New Delhi, Sept. 13 -- In 2018, Goethe Institut and Max Mueller Bhavan (MMB), Mumbai launched an interdisciplinary project, titled State of Nature, to spark creative and scholarly exchanges on the ongoing climate crisis. Led by artist and environmentalist Ravi Agarwal and poet and writer Ranjit Hoskote, the idea was to bring together experts and practitioners from different fields to curate interventions that reflected on humanity's shifting relationship with nature. Over the next several years, art and poetry via philosophy and activism informed these meetings, which have been recently recorded in a single volume, Practices of Hope: A Reader for the Future, edited by Agarwal, Hoskote and Amruta Nemivant.

The ambition behind this endeavo...