On America: Writing & Reading the Environment

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From our home places, we convene. It is tonic. To get a chance to explore storytelling with these talented writers, all approaching their craft from different angles, was such a pleasure. Here’s the full post about the October 1 event, with an expansive suggested reading list. We were: a panel of writers, journalists, and climate change activists considering the formal, structural elements environmental writers can bring to storytelling, how to handle or tell stories that support political stances, and examine the stories out there that can foster a better understanding of our environmental crisis. But it was so much more. Exploring systems of reciprocity, how far writing can reach (will there ever be another Silent Spring?) and, and, and….

Have a look. And then pick up Kerri Arsenault’s rooted true tale Mill Town. And Bathsheba Demuth’s exquisite Floating Coast. Travel the world through John’s latest Freeman’s: Love. Seek out the deeply thought-through essays on climate and the hard questions they force upon us by Emily Raboteau and Meehan Crist.

Thanks to our hosts: Center for Fiction in collaboration with Orion Magazine and the National Book Critics Circle as part of the Brooklyn Book Festival’s Bookends series.

Climate Change as Threat (& Opportunity) Multiplier

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My year at Princeton University is coming to a close, although the second half of the spring semester was disrupted, as everything has been, by the COVID-19 pandemic. But I still wanted to share the syllabus for the class, which includes the adaptations I made given the shifting situation. After spring break in March, we all transitioned to Zoom, and our planned trip to a local farm to learn about carbon farming had to be cancelled, but the class remained a great series of discussions, inquiries, tough questions, thoughtful answers, exciting possible solutions, and more.

Here’s the description for ENV 381, which was cross-listed in journalism and urban studies:

The US Department of Defense has called climate change a “threat multiplier,” referencing military bases inundated by sea level rise and increased global political instability from extreme weather events, especially in vulnerable countries already struggling with poor governance and impoverished populations. Likewise, among conservation biologists and urban designers, farmers and social justice activists, there is acknowledgement that perennial challenges are all exacerbated because of a rapidly warming planet for these same reasons. Every aspect of life on earth, for humans and other living creatures, is changing. This class will explore everything from the state of songbirds to the national security concerns of war hawks to agriculture to urban design to storytelling to social justice. The aim is to understand how, while climate change aggravates existing struggles, innovative climate action solutions might also help ease them.

As always, feel free to reach out to me with your suggestions or to let me know if you’ve adapted it for your own class. Here’s the full syllabus:

ENV381_SYLLABUS_ClimateChangeAsThreatMultiplier

(Cancelled) New Imaginings: Storytelling, Science & Activism

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Imagery: Jules Bartl/BBC World Service

*Due to the coronavirus/COVID-19 crisis, this event has been cancelled*

During my time at Princeton University, I have the pleasure of organizing an event, and I decided to shape it around the powerful novel The Overstory. If you’re in the Princeton area on March 26, please join me. And thanks to Jules Bartl and the BBC for letting us use this exquisite image for the event (check out the short animated film!).

More event info here.

Award-winning environmental journalist Meera Subramanian will host the discussion “New Imaginings: Storytelling, Science and Activism” featuring Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Richard Powers, author of The Overstory; Robin Wall Kimmerer, SUNY professor of environmental biology and author of Braiding Sweetgrass; and forest activist Timothy Ingalsbee, executive director of Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics and Ecology.

Subramanian, the 2019-20 PEI Barron Visiting Professor in the Environment and the Humanities, will lead a conversation exploring how the work of scientists, artists and activists come together to inspire fundamental shifts in perspective. From the underground networks that feed forests to how human activity impacts the upper atmosphere, our understanding of how the world works shapes our minds, the stories we tell, and the way we act.

This event is free and open to the public. Books will be available for purchase from Labyrinth Books.

Thu, Mar 26, 2020
4:30 PM – 7:00 PM
Princeton University, McCosh Hall, Room 10

 

Related show

  • Author: Meera Subramanian
  • Tour: Teaching/Workshops
  • Date: March 26, 2020
  • Time: 4:30pm
  • Venue: Princeton University: McCosh Hall
  • City: Princeton , NJ
  • Address: McCosh Hall, Room 10
  • Country: United States
  • Cancelled
  • More information
  • Notes: Award-winning environmental journalist Meera Subramanian will host the discussion “New Imaginings: Storytelling, Science and Activism” featuring Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Richard Powers, author of The Overstory; Robin Wall Kimmerer, SUNY professor of environmental biology and author of Braiding Sweetgrass; and forest activist Timothy Ingalsbee, executive director of Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics and Ecology. Subramanian, the 2019-20 PEI Barron Visiting Professor in the Environment and the Humanities, will lead a conversation exploring how the work of scientists, artists and activists come together to inspire fundamental shifts in perspective. From the underground networks that feed forests to how human activity impacts the upper atmosphere, our understanding of how the world works shapes our minds, the stories we tell, and the way we act.

