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.
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.
Artwork: Steve McPherson
EARLY IN 2004, a buoy was released into the waters off Argentina. Half of the buoy was dark and the other light, like a planet in relief. The buoy sailed east, accompanied by the vastness of the ocean and all the life it contains, the long-lived great humpback whales with their complex songs that carry for miles, and the short-lived Argentine shortfin squid. Along the way, many thousands of minuscule creatures were colonizing this new surface, which had appeared like a life raft in the open waters of the South Atlantic.
The researchers who’d dropped the buoy followed its movement in hopes of learning more about ocean currents than generations of science and sailing history had revealed. They watched the buoy float into the wide-open ocean between South America and Africa, those twin coastlines that struck me, as I gazed at them on the pull-down map in first grade, as two puzzle pieces that once linked. They surveilled its movements by GPS. Eighteen months later, the signal ceased. Silence from the satellites.
The buoy continued along the currents of the South Atlantic, free from surveillance, sheltered and shocked by sun and clouds and storms overhead. It was likely molded out of a thermoplastic polymer called acrylonitrile butadiene styrene, or ABS, which, like most plastics, was crafted from the extracted remains of long-ago life-forms. ABS was engineered in the lab to endure—rigid, resilient, capable of withstanding all that being let loose at sea may foist upon it.
All plastic begins in a factory. That much we know. But where it goes next remains poorly understood. Only 1 percent of the plastic released into the marine environment is accounted for, found on the surface and in the intestines of aquatic animals. The rest is a little harder to measure. Some presumably washes back ashore. An untold amount settles, sunk by the weight of its new passengers. (One study found four times more plastic fibers in the sediment of the deep-sea floor than on the surface of the ocean.)
And some, like the buoy, just keeps drifting along.
***
I have spent thirty years fixated on environmental issues, spawned during my own oceanic migration in the fall of 1989….
I wasn’t going to post a year-end plea on behalf of the Society of Environmental Journalists this year, where I served as the President until earlier this month. So many asks at this year-end moment, and in such a year where the needs are bottomless, and I didn’t want to add to the pile.
But IF you are still making your 2020 contributions, if you are moved by the news of journalists who have died from the coronavirus contracted while covering the pandemic to bring us news, or the staggering number of layoffs and publications permanently shuttered, I can attest to the value of your donation. SEJ has an incredible team of dedicated staff and volunteers who made it possible to ride out this year and keep the organization stable. We got money to those who needed it most, forming a rapid response grant and a Members-in-Need fund. To see more about what we accomplished this year, you can read my final President’s Letter here.
I was fortunate, teaching and writing longer-form pieces from home, able to postpone reporting trips indefinitely. But so many were out there on the frontlines, continuing to cover stories about historic hurricanes and wildfires, climate upheaval, and environmental protection rollbacks under the Trump administration that will manifest in diminished human health and a compromised natural world for a long time to come.
If you hope to see environmental journalism continue into 2021 and beyond, I invite you to join me with a contribution to SEJ. Check out our incredible (and growing) Wall of Heroes, listing some of the best journalists out there on this beat.
One big bonus this year: up to $300 in charitable giving can be deducted “above the line” from your 2020 taxable income, even if you take the standard deduction. That means everyone can receive a tax benefit from their donation to SEJ, not just those filers that itemize.
And if you can’t do anything this year, that’s fine too. No matter what, I just hope this finds you and yours safe and healthy, and staying that way as we tip into the new year.
with love,
~meera
This was an evening of incisive conversation with MacDowell Fellows who work in investigative and long-form narrative journalism. In this era of the 30-second soundbite and relative truth, in-depth reporting and groundbreaking nonfiction writing are more important than ever.
MacDowell has been supporting journalists for decades, and believes a new model of assistance is needed for journalists who dedicate their lives to telling complex stories that have the power to change our lives and make our society better. The Art of Journalism Initiative at MacDowell is one way we support groundbreaking voices in non-fiction—like those of James Baldwin, Shane Bauer, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Frances FitzGerald, Sheri Fink, William Finnegan, Adrian Nicole Leblanc, and others.
With The Art of Journalism initiative, we are investing $2 million in Fellowships for journalists and long-form non-fiction authors, as well as providing journalism project grants, while helping to link a new network of publishers, non-profit newsrooms, and other key players in the journalism community to MacDowell’s artist community. Get the scoop here .
Watch the video here: Art & Urgency Video
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:
