Letter to a Stranger

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Book cover of Letter to a StrangerIt began in 2013 as a question posed by Off Assignment: Who haunts you? It’s a brilliant premise (and excellent writing prompt): write a letter to someone, anyone, who has stayed with you. I wrote about a man I met in southern India, who spoke to me of dancing cobras.

The stories amassed and writer Colleen Kinder decided to collect them into an anthology. Letter to a Stranger: Essays to the Ones Who Haunt Us came out this spring from Algonquin. Pieces by Lauren Groff, Leslie Jamison, Pico Iyer, Lia Purpura, Lavinia Spalding (who led me to Off Assignment so long back!), Irina Reyn and so many others each tell a story that is short, precise and aching in some deeply human way.

Here are a few links to some of the goodness that emerged around publication:

What had brought you to Auroville? I came because I still sought utopia.

And here’s a video of an event I did with Book Passage in San Francisco  with Colleen Kinder, Lavinia Spalding, Akemi Johnson, Faith Adiele, Emmanuel Iduma, and Anna Vodicka:

Person Place Thing… Strangers!

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I’ve got a couple of events coming up this week. Hope you can join us!

Person Place Thing / Orion

The first is tomorrow (Tues. 5/3) at 6:30 pm ET. I’ll be in conversation for a live virtual recording with Randy Cohen, the delightful host of the podcast Person Place Thing, an interview show based on the idea that people are particularly engaging when they speak not directly about themselves but about something they care about. I’m trying not to think about the fact that his prior guest was Ken Burns. The man definitely has more stories than me!

The event is co-hosted by Orion Magazine, and here’s the link to register: https://orionmagazine.org/event/person-place-thing-orion-live-podcast-recording/

 

Letter to a Stranger

The second event is on Wed (5/4) at 8:30 pm ET. A wonderful new book emerged into the world recently called Letter to a Stranger. It’s an anthology of short, searing letters written to people that haunt them for all sorts of reasons, stories of love and regret and wonder and mystery. I’ll be joining editor Colleen Kinder and fellow contributors, Lavinia Spalding (dear friend and sister-in-law!), Akemi Johnson, Faith Adiele, Emmanuel Iduma, and Anna Vodicka. You can just jump into Zoomlandia directly the night of the event at this link: https://www.bookpassage.com/lettertoastranger

Hope to see you!

Strange Gardens

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By Alicja Wróblewska

It was a pleasure to explore Alicja Wróblewska’s art for the latest issue of Virginia Quarterly Review. Here’s how “Strange Gardens: An Effervescent Vision of Plastic’s Impact on the Ocean” begins…

What is beauty for? What is its source? Polish artist Alicja Wróblewska thinks about such things as she fashions fanciful sculptures, snaps photographs, and creates collages both analog and digital to explore the impact of plastics on ocean health. With a background in political science and commercial photography, Wróblewska lives in the tense space between the consumer societies we inhabit and the wreckage they leave behind.

She’s slipped away from work into the sunlight of a Warsaw park to speak to me, her long brown hair lifting in the wind as she walks with her phone, seeking…

Read the rest here.

Introducing…the Religion & Environment Story Project

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Here’s a kitchen-table story for you. I’m a science journalist who has been thinking about how humans relate to their environment for decades. I’m also an atheist … who fell in love with a religious studies professor.

While I’d be off on reporting trips from West Virginia to India, Stephen Prothero would be teaching religious literacy to students at Boston University. Over the years, our kitchen-table conversations revealed how much our two arenas rarely overlap and how much is lost because of the divide.

We wanted to try to reconcile the split between these siloed beats of religion and the environment so, with funding from the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations and a base at Boston University, we launched the Religion & Environment Story Project, or RESP.

Our goal is to bridge the divide between religion and science reporting, and to promote new thinking and new narratives that will inform and educate the public, especially on the climate crisis.

In May, RESP partnered up with the Society of Environmental Journalists and the Religion News Association for a webinar entitled “Missing Stories: Uncovering Environment-Climate-Religion Connections.” Watch the whole event, or read the summary in this piece in SEJ News.

Part of this inaugural event was to announce two great opportunities to help journalists find these missing stories. The shared deadline is fast approaching.

Deadline for both the story grants and the fellowship is June 15. Apply now and spread the word to others who might be interested.

