Meera Subramanian
  • Home
  • Books
  • Writing
  • Bio
  • Blog
  • Photos
  • Events
  • Speaking
  • Contact

A River Runs Again Orion Book Award finalist

October 14, 2016 By meerasub Leave a Comment

screen-shot-2016-10-14-at-8-18-17-am

Orion Magazine just announced its annual Book Award finalists and A River Runs Again was on the list! Could I be in better company? I think not. Sy Montgomery’s Soul of an Octopus, Summer Brennan’s The Oyster War, and Helen Macdonald’s wildly acclaimed H is for Hawk.

Thank you, Orion. When I lived in NYC, I used to go to the annual Orion Book Award events at the Cynthia Reeves Gallery way over on the West Side in Chelsea and would fawn over the authors, the chance to meet them and get books signed, but more importantly, to get inspired. Seems that it worked. Just to have made the list is the greatest of honors.

The winner will be announced Monday.

UPDATE: Huge congrats to Sy Montgomery for winning the award!

Filed Under: A River Runs Again, awards, News Tagged With: A River Runs Again, awards, New York City

Santa Monica Green Prize

September 7, 2016 By meerasub Leave a Comment

I’m delighted to announce that A River Runs Again: India’s Natural World in Crisis, from the Barren Cliffs of Rajasthan to the Farmlands of Karnataka was awarded the Green Prize for Sustainable Literature from the Santa Monica Public Library. Here’s how the library describes the award and a complete list of winners, including Pope Francis:

Screen Shot 2016-09-07 at 8.44.10 AM“The Library established the Green Prize to encourage and commend authors, illustrators, and publishers who produce quality books for adults and young people that make significant contributions to, support the ideas of, and broaden public awareness of sustainability. The City of Santa Monica’s Sustainable City Plan defines sustainability as “meeting current needs – environmental, economic, and social – without compromising the ability of future generations to do the same.” The Green Prize is sponsored by the Santa Monica Public Library and the City of Santa Monica’s Office of Sustainability and the environment.” [Read more…]

Filed Under: A River Runs Again, awards, News Tagged With: Green Prize, Santa Monica Public Library

100 Years of the National Park Service

September 1, 2016 By meerasub 1 Comment

IMG_8194

In Cambridge, I reunited with a friend from another place, Ruth Goldstein – who is now teaching at Harvard. In recent years, she’s spent the better part of her time in South America and she’s here to share her findings through wonderful classes about mythology and women and plants and gold. We talked of these things but we also talked of maps and cartography and the way they define space and landscapes. Later, she sent me these words, written in 1924 by Aldo Leopold in an essay entitled “The River of the Mother of God,” which apparently sat in a drawer, a victim of a Yale Review rejection. Aldo wrote:

…wilderness is the one thing we can not build to order. When our ciphers result in slums, we can tear down enough of them to re-establish parks and playgrounds. When they choke traffic, we can tear down enough of them to build highways and subways. But when our ciphers have choked out the last vestige of the Unknown Places, we cannot build new ones.

(Setting aside the hint of razing slums…) this brings us to a moment of appreciation for those who, a century ago, helped establish the National Park Service. I know, I know, these aren’t exactly the Unknown Places they once were, but they are something, and something important. When the Service was founded it held 17 national parks and 21 national monuments in its trust. This year, on the centennial of the Service, there are now more than 400 sites, on more than 84 million acres, protected places of wild beauty and historic significance. Last week, President Obama added one more to the list as he created the Katahdin Woods and Waters National Monument in Maine.

So as I moved back to the city, these public spaces were on my mind. Our first Knight Science Journalism fellowship workshop was an audio class with multimedia journalist and past Knight fellow Ibby Caputo.  I’ve been recording in the field for years, but am still woefully not at ease with production. Usually, I record, I transcribe, I write. Here our goal was two minutes of auditory wonder. Three intense days later, Ibby had indeed whipped us into shape, and we each had a Vox Pop – man on the street – piece to prove it. Here’s mine, complete with rookie mistakes of hot tape and pops, after I went out and about on the MIT campus to hear people’s memories and thoughts on the National Park Service, in the week of its centennial.

 

And now to end with something more polished, “MODERN MAJOR PARK RANGER,” a sing-along collaboration made in partnership with hitRECord, the National Park Service, and the National Park Foundation. Enjoy. Then, go #FindYourPark!

Filed Under: audio, Knight Science Journalism, News Tagged With: abolitionist, history, National Park Service, National Parks, wilderness

something’s happening here…

June 23, 2016 By meerasub Leave a Comment

maxresdefault

When a mass shooting of little six-year-olds in Newtown didn’t inspire gun control action, nor the 49 deaths at the massacre in Orlando, nor the thousands of other deaths that take place in America each year, I began to think that only a mass shooting in Congress could make this problem real to the elected officials who have continually blocked gun control measures. Horrid thought, I know, but that’s what crossed my mind when the Senate defeated all four bills (two from each side of the aisle) earlier this week, even though the blood in Orlando remained so fresh.

