Randy Cohen likes to learn about people slant. Instead of asking them about what they do, etc., etc., he asks them about a person, a place, and a thing that are meaningful to them. It was a pleasure to talk with him about girls in India, maps of Texas, and falcons over Cape Cod. Person Place Thing from Northeast Public Radio’s WAMC was produced with Orion magazine. Have a listen here.
What is the role of storytelling in altering the future of plastics? How might storying plastics differently help shift culture? Or invite change? Or directly address plastic pollution, drawing down the volume of short-term use plastics and the host of support chemistries that make them possible?
This event emerged from a series of four pieces on plastics that Orion published over 2020-2021. You can watch the webinar here, hosted by Beyond Plastics’ Judith Enck, but I encourage you to read all of the pieces in the series, too. Dr. Rebecca Altman, who is a sociologist working on a book about the socio-environmental legacy of plastics, served as the guest editor and it was a beautiful collaborative process to work with her and Orion editor Sumanth Prabhaker.
Rebecca’s piece, “Upriver,” reveals her journey of generations, of thinking you’re moving away from something when you’re really diving right into it. Because you can’t not. Because it’s everywhere. Orion, which is a gorgeous magazine that you really should subscribe to so you can enjoy the sumptuous art and layout as well as the words, features Ansel Adams photography you’ve never seen before with her piece.
“Hand in Glove” by David Ferrier, author of Footprints: In Search of Future Fossils, was written early in the pandemic and considers all those plastic gloves…and the last hand he held before lockdown, his grandmother’s.
Plastics geographer Dr. Max Liboiron‘s considers their role as a researcher in Newfoundland in the piece “Plastics in the Gut.” When does scientific standardization turn into a form of colonialism and how can researchers learn to think with locals as they gather information? Their book, Pollution is Colonialism, explores this more deeply.
And my piece was “The Nature of Plastics,” in which I explored the ecological, biological and geological impact of this material that is so new, and so transformative, and so ubiquitous that it is altering every facet of life on earth.
The world is changing, in a fast and furious way. The World as We Knew It: Dispatches from a Changing Climate is a new anthology chronicling that change in real time. Co-edited by Amy Brady (now the Executive Director of Orion magazine) and Tajja Isen (author of Some of My Best Friends: Essays on Lip Service and editor for Catapult Magazine) brought together an amazing roster of contributors including Elizabeth Rush, Emily Raboteau, Mary Annaïse Heglar, Alexandra Kleeman, Kim Stanley Robinson, Omar El Akkad, Melissa Febos, and so many others. In my essay “Leap,” I wrote about ticks, and the love child of Poseidon and the earth goddess Gaia, and summer rituals, and more:
Now, I can’t stop the calculus in my head as I interact with the places that once offered solace. This is what climate change is. It’s what it does to the psyche, along with the body, and the places we love. It’s nearly invisible until the moment something startles you into attention. A creeping catastrophe, waiting with arms outstretched to deliver a suffocating embrace. And once the knowledge is gained, there is no unknowing it. You are no longer climate blind. You see and cannot unsee.
From the starred review from Publishers Weekly: “The pieces create a moving mix of resolve and sorrow, painting a vivid picture of an era in which ‘climate change is altering life on Earth at an unprecedented rate,’ but ‘the majority of us can still remember when things were more stable.’ The result is a poignant ode to a changing planet.”
Amy Brady and Tajja Isen have gathered together writers to explore how they’re living in a world changing in a warming climate. I’m honored to be one of the nineteen, which includes Lydia Millet, Kim Stanley Robinson, Omar El Akkad, Lidia Yuknavitch, Melissa Febos, and many more. Join Amy, Tajja and fellow contributor Alexandra Kleeman to celebrate the launch at this Zoom kick-off event on Wednesday, June 15 at 7:00 p.m. ET. Register here.
Update: here’s the video of the event, if you’d like to watch it:
And here’s a lovely shout out from Lily Houston Smith over at The Atlantic:
Near the end of her essay, Subramanian writes, “We have returned to the times of mythology, and we need new stories to survive.” The World as We Knew It is an attempt to write these stories, to hold a mirror up to our lives at a crucial moment in our collective history, and reflect the slew of compounding, often conflicting fears that characterize it. In many ways, storytelling while on the precipice of global devastation is no different from storytelling at any moment in our history. Delve into ancient myths and you’ll quickly realize that the human condition has always been marked by an uneasy awareness that even the most rigid systems are subject to the whims of fate.
It 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.
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:
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!
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…
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.
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.
How do we connect across the climate divide? In this episode of the Climate One podcast, Greg Dalton explores the answer with Nathaniel Rich, author of the new book Second Nature: Scenes from a World Remade, and yours truly. Have a listen here.
