Longreads Best of 2018 / Science & Technology

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So insanely honored to have one of my InsideClimate News Finding Middle Ground pieces mentioned in Longreads Best of 2018 list for science and technology stories. I’m still blushing, reading these words from…

Deborah Blum
Director of the Knight Science Journalism program at MIT and author of The Poison Squad.

They Know Seas Are Rising, but They’re Not Abandoning Their Beloved Cape Cod (Meera Subramanian, InsideClimate News)

For more than a year, Meera Subramanian has been traversing the country for InsideClimate News, creating a series of vivid and wonderfully balanced portraits of small communities wrestling with the havoc of climate change (whether they admit it or not). This one from October, focused on an increasingly flood-washed area called Blish Point, stands out for me. It’s a tapestry-like picture woven of relentlessly rising seas, threatened homes and businesses, the politics of climate change science, and pure, stubborn human reluctance to give up on a beloved way of coastal living.

Subramanian never raises her voice or treats any viewpoint with less than respect — although she occasionally deftly slides in the scientific arguments that counter climate denialism. She has an elegant way of making both people and place live on the page. The result is a compelling and compassionate narrative in which this one small, beautiful, vanishing strip of Massachusetts, perched on the edge of an encroaching ocean, becomes a microcosm for the much bigger story of change — and its reckoning — now being realized around the world.

A River Runs Again Orion Book Award finalist

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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!

Santa Monica Green Prize

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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…]

fulbright-nehru research fellowship

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J. William Fulbright was an American senator from the south who fought McCarthyism and the Vietnam War, and in the time in between, set up the Fulbright program in hopes of infusing “a little more reason, and a little more compassion into world affairs.” Jawaharlal Nehru was India’s first prime minister, a man who — in the words of scholar Ananya Vajpeyi — “is himself caught up in the subtle alchemy that transforms him into the leader of all Indians and all Indians into the People of India.”

Their legacies live on in both their countries, and I’m elated to announce I’ll be tapping into that heritage as a Fulbright-Nehru Research Scholar in 2013-14. The funding will allow me to spend five months in India, reporting, researching and writing my first book, Elemental India. To say I’m not quite sure how I would have done it without this support is no small understatement. On behalf of struggling journalists everywhere, I bellow, “Thank you!”

“a heritage takes wing” wins best feature story

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Saed Ateq Al Mansori, Falconry Festival, UAE

About a year ago this time, I was in the UAE covering a story about falconry receiving a UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage designation. The story, “A Heritage Takes Wing,” was published by Saudi Aramco World magazine, and I recently found out it received an award. My editor sent along this dispatch:

The March/April 2012 Saudi Aramco World cover story on falconry, “A Heritage Takes Wing,” was named Best Feature Article in the Association/Custom/B-to-B magazine division at this year’s annual national magazine contest sponsored by Folio in New York.

Here’s their announcement. While Saudi Aramco World is officially a trade magazine, it reads more like the Smithsonian of the Middle East, with smart, well-reported stories about culture, food, travel, history and the like. And it’s free. Yup. You should most certainly check it out.