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…]

100 Years of the National Park Service

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In Cambridge, I reunited with a friend from another place, Ruth Goldstein – who is now teaching at Harvard. In recent years, she’s spent the better part of her time in South America and she’s here to share her findings through wonderful classes about mythology and women and plants and gold. We talked of these things but we also talked of maps and cartography and the way they define space and landscapes. Later, she sent me these words, written in 1924 by Aldo Leopold in an essay entitled “The River of the Mother of God,” which apparently sat in a drawer, a victim of a Yale Review rejection. Aldo wrote:

…wilderness is the one thing we can not build to order. When our ciphers result in slums, we can tear down enough of them to re-establish parks and playgrounds. When they choke traffic, we can tear down enough of them to build highways and subways. But when our ciphers have choked out the last vestige of the Unknown Places, we cannot build new ones.

(Setting aside the hint of razing slums…) this brings us to a moment of appreciation for those who, a century ago, helped establish the National Park Service. I know, I know, these aren’t exactly the Unknown Places they once were, but they are something, and something important. When the Service was founded it held 17 national parks and 21 national monuments in its trust. This year, on the centennial of the Service, there are now more than 400 sites, on more than 84 million acres, protected places of wild beauty and historic significance. Last week, President Obama added one more to the list as he created the Katahdin Woods and Waters National Monument in Maine.

So as I moved back to the city, these public spaces were on my mind. Our first Knight Science Journalism fellowship workshop was an audio class with multimedia journalist and past Knight fellow Ibby Caputo.  I’ve been recording in the field for years, but am still woefully not at ease with production. Usually, I record, I transcribe, I write. Here our goal was two minutes of auditory wonder. Three intense days later, Ibby had indeed whipped us into shape, and we each had a Vox Pop – man on the street – piece to prove it. Here’s mine, complete with rookie mistakes of hot tape and pops, after I went out and about on the MIT campus to hear people’s memories and thoughts on the National Park Service, in the week of its centennial.

 

And now to end with something more polished, “MODERN MAJOR PARK RANGER,” a sing-along collaboration made in partnership with hitRECord, the National Park Service, and the National Park Foundation. Enjoy. Then, go #FindYourPark!

something’s happening here…

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When a mass shooting of little six-year-olds in Newtown didn’t inspire gun control action, nor the 49 deaths at the massacre in Orlando, nor the thousands of other deaths that take place in America each year, I began to think that only a mass shooting in Congress could make this problem real to the elected officials who have continually blocked gun control measures. Horrid thought, I know, but that’s what crossed my mind when the Senate defeated all four bills (two from each side of the aisle) earlier this week, even though the blood in Orlando remained so fresh.

Then, yesterday, something happened. Something kind of wonderful. Democrats in the House of Representatives had a sit-in. Ole school – Gandhi – MLK, Jr. – style. “No bill! No break!” they chanted between speeches. When the CNN feed went dead, shaky cell phones brought the news out with Twitter’s Periscope live feed. (Here’s @ScottPeters.) #HoldTheFloor, #NoBillNoBreak, and #DemocraticSitIn trended.

I got excited. Proud that my representative, Bill Keating, was part of it. Wondered how long it’d last. Wondered what would come of it. I could have glued myself to the Internet to watch each moment. Instead, [Read more…]

matt power: in memoriam

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Photo I took of Matt Power as we roamed through NYC in the blizzard of February 2006

 

I wrote this almost two years ago, and read it at Matt’s Vermont memorial. I think I’m ready to post it.

“Did you water the plants?”

The g-chats would come from Asia, South America, Africa. I would sigh and smile and type back in that too abrupt chat shorthand. “Yup” and then we’d bounce to some other topic, often dirt-or-word related. Matt Power could be both singularly obsessed and as scattered as the visas in his passport. Did he know that I cared as much about the plants’ survival – the striated leaves of the spider plant in the bay window of the parlor and the abundance of the vegetable-berry-herb-opium poppy garden of the summer – as he did? If I wasn’t on my own travels, I was babying the babies too, giving them water as they soaked up the south sun, all of us awaiting his next return to Hawthorne Street. I lived there with Matt and Jess for five years, from the first day when we sat on the bare floor in the bare limestone (“It’s not a brownstone,” Matt would correct.) eating takeout, as a cast of characters came and went, until I left too. Did he know I loved the plants? Did he know, we all asked last week, when news of his death in Uganda arrived, how much we loved him?

We often step into each other’s lives in quiet, non-monumental ways. [Read more…]

living on earth

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photo by Meera Subramanian

photo