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Seeing God’s Hand in the Deadly Floods…

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White Sulphur Springs, WV. Photo by Meera Subramanian.

 Second in a series of stories for InsideClimate News. An evangelical mountain town in West Virginia lost eight people to flooding from an extreme rain storm last year. Many residents see the Biblical prophecy of the apocalypse, and welcome it, while some are considering climate change in a new light.

Jake Dowdy is a police officer in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, where he lived a block from Howard Creek, a stream so inconsequential you could usually hop-skip across parts of it without wetting your toes.

It was the morning of June 23, 2016, and a heavy rain was falling as Jake went to the gym for a workout. He wasn’t thinking much about the rain, other than that it’d be good for the garden. When he got home around noon, he had lunch and kicked up his feet in the living room, chilling out for a while before his 4 pm shift. He drifted off to sleep on the couch and awoke when his wife texted, confusing him for a moment; she was concerned about reports of flooding.

His disorientation turned to panic when he set his feet on the carpet and felt it squish soggily beneath his soles. He had just enough time to grab the cat and wade through thigh-high rushing water to his truck.

Read more at InsideClimate News or West Virginia Public Broadcasting. 

On ‘Writing the Book You Can’t Not Write’

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Between the Lines: Subramanian on ‘Writing the Book You Can’t Not Write’

For the latest installment of SEJournal’s author Q & A, “Between the Lines,” Meera Subramanian talks to book editor Tom Henry about the research and writing process behind her debut, “A River Runs Again: India’s Natural World in Crisis,” a 2016 Orion Book Award finalist that travels from the barren cliffs of Rajasthan to the farmlands of Karnataka.

SEJournal: What inspired you to write “A River Runs Again?”

Meera Subramanian: I have visited India all my life to see my father’s family and couldn’t help but observe how things were done there compared to my home in the United States. I’d be older with each trip, viewing with a new perspective, but India was changing, too, and when the country opened up its economy in the 1990s, that change ramped up to a frantic pace.

But who was getting left behind as the IT boom swept South Asia? Where was this country that is now poised to become the most populous nation on Earth heading in terms of development? What were they doing right and what were they doing wrong in a place where a growing population was colliding with limited natural resources, where everyone wants to satisfy their basic needs — and then some?

But this wasn’t just describing India; it was the state of the entire world. I decided to start with India, a place I could view with the fresh eyes of an outsider but also with a touch of insider knowledge.

Read the entire interview here.

write the book you cannot not write

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I’ve been a long-time member of the Society of Environmental Journalists. I had a great conversation with them about book writing. Read here or click on through to the original.

For the latest installment of SEJournal’s author Q & A, “Between the Lines,” Meera Subramanian talks to book editor Tom Henry about the research and writing process behind her debut, “A River Runs Again: India’s Natural World in Crisis,” a 2016 Orion Book Award finalist that travels from the barren cliffs of Rajasthan to the farmlands of Karnataka.

SEJournal: What inspired you to write “A River Runs Again?”

Meera Subramanian: I have visited India all my life to see my father’s family and couldn’t help but observe how things were done there compared to my home in the United States. I’d be older with each trip, viewing with a new perspective, but India was changing, too, and when the country opened up its economy in the 1990s, that change ramped up to a frantic pace.

But who was getting left behind as the IT boom swept South Asia? Where was this country that is now poised to become the most populous nation on Earth heading in terms of development? What were they doing right and what were they doing wrong in a place where a growing population was colliding with limited natural resources, where everyone wants to satisfy their basic needs — and then some?  [Read more…]

In Georgia’s Peach Orchards, Warm Winters Raise Specter of Climate Change

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 First in a series of stories for InsideClimate News.

MUSELLA, Georgia — Three generations of Robert Lee Dickeys share the two chairs in the cozy office of Dickey Farms, the younger always deferring to the elder. For 120 years, the Dickeys have been producing peaches so juicy they demand to be eaten over the kitchen sink.

Robert Lee “Mr. Bob” Dickey II, 89, is slightly stooped but moves quickly, dropping in just for a morning read of the Wall Street Journal. His son Robert Dickey III, 63, and his grandson, who goes by Lee, age 33, stick around all day, fielding calls and customers, checking the orchards. The next-generation Dickey is having her morning nap and will appear later in a tiny flowered dress, cradled in the arms of her mother, Lee’s wife, Stacy.

Just outside the office is the retail shop, where I watch customers drift into an open-air porch with white rocking chairs and a breeze, to consider peaches. Or, rather, the lack of peaches.

It’s mid-July, what should be peak season, but…

Read the full story here at ICN or in the partner publication, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

life large & small in Sewanee

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This is my last Sunday in Sewanee. I fell asleep to the deafening sound of cicadas, a thrumming from the upper branches of the trees that surround the house. In spite of stories of escaped convicts, I can’t help but keep the sliding doors open so I can hear the sound. The land is alive with the cacophony. Bring it on. The more there is, the merrier I am. It was the brilliance behind Rachel Carson’s book title. Two words. No rambling subtitle telling all. Just two words, three syllables, that spoke volumes: Silent Spring. Give me noise from the natural world. Remind me, unceasingly, that there is life. Keep the silence at bay.

I’ve just finished reading [Read more…]

perimeter perambulations

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I always try to deny dawn. She slips under my eyelids and I reach for my eye mask, craving one more hour of unconsciousness. But I hear birds. Knew the light was illuminating the unexplored forest behind the house I now find myself living in. Discovered myself pulled up and into clothes warm enough for the cool morning, lacing up my hiking shoes before I quite realized it. My eyes don’t read so well in the morning anymore, but before I walk out the door, I squint at the map for the Perimeter Trail that loops around Sewanee, hugging the edge of the Cumberland Plateau, and figure it should be due west of the house. Why walk along the lanes to find a proper entrance? I tuck my pants into my socks (the default fashion for us in Cape Cod’s tick-infested landscape. Are they here or am I liberated?) and cross the bit of backyard grass and enter the woods. Ten steps in, I flush a herd of white-tailed deer twenty strong, their cotton-burst butts bounding down the hill of the small valley, then up the other side. A hundred feet in and I find a brook I can step across with one stride. Twenty more paces and I’m on the trail. I take a right and go. It’s good to be back in church.

Just before I left Knight Science Journalism fellowship up in Cambridge, Maura O’Connor spoke to us about her new book on wayfinding. She explained the wonders of the hippocampus, how it grows when we challenge it by getting lost and then finding ourselves. I have not (blindly) used a GPS since then. I find a map, preferably on paper, and study it til I can put my finger on the spot where I am. I have loved to do this, always. It felt like a reward when the last page of a test in third grade was a map, the legend reliably there in the corner, a gift of a key that would unlock the mysteries some mapmaker made.Here on the edge of the plateau, there is the added orientation ease of heading towards the almost horizon that appears between the boles of upright trees, that indicates the drop-off of slope and the potential payoff of views. It’s why I went right. But I am distracted. A russula mushroom there in the duff. A widow-maker tree defying gravity until her uprooted roots decide to give out completely. Rounding a bend and finding myself below a sandstone overhang like a chiseled layer cake of rock, seeps staining spots dark, the smell of iron in the air. Did I gasp? I think I gasped. At a fork I go left, each rock outcropping greater than the last. I scramble up a rock to pass through a tunnel of stone and then the sound of water pulls me forward until I’m below the spray of Bridal Veil Falls, oxygenated, awake. [update: that wasn’t Bridal Veil, I discover later. Just some unnamed cascade. Just as lovely, if not as spectacular.]

How many landscapes can one love? How many humans? How many creatures, great and small? Imagine an infinite number and you are correct.

#Sewanee #hiking #waterfall #Tennessee @univofthesouth #schoolofletters #PerimeterTrail #getoutofbed

Finding Middle Ground

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As the Knight fellowship comes to a close, I prepare to return to the world of freelancing. I couldn’t be more excited that one of the first projects I’ll be working on is with InsideClimate News, a Pulitzer Prize-winning, non-profit, non-partisan news organization dedicated to covering climate change, energy and the environment. You can help make it happen. ICN is fundraising, but I’m also eager to hear from you about what’s happening in your American towns that are far from the coasts and the homes of mainstream news outlets. Check out the full description below and then please feel free to contact me via Twitter (@meeratweets) or email.

Your Guide to Finding Middle Ground

Few issues expose the nation’s current ideological divide more starkly than climate change, and we need your support to plunge headfirst into the abyss. We don’t know what we will find there. That’s exactly why we want to send a seasoned and talented writer, Meera Subramanian, on an extended reporting assignment to explore this unknown territory. [Read more…]

the year in books

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My bookshelves are beyond capacity. As the year as a Knight Science Journalism fellow comes to a close, I take short jaunts back to the Cape, carrying boxes full of paperbacks and hardcovers that encapsulate the year. Sustainable Energy — Without the Hot Air by David J.C. MacKay and David Archer’s The Long Thaw: How Humans Are Changing the Next 100,000 Years of Earth’s Climate from Dan Schrag’s The Consequences of Energy Systems class. The hefty tome Magnum Contact Sheets, Cotton Tenants: Three Families by James Agee and Walker Evans, and the playful Seeing Things: A Kid’s Guide to Looking at Photographs by Joel Meyerowitz, all for B.D. Colen’s photojournalism class. Sophia Roosth’s new book Synthetic: How Life Got Made. [Read more…]

southern hospitality

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After a year of growing boycotts, North Carolina reversed part of its Public Facilities Privacy & Security Act, better known as HB 2 or simply the Bathroom Bill, in March 2017. I was there immediately after that decision and took to the streets of North Carolina to see what people were thinking about who gets to use what bathrooms in the state. Here’s what I found:

Southern Hospitality from Meera Subramanian on Vimeo.

Women’s Health & The Environment: Going Up In Smoke

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Tomorrow I’ll be heading to the heartland for University of Iowa’s Global Forum to talk cookstoves. With people from a variety of backgrounds — anthropology, engineering, economics, gender studies, journalism, non-profits and more — we’ll discuss the troubling persistence of harm from biomass cookstoves used by three billion people around the world. This multidisciplinary approach seems like a good step away from thinking about this as a purely an engineering problem, or an economic problem, or a development problem. It’s all those things and a whole lot of other messy humanness. It’s what I explored in my book, A River Runs Again and this piece for Nature. The event is free and open to the public.