Then, yesterday, something happened. Something kind of wonderful. Democrats in the House of Representatives had a sit-in. Ole school – Gandhi – MLK, Jr. – style. “No bill! No break!” they chanted between speeches. When the CNN feed went dead, shaky cell phones brought the news out with Twitter’s Periscope live feed. (Here’s @ScottPeters.) #HoldTheFloor, #NoBillNoBreak, and #DemocraticSitIn trended.

I got excited. Proud that my representative, Bill Keating, was part of it. Wondered how long it’d last. Wondered what would come of it. I could have glued myself to the Internet to watch each moment. Instead, [Read more…]

Filed Under: News Tagged With: civil disobedience, gun control, hope, politics, protest

Can Delhi save itself…

June 20, 2016 By meerasub Leave a Comment

…from its toxic air?

by Meera Subramanian

by Meera Subramanian

In A River Runs Again, I explored the devastating effects of cook fires on human and climatic health, but they are just one part of what is causing New Delhi to claim the worst air quality of any major city in the world. Since January, I’ve been researching what it is that makes Delhi’s air so toxic and what steps the city is undertaking to try to improve it. Here’s the start of the piece just published in Nature:

On winter nights, New Delhi burns with innumerable fires. Flames flicker along pavements and street corners, where the destitute huddle to stay warm and cook their suppers, while night watchmen stand guard next to their own small blazes outside private homes. The rising plumes of smoke mingle with exhaust and dust stirred up by overloaded trucks that rumble down roads blanketed in fog. The mixture melds into a nearly opaque substance that leaves a metallic taste on the tongue. Overhead, there is not a single star to be seen.

Read the rest of “Can Delhi save itself from its toxic air?” here.

As for action, encouraging news came a couple weeks ago, with the announcement of a plan to spend almost $3 billion to reduce traffic congestion in New Delhi, although it still needs to be approved and some of the measures are ones that have failed in the past, such as Bus Rapid Transit systems. But a move for more buses, and more pedestrian crossways, and to actually make parking on a footpath an offense, is an excellent start. Increased attention to the issue is a hopeful indicator of more action to come.

If you want to know more, nonprofits such as the Centre for Science and the Environment and Care For Air both are work to inform the public about the city’s air quality, UrbanEmissions brings together concise graphics and scientific information to help understand a complicated issue, and the Air Quality in Delhi Facebook group connects concerned citizens.

I also wrote a couple of pieces specifically about the odd-even traffic reduction plan that was underway when I was in Delhi in January. “New Delhi car ban yields trove of pollution data” was in Nature and the piece with the (mildly overblown!) title “Amazing Things Happened When New Delhi Halved the Number of Cars on the Road” ran in Vice News.

Measuring air quality is incredibly tricky business. The 122 micrograms per cubic metre [Read more…]

Filed Under: journalism Tagged With: A River Runs Again, air, air pollution, air quality, Elemental India, india, New Delhi

memorial days

May 31, 2016 By meerasub Leave a Comment

Sangin, Afghanistan: Portraits of a Marine Squad, by Elliott Woods

Sangin, Afghanistan: Portraits of a Marine Squad, by Elliott Woods

 

Rain fell on the flags that lined glistening Route 6A on Cape Cod yesterday. I went to no parades, thanked no one for their service. Because I’m like most of the Americans veteran and journalist Elliott Woods describes in his TEDx talk, “Ever After: Finding Fulfillment in the Aftermath of War,” a title that doesn’t even begin to capture the power of his message. Only one in 75 Americans have any direct connection to the conflicts that have been unfolding for a generation in the Middle East. Even that number is probably wildly conservative. Elliott served. He returned home. And he became a journalist to return overseas again and again to document the lives of soldiers and the people who live in the countries where the wars play out, far far from the glistening roads of Cape Cod, or Kansas, or California. [Read more…]

Filed Under: peregrinations Tagged With: Afghanistan, Elliot Woods, Iraq, Memorial Day, middle east, photography, war

Knight Science Journalism fellowship

May 5, 2016 By meerasub Leave a Comment

istockdome_small1

I still can’t quite believe that, come August, I’ll be joining an incredible cohort of journalists for the Knight Science Journalism fellowship at MIT.

Here’s the official announcement, which begins…

The Knight Science Journalism Program at MIT, the premier global fellowship program for journalists covering science, technology, health and the environment, is proud to announce that ten journalists, representing five countries, have been selected to join the program’s 34th class of fellows.

Proud that of the ten journalists, three of us are from the Society of Environmental Journalists, including Robert McClure of Investigate West and Rosalia Omungo of the Kenya Broadcasting Corporation in Nairobi. Mark Wolverton and I mucked about in a salt marsh last summer when we did the MBL Logan Science Journalism program out of Woods Hole, MA. I plan on [Read more…]

Filed Under: journalism Tagged With: awards, Cambridge, journalism, Knight Science Journalism, Society of Environmental Journalists

Will Modi Colonize his Country or Enact EcoSwaraj?