Crossing the Climate Change Divide syllabus

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I’m just wrapping up a semester of teaching a class I called Crossing the Climate Change Divide, an undergraduate seminar I led at Princeton University.

The effects of climate change are here, now. Yet Americans are divided on this singular issue. Or are they? While media often portray climate change debates as binary—fact-averse conservative denialists vs. Green-New-Deal leftists—the reality is that all Americans are experiencing changes in their own backyards. For some it is the impact of devastating extreme events such as wildfires or storm flooding; for others, it is noticing quieter shifts such as when spring blooms and birds arrive. How they process and understand these changes was the focus of our semester.

Our readings included:

  • Bill McKibben, The End of Nature
  • Andrew J.  Hoffman, How Culture Shapes the Climate Change Debate
  • Michael Mann and Tom Toles, Madhouse Effect: How Climate Change Denial is Threatening Our Planet, Destroying Our Politics, and Driving Us Crazy
  • Naomi Oreskes and Erik. M. Conway, Merchants of Doubt
  • Arlie Russell Hochschild, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right
  • Earl Swift, Chesapeake Requiem: A Year with the Watermen of Vanishing Tangier Island
  • Elizabeth Rush, Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore
  • Candis Callison, How Climate Change Comes to Matter: The Communal Life of Facts
  • Mitch Hescox and Paul Douglas, Caring for Creation: The Evangelical’s Guide to Climate Change and A Healthy Environment
  • Pope Francis, Encyclical on Climate Change & Inequality: On Care for Our Common Home

But for educators curious about the whole class, here’s the syllabus:

ENV375_SYLLABUS_CrossingClimateChangeDivide

And I’d love to hear from others out there about the readings that you are using in your classrooms, too. Write me!

United in Change

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Photo by Meera Subramanian

As a reader I find there are stories that just stick with me; I can’t shake them. But as a journalist, I experience this a thousand-fold. What appears in print can feel like a haiku, with too many interviews and notebook jottings ending up on the cutting room floor. The histories of place I unearthed through research. The letters to the editor in the thin pages of the local newspaper. The anecdotes shared by those who didn’t make it into the piece. The deep story revealed behind and between their words, too big for the bounds of the word-count. 

As I finished up each of the nine pieces that were part of the series Finding Middle Ground series for InsideClimate News that I worked on for most of 2017-18, about perceptions of climate change in conservative parts of the country, I would find filaments linking them with each other that I didn’t have room to explore. I’d get tangled in threads leading to stories I’d reported in other parts of the world, a lament I heard from a peach farmer in Georgia echoing what a rice farmer had said in India. There were strands of sinew between what I learned in the field and what I knew from my own personal life, a peripatetic journey that’s granted me multiple vantage points, making me feel at home both nowhere and everywhere at once. 

Last year I became a contributing editor of Orion magazine, a publication I’ve read for many years, enjoying the lush richness of its pages, the images and poems and book reviews and NO ADS. (Yes, this is a nonprofit endeavor, and, yes, you can support it by subscribing.)  With this piece for Orion, I finally had a chance to reach up for some of those disparate threads that have been floating around in my head since I finished the ICN series and try to weave them into something that made sense. Or, at least, began to make sense. Still, it feels like a haiku. Still, there is so much unsaid at the edges. Because the story of climate change at this moment in time is immense, and shifting. We’re all living this in real-time, the scientists and storytellers and skeptics all. Much of what I found over 18 months of reporting is deeply troubling, the changes underway stirring so much into uncertainty, but I also hold onto the possibility of the disruption as a great opportunity. No rain without thunder and lightning, Frederick Douglass reminded us. And the storm of climate change is here, now. Anything could happen. 

The piece begins…

For the past couple of years, I traveled across my country, falling in love with strangers. I sought them out—farmers, ranchers, fly fishermen, evangelicals— and stepped into their lives, uninvited but nearly always, inexplicably, welcome. I sought some kind of connection, asking them questions few seemed to be asking them, about their lives and what they care about and what they believe in. Who they vote for and why. What they remember from before and what they expect in the future, which to their collective grief are often different things.

Read the rest here.

Crossing the Climate Change Divide

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ENV 375 class. Photo by Denise Applewhite

This fall, I’ve been leading Princeton undergraduates as we take a deep dive into the climate debate in the seminar “Crossing the Climate Change Divide.” Tom Garlinghouse from Princeton’s Office of Communications joined us to share what we’re doing. To see the full syllabus, click here. And here’s his piece:

The course is taught by award-winning journalist Meera Subramanian, who is asking students to examine what people think about climate change — whether they accept the current climate science, reject it or are simply confused by it — and why they think the way they do.

“I’d love the students to engage in the conversation around climate change with a slightly more wide-open lens about how people are thinking about this and why people are thinking about it in the ways that they do,” said Subramanian, the Currie C. and Thomas A. Barron Visiting Professor in the Environmental Humanities in the Princeton Environmental Institute (PEI). She is participating in a panel titled “Breaking the Logjam” at the Princeton Environmental Forum on Oct. 25.

