“filigree of cautionary & celebratory stories”

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CSMLogo

A few weeks ago, the Christian Science Monitor included A River Runs Again in its list of the Ten Best Books of August. Just today, they’ve published a lovely review of it by Peter Lewis. A close reader, he writes with eloquence and wonderful turns-of-phrase, comparing India to a Rube Goldberg contraption that’s been thrown out of whack by environmental upheaval. He writes:

Meera Subramanian’s A River Runs Again tells five tales of India at the crossroads – a filigree of cautionary and celebratory stories – voiced with dignified passion….

Subramanian navigates these rough waters between baneful emergencies and precarious signs of enlightened attitudes with the right degree of cautious optimism.

Read the whole review here.

pub date!

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It’s official. A River Runs Again is now available in bookstores across the US. (Of course, Amazon has been sending it out for weeks.) To find out which independent bookseller near you will be stocking it, check here, or call up your local library and encourage them to purchase a copy for their collection. Then you, too, can look like this man:

ParReadsARRA

It will be coming out in India, as Elemental India: The Natural World at a Time of Crisis and Opportunity, soon!

found on Haul Rd

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2015.07.27Pluck-68

Still, always, I am enraptured. The sense memory of a peregrine falcon remains in my hands though it has been years now since I held one. But this gyrfalcon is new to my skin, new to my eyes. I think she’s a she, larger than a female peregrine, and she is dead and frozen on the table in the trailer of Lab 1 at Toolik Field Station on the North Slope of Alaska. Dalton Highway, better known as Haul Road for the semis that carry supplies back and forth between inland Fairbanks and Deadhorse on the Arctic Ocean, parallels the spine of the pipeline through this part of Alaska. On that road, the gyrfalcon most likely made contact with some vehicle passing through. Toolik people found her on the side of the road, intact, limp, just a dollop of blood at the edge of her beak. I found her in the -80 freezer, clouds of coolness pooling at my feet when Seth, the Toolik naturalist, opened the double door and found the plastic bag with her remains. He sets her out on the table. Switches on the light. He lets me hold her, the weight hefty for the hollow-boned fighter. Ice crystals glaze her beak, sweep over her eyes, cinched shut. Her tail is long, barred with bands of smoky grey and and smudged tan, the striations of feathers running on the diagonal. Her head tucks in toward one rounded shoulder, a demure pose, cozy and shy and frozen in place like the permafrost that lies below this northern land. On a piece of paper in the bag are the details: “Found on Haul Road btwn Slope Mtn & OKs culverts 7.17.2015″

Life forms larger than a mosquito are few and far between here on the halo of the earth. Ground squirrels scrambling along the tundra underfoot and the arora borealis, a different type of life force, invisible but existent overhead, masked by the eternal daylight this time of year. There is a buzz with each wolf or grizzly sighting, a coveted moment of witnessing great bigness. The ground is alive with microorganisms, and bees hover around the purple glow of fireweed blooms that are hopeful that a seed might form before the killing freeze arrives. But today there is one less gyrfalcon flying through these wide open skies. Seth slips her back into the bag and returns her to the raptor morgue.

@toolik @Mblscience #eulogy #gyrfalcon #raptor #Alaska #truestoryshort

the pluck

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2015.07.27Pluck-79

About 35 years ago, when most ecologists were still musing about how we’d deal with the ice age that models then showed was on its way, young scientists Gus Shaver, Terry Chapin and John Hobbie set up camp on an old abandoned airstrip at Toolik Lake on the North Slope of Alaska. Scientists tinker and so when they gazed at this wild and beautiful yet nutrient-poor place, bereft of nitrogen and phosphorous found in the temperate regions of the globe, they wondered what might happen [Read more…]

fishscape on the kuparuk river

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At the Woods Hole portion of the MBL Logan Science Journalism fellowship, we worked with researcher Linda Deegan. Fishscape, one of her projects, is underway here at Toolik. She’s not here now, but I went out today with her research team as they collect data along the Kuparuk River, studying the impact of climate change on the Arctic grayling, a freshwater fish in the salmon family. The commute, via a Roberston-44 helicopter, was pretty thrilling. And, is it just me, or did the face of Jesus appear in the tundra around :30??

The ride was over much too quickly, and [Read more…]

getting my bearings straight

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2015.07.22Fairbanks-6

Strolling through Fairbanks, Alaska is the Chena River, all glassy and glorious beneath a sky miraculously scrubbed of smoke from the fires that clouded it a day before I arrived. A visit to Alaska has been a wish for quite a long time and it’s great to finally be here on my way to Toolik Field Station as a Logan science journalism Arctic fellow with the Marine Biological Lab (MBL).

The first part of the MBL fellowship took place [Read more…]

A River Runs Again (aka Elemental India)

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For years now I’ve been referring to the book I’ve been working on as Elemental India. It still may retain that title when it comes out in India, but here in the United States, now that the manuscript is handed in, the facts checked and checked again, the galleys scanned for typos, and the cover art completed, it is time for a rechristening. Somewhere along the way, it became A River Runs Again: India’s Natural World in Crisis, from the Barren Cliffs of Rajasthan to the Farmlands of Karnataka. The team at PublicAffairs have been amazing to work with and we’re all looking forward to August 25th, when it shall be released. Stay tuned for news on book launch and fall events, and don’t hesitate to be in touch if you have ideas or suggestions.

Kirkus Reviews was the first to respond to the book: [Read more…]

deadly dinners

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Cooking on an Envirofit improved cookstove. Photo by Meera Subramanian

Cooking on an Envirofit improved cookstove in Tamil Nadu. Photo by Meera Subramanian

I spent a good chunk of last winter stepping into women’s kitchens in rural India to see what was cooking. Rice. Rotis. Dal. Curries. But regardless of the meal, most rural homes were cooking over open fires. With the incredible support of a Fulbright-Nehru fellowship, I was working on a book about environmental stories across India, including doing research and reporting about what — if anything — was helping women move away from the polluting form of cooking with biomass. Today, the journal Nature published my piece that tells a little bit about what I found. Deadly Dinners (a heavy-handed but unfortunately devastatingly accurate title) begins:

After returning from her nine-and-a-half-hour shift as a security guard, Savita Satish Dadas begins plucking fenugreek leaves from their stems for dinner. She and her two children, along with three of their cousins, gather in a shed-like structure next to their house in the Satara District of Maharashtra, India. As goats and cows settle in for the night a few metres away, Dadas and the children sit down on a packed dirt floor around the family hearth.

Whisps of smoke rise up from their chulha, the Indian name given to a traditional cooking-stove fuelled by wood and other organic matter often gathered from the countryside. Dadas’s stove, like several of her neighbours’, is sculpted out of clay. But many make a rudimentary three-stone fire — a triangle of elevated points to support a pot — that humans have used for millennia. Dadas feeds roughly chopped logs into the stove and her hands shape moistened flour into bhakri bread, the rhythmic movement illuminated by the flickering flames.

With this simple daily act, Dadas shares a connection with more than one-third of the world’s population, the three billion people who depend on solid biomass fuels — such as wood, animal dung, agricultural waste and charcoal — or coal for their cooking needs.

[Read more…]

this is how it happens

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2014.04.09-23

Lean back til you feel like you’ll tip. Take in the sky. Wasn’t it a steely grey just a minute ago, and now, now, blue like the eggs already in the nest, cluttered with clouds that have broken apart. Soon the marsh grass will erupt. An emerald carpet reaching up, breaking through the brackish phragmites, pounded flat in the last storm, but for now, a wash of pale shades.

2014.04.09-14

This is how it happens, falling in love with a place. [Read more…]