March 20, 2016 By meerasub Leave a Comment

NEW DELHI/INDIA, 16NOV08 -Narendra Modi, Chief Minister of Gujarat, India, speaks during the welcome lunch at the World Economic Forum's India Economic Summit 2008 in New Delhi, 16-18 November 2008. Copyright World Economic Forum (www.weforum.org)/Photo by Norbert Schiller

Photo by Norbert Schiller via Wikimedia Commons

I am a half-daughter of India. I have watched the South Asian nation develop since I first visited Madras as a young girl, my Indian father bringing his fair-skinned American wife and my brother and me from America on multiple trips to visit dozens of relatives along the shores of the Bay of Bengal.

In the forty years since that first visit, the country has undergone a whole-scale transformation. Never have there been so many humans with so much elemental need for healthy food, clean water, and dependable energy systems. How will India bring these basics to her citizenry?

In recent years, I have visited as an environmental journalist and Fulbright scholar to seek out the answer to this question, investigating the state of India’s natural world and exploring how the elements – earth, water, fire, air and ether – are faring. I found a subcontinent in crisis, but I also found individuals and organisations reinventing their landscapes and lives.

Whether they will receive support from the government remains to be seen.

Read the rest at TheDailyO.

Filed Under: A River Runs Again, elemental india, journalism Tagged With: A River Runs Again, Elemental India, india, journalism, opinion

matt power: in memoriam

March 10, 2016 By meerasub

Photo I took of Matt Power as we roamed through NYC in the blizzard of February 2006

 

I wrote this almost two years ago, and read it at Matt’s Vermont memorial. I think I’m ready to post it.

“Did you water the plants?”

The g-chats would come from Asia, South America, Africa. I would sigh and smile and type back in that too abrupt chat shorthand. “Yup” and then we’d bounce to some other topic, often dirt-or-word related. Matt Power could be both singularly obsessed and as scattered as the visas in his passport. Did he know that I cared as much about the plants’ survival – the striated leaves of the spider plant in the bay window of the parlor and the abundance of the vegetable-berry-herb-opium poppy garden of the summer – as he did? If I wasn’t on my own travels, I was babying the babies too, giving them water as they soaked up the south sun, all of us awaiting his next return to Hawthorne Street. I lived there with Matt and Jess for five years, from the first day when we sat on the bare floor in the bare limestone (“It’s not a brownstone,” Matt would correct.) eating takeout, as a cast of characters came and went, until I left too. Did he know I loved the plants? Did he know, we all asked last week, when news of his death in Uganda arrived, how much we loved him?

We often step into each other’s lives in quiet, non-monumental ways. [Read more…]

Filed Under: News Tagged With: Brooklyn, journalism, Matthew Power, New York City

the burning garbage heap

February 29, 2016 By meerasub Leave a Comment

2016.02.07Deonar-151

I thought the air would improve as I traveled from New Delhi to Mumbai. Then the dump caught on fire. Here’s a dispatch for The New Yorker:

From above, the sprawling trash heap of Deonar (pronounced “Devnar”), in eastern Mumbai, resembles a large left ear. A curving stream traces its outer edge, feeding into Thane Creek, the body of water that separates the city from the Indian mainland. On the opposite side of the ear, where the head would be, is the teeming neighborhood of Shivaji Nagar. In late January, Deonar erupted in fires. An arrowhead-shaped plume of smoke floated up from the three-hundred-and-twenty-six-acre site, carried aloft by northeasterly winds, and blanketed Mumbai. For six days, the city’s  air-quality rating remained at “very poor,” with measurements of particulate matter exceeding safety standards by a factor of five. Seventy schools were closed, and hospitals were flooded with patients suffering from lung and heart ailments. (Air pollution contributes to more than six hundred thousand premature deaths in India every year.) The acrid smoke burned the eyes and throats of people from the Gateway of India, a monument at Mumbai’s southern tip, to Chembur, fifteen miles away, near the dump. Locals took to calling the neighborhood Gas Chembur.

Read the rest at The New Yorker.

Filed Under: journalism Tagged With: air pollution, compost, fire, garbage, india, Mumbai, recycling

  • « Previous Page
  • 1
  • …
  • 5
  • 6
  • 7
  • 8
  • 9
  • …
  • 14
  • Next Page »

Join Meer’s Mailing List

for the very occasional bit of news.

Please enter a valid email address.
Subscribe

Thanks for subscribing! 

Something went wrong. Please check your entries and try again.

Categories

Tags

Alaska anthology A River Runs Again Art awards birds of prey books book tour Cambridge cape cod climate change conservation dissent Elemental India energy events Fulbright india InsideClimate News journalism kenya Knight Science Journalism Nature New York City organic farming Orion peregrine falcon pesticides photography plastics politics pollution environment Princeton University radio readings religion reviews science Society of Environmental Journalists teaching Texas travel USA vulture water

Archives by Month

Connect

  • Facebook
  • Instagram
  • LinkedIn
  • Twitter

© 2023 Meera Subramanian | All Rights Reserved. | Mastodon | Links | Website design by Sumy Designs, LLC