For more information on these opportunities — and on stories that cut across religion, spirituality and climate change, follow RESP on Twitter at @ReligionEnviro.

climate stories we tell ourselves

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There has been an explosion of podcasts on the climate crisis of late, but one has been at it for more than a decade: ClimateOne. It was great to talk with host Greg Dalton about the stories we tell ourselves about the changing planet and what I heard when I was on the road for my series on conservative perceptions of climate change for Inside Climate News in 2017-18. The other half of the show is Greg in conversation with Nathaniel Rich, author of the new book Second Nature: Scenes from a World Remade.

Have a listen here.

The Nature of Plastics

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Artwork: Steve McPherson

 

EARLY IN 2004, a buoy was released into the waters off Argentina. Half of the buoy was dark and the other light, like a planet in relief. The buoy sailed east, accompanied by the vastness of the ocean and all the life it contains, the long-lived great humpback whales with their complex songs that carry for miles, and the short-lived Argentine shortfin squid. Along the way, many thousands of minuscule creatures were colonizing this new surface, which had appeared like a life raft in the open waters of the South Atlantic.

The researchers who’d dropped the buoy followed its movement in hopes of learning more about ocean currents than generations of science and sailing history had revealed. They watched the buoy float into the wide-open ocean between South America and Africa, those twin coastlines that struck me, as I gazed at them on the pull-down map in first grade, as two puzzle pieces that once linked. They surveilled its movements by GPS. Eighteen months later, the signal ceased. Silence from the satellites.

The buoy continued along the currents of the South Atlantic, free from surveillance, sheltered and shocked by sun and clouds and storms overhead. It was likely molded out of a thermoplastic polymer called acrylonitrile butadiene styrene, or ABS, which, like most plastics, was crafted from the extracted remains of long-ago life-forms. ABS was engineered in the lab to endure—rigid, resilient, capable of withstanding all that being let loose at sea may foist upon it.

All plastic begins in a factory. That much we know. But where it goes next remains poorly understood. Only 1 percent of the plastic released into the marine environment is accounted for, found on the surface and in the intestines of aquatic animals. The rest is a little harder to measure. Some presumably washes back ashore. An untold amount settles, sunk by the weight of its new passengers. (One study found four times more plastic fibers in the sediment of the deep-sea floor than on the surface of the ocean.)

And some, like the buoy, just keeps drifting along.

***

I have spent thirty years fixated on environmental issues, spawned during my own oceanic migration in the fall of 1989….

Read the rest at Orion Magazine.

Keep Environmental Journalism strong

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I wasn’t going to post a year-end plea on behalf of the Society of Environmental Journalists this year, where I served as the President until earlier this month. So many asks at this year-end moment, and in such a year where the needs are bottomless, and I didn’t want to add to the pile.

But IF you are still making your 2020 contributions, if you are moved by the news of journalists who have died from the coronavirus contracted while covering the pandemic to bring us news, or the staggering number of layoffs and publications permanently shuttered, I can attest to the value of your donation. SEJ has an incredible team of dedicated staff and volunteers who made it possible to ride out this year and keep the organization stable. We got money to those who needed it most, forming a rapid response grant and a Members-in-Need fund. To see more about what we accomplished this year, you can read my final President’s Letter here.

I was fortunate, teaching and writing longer-form pieces from home, able to postpone reporting trips indefinitely. But so many were out there on the frontlines, continuing to cover stories about historic hurricanes and wildfires, climate upheaval, and environmental protection rollbacks under the Trump administration that will manifest in diminished human health and a compromised natural world for a long time to come.

If you hope to see environmental journalism continue into 2021 and beyond, I invite you to join me with a contribution to SEJ. Check out our incredible (and growing) Wall of Heroes, listing some of the best journalists out there on this beat.

One big bonus this year: up to $300 in charitable giving can be deducted “above the line” from your 2020 taxable income, even if you take the standard deduction. That means everyone can receive a tax benefit from their donation to SEJ, not just those filers that itemize.

And if you can’t do anything this year, that’s fine too. No matter what, I just hope this finds you and yours safe and healthy, and staying that way as we tip into the new year.

with love,
~meera

Anger & Angels: Artist Edith Vonnegut Responds to Trump

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After President Trump’s inauguration in 2017, artist Edith Vonnegut was outraged. Her response? She embarked on a creative frenzy of artistic works, one a day, for the first 100 days (except on the days that the new president was playing golf), with a few pranks along the way.

Meanwhile, I was a Knight Science Journalism fellow at MIT, taking a class in short docs with Vivek Bald. Thanks to Edie for letting me follow her around, filming, learning as I went along.

Here’s her story.