must india ravage to rise?

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My double book review was just published in Caravan magazine, looking at Churning the Earth: The Making of Global India, by Aseem Shrivastava and Ashish Kothari, and Making Peace with the Earth: Beyond Resource, Land and Food Wars, Vandana Shiva’s latest. It’s loaded with (unanswerable) questions.

Is there nothing between the sleepy socialism of India’s first decades that admittedly did little to raise the standard of living for most Indians and the sell-out spree of the recent past that has created a growing chasm between the haves and the have-nots? What happened in the half-century between political independence gained and economic independence relinquished?

Read the piece here.

 

thank you, sej/fej!

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Three’s a charm. I’d applied for reporting funds from the Society of Environmental Journalists’ Fund for Environmental Journalism before, to no avail. But take note, you other scrappy journalists out there, you must persevere! I did, and now I am thrilled and thankful to learn that my application this summer, which will help support my new book project, Elemental India: Dispatches from the Global Environmental Front, was funded. The indispensable support will help me begin reporting in North India this fall. Thank you. Shukriya!

Here’s the announcement of all the grant recipients…

Fund for Environmental Journalism Announces Summer 2012 Grantees.

Thanks to generous funding from the Cornelius King Foundation and the Heinz Endowments, plus numerous small gifts from members and friends of the Society of Environmental Journalists (SEJ), we are pleased to announce that the organization is awarding a total of $12,105 to five journalism projects selected in SEJ’s Fund for Environmental Journalism (FEJ) Summer 2012 grant cycle. In addition to the grant, SEJ will also provide mentoring support to any grantees requesting it.The Society of Environmental Journalists launched the Fund for Environmental Journalism in 2010, to support reporting projects and entrepreneurial journalism ventures related to the environment. For the first time in its history SEJ began awarding small grants to both staff and freelance journalists, to cover costs of travel, lab testing, graphics development, website costs, and other budget items without which journalists might have been unable to produce and distribute specific timely stories about important environmental issues.

Congratulations to the winners in the Summer 2012 round:

Jane Braxton Little and Winifred Bird
Greenville, CA, USA and Nagano, Japan
$3,500 for travel to the Ukraine and Fukushima to produce an article on approaches to managing forest contamination in the aftermath of nuclear disaster

Tara Lohan
San Francisco, CA
$730 for travel expenses to support a feature story and photographic essay showing the impact on rural communities of fresh water diversion to Las Vegas

Barbara Moran
Brookline, MA
$1,325 for travel and media-production expenses for articles examining the impact on environmental pollution and public health of industrial laundries in New England

Erica Peterson
Louisville, KY
$3,500 for air-testing expenses to support reporting for a radio series about industrial pollution in Louisville, Kentucky

Meera Subramanian
West Barnstable, MA
$3,050 for travel expenses to produce articles, and chapters for a book, about sustainable growth and development in India

To learn more about the FEJ awards program, including applicant eligibility and submission guidelines, or to see information and links about past awards, please go to the Fund for Environmental Journalism web page. We are currently fundraising for the next FEJ round of grants. Please consider making your own donation today, to help SEJ build the Fund for Environmental Journalism and support new work! Many in this field are adapting to disruptions in their employment and new methods in media; yet they remain steadfast in their goal of providing our communities every day with vitally important information on environment-related issues. If you would like to help experienced environmental journalists to continue producing rich, rigorously investigated and unbiased content, please make a gift on SEJ’s secure website.

sej outstanding feature story

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Thrilled that the SEJ 11th Annual Awards for Reporting on the Environment selected “India’s Vanishing Vultures” for First Place for Outstanding Feature Story.

The judges said “this story by Meera Subramanian was extremely well researched, compellingly written and showed how the impact of the decline of these uncharismatic birds is dramatically affecting the health and the environment of this South Asian nation.”

I, in turn, select the Society of Environmental Journalists as an outstanding journalists’ association. They’ve been instrumental in helping me tackle this challenging trade, especially as a freelancer.

california condor faces lead menace

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After more than three decades on the brink of extinction, the California condor (Gymnogyps californianus) — the largest and most threatened wild bird species in the United States — is making a modest recovery, thanks to intensive captive breeding and medical intervention. But troubling data reported this week suggest that unless hunters change their practices, the condor will require extensive support in perpetuity if it is to survive in the wild. [Read more…]

an ill wind: the trouble with turbines

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I’ve been following with interest the rapid expansion of wind energy and its impact on wildlife. Excited that I had a chance to delve into the issue for Nature magazine. Here’s how it starts:

Marc Bechard turned a worried eye skywards as he walked among the limestone hills at the southern tip of Spain. It was October 2008, and thousands of griffon vultures — along with other vulnerable raptors — were winging towards the Strait of Gibraltar and beyond to Africa. But first they had to navigate some treacherous airspace. The landscape on either side of the strait bristles with wind turbines up to 170 metres high, armed with blades that slice the air at 270 kilometres per hour. [Read more…]

pick your poison

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I once helped draw blood from a wild falcon, its lithe wings gently lashed, its head covered to calm it. Biologists have been taking such tests for more than thirty years, tracking toxins in the predatory birds as they make landfall after spending months in Central and South America, where chemicals such as DDT and PCB aren’t banned like they are in the United States, since the 1970s. A month earlier I’d heard Charles Henny, a U.S. Geological Survey wildlife biologist with a focus on toxicology, say that by 2004 there was almost no detectable DDT in these falcons, whose populations had crashed due to DDT but then recovered. But there was something new on his radar. “There’s other stuff that’s replaced it,” he said. “My concern right now is the flame retardants.”

Read the rest at Dissent…

a heritage takes wing

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Just out, my cover story in Saudi Aramco World magazine.

Some stories have no beginnings. But sitting around a fire in a spacious landscape with radiant stars overhead, next to a man with a gyrfalcon on his fist, I get a sense of a beginning. The bird is exquisite, otherworldly, glowing in the light of the fire. When I am offered the chance to hold it, I do not say no. We slip the thickly padded, finely embroidered cuff from his hand to mine. I stroke the bird’s feathers with the backs of my fingers. Its weight is, somehow, just right: light enough not to be a burden, heavy enough to convey the substance of what rests on my wrist.

I am in the desert of the Ramah Wildlife Refuge outside Al Ain in the United Arab Emirates, close to the border of Oman. In the darkness of the dunes are foxes and owls and, if the conservation efforts are working, hares and houbara bustards. It is the first day of the International Falconry Festival, a gathering that will bring hundreds of people from dozens of nations to this sandy spot to celebrate the world’s growing recognition of their artful sport—indeed, their obsession.

Late in 2010, at a meeting in Nairobi, UNESCO announced that it would inscribe falconry onto the Representative List of Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH). The room, filled with expectant falconers, broke out in cheers so long and loud that a recess had to be called. Abu Dhabi had spearheaded the effort that led to this announcement, submitting the application on behalf of 11 other disparate nations: the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Morocco, Belgium, France, Spain, the Czech Republic, Mongolia and Korea. It was the largest and most internationally diverse application UNESCO ICH had ever received.

Read the rest here… 

climate change – are you a believer?

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In graduate school I studied under religion writer Jeff Sharlet. It was through him that I learned how every story is a story of faith. The debate around climate change—is it happening, how bad is it, if it is happening what’s causing it, what should we do about it?—really comes down to a question of belief.

This summer, Andrew Hoffman had a piece in the Christian Science Monitor that addressed this fundamental notion of worldviews and cultural beliefs underlying the divide between climate skeptics and believers. He wrote, “For skeptics, climate change is inextricably tied to a belief that climate science and policy are a covert way for liberal environmentalists and the government to diminish citizens’ personal freedom.” For the skeptics, the science is merely a guise for a liberal anti-capitalist agenda.

But does the public agree?

Read the rest at Dissent...

weight of the world

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On Monday, the Worldometers clock, which rapidly ticks off the ever-increasing number of humans inhabiting our planet, leapt across the seven-billion mark. In honor of the staggering sum (and with a hat tip to Harper’s), let’s look at some other numbers relating to population.

• Cost of raising a child, birth to age eighteen, excluding college, for a middle-income, two-parent family in the United States as of 2010: $226,920 [Read more…]