Subramanian wants the students to use what anthropologists call an “emic,” or “insider’s,” approach — that is, taking into account a person’s words, perceptions and beliefs as main sources of information rather than adopting a potentially more objective or “outsider’s” approach. This demands that the students consider factors such as how an individual’s ideology, religion, economic level and politics impinge on a particular topic — in this case, the climate debate.

“Humans are messy creatures,” Subramanian said. “It’s not like we’re just economic creatures or just religious creatures. We are all of those things, all at once.”

Read the rest here.

more on Chennai’s water crisis

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The summer Southwest monsoon has brought some rain and momentary relief to Chennai, but the question of how to mitigate water shortages (and excesses) are not gone. After my New York Times op-ed last month, I’ve had a chance to speak about water with others interested in the story. These issues are not disappearing anytime soon. From the World Resources Institute:

New data from WRI’s Aqueduct tools reveal that 17 countries – home to one-quarter of the world’s population—face “extremely high” levels of baseline water stress, where irrigated agriculture, industries and municipalities withdraw more than 80% of their available supply on average every year.

I spoke to Mark Goldberg on the Global Dispatches Podcast. In essence, do all the small stuff first: restore wetlands, enforce rainwater catchment mandates, educate on conservation, fix leaky pipes, capture water across the landscape with small-scale systems that work with nature, and not against it. Can India develop a new 21st-century model of sustainable development? The opportunity is still there, though hard to see evidence of embracing such possibility. Listen to the podcast here:

On the BBC’s podcast Beyond Today, I spoke with host Matthew Price about the crisis. BBC’s Rajini Vaidyanathan also reported from Chennai directly. Have a listen here.

I also make a cameo appearance in this Al Jazeera The Stream news piece, featuring Veena Srinivasan, a senior fellow with Ashoka Trust, Raj Bhagat Palanichamy, a data manager with World Resources Institute India, and T.M. Krishna, a musician, artist, and activist. Watch the episode here:

And then sit back and watch/listen to T.M. Krishna’s haunting song Poromboke:

Chennai’s Water Crisis

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Rebecca Conway for The New York Times

 

While researching and reporting A River Runs Again (aka Elemental India), I explored small-scale, across-the-landscape solutions for water crises in India. Even just a few years later, the world is warmer and there are more people in need of water. When the major South Indian city of Chennai, where my father is from and where many in my extended family live, ran out of piped water during its current drought, I wrote an op-ed for The New York Times about how India might consider a new approach to development that might embrace the methods I wrote about in the book. Here’s how it begins:

India’s water crisis offers a striking reminder of how climate change is rapidly morphing into a climate emergency. Piped water has run dry in Chennai, the capital of the southern state of Tamil Nadu, and 21 other Indian cities are also facing the specter of “Day Zero,” when municipal water sources are unable to meet demand.

Chennai, a city of eight million on the Bay of Bengal, depends on the fall monsoon to provide half of the city’s annual rainfall. Last year, the city had 55 percent less rainfall than normal. When the monsoon ended early, in December, the skies dried up and stayed that way. Chennai went without rain for 200 days. As winter passed into spring and the temperature rose to 108 degrees Fahrenheit, its four water reservoirs turned into puddles of cracked mud.

Some parts of the city have been without piped water for five months now. Weary women with brightly colored plastic jugs now await water tankers, sometimes in the middle of the night. On June 20, the delayed summer monsoon arrived as a disappointing light shower.

These water crises are now global and perennial….

Read the rest of “India’s Terrifying Water Crisis” here at The New York Times.

a letter from 2049

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Shutterstock

 

I don’t normally do speculative fiction, but when In These Times told me they were doing a special climate issue and asked me what our world might be like if we were to achieve a net zero carbon economy, I found myself writing a letter to my cousin-brother. 

Dear Harish,

Hello, my sweet, faraway cousin-brother! As we approach our—gasp!—80th birthdays, I felt inspired to resurrect the old tradition of letter writing.

It seems like yesterday we were sitting on your parents’ rooftop, taking in the night sounds of Besant Nagar, in the days when I would impulsively buy a ticket from Boston to Chennai without much of a thought beyond my bank account balance.

Remember when a ticket cost a few weeks’ pay instead of six months’? Has it really been 20 years since I last flew to India? I have forgotten the smell of the jasmine flowers women sold along the streets. Remind me again of their fragrance…

Do you see more stars now that the coal plants have shut down? Are the streets quieter without the roar of motorbikes? I suspect the electric vehicles still honk just as frequently and drive as wildly.

Perhaps everything is a little calmer, without the overwhelming crowds? But I imagine there’s an eeriness to that calm, knowing the cost at which it came.

Read the rest here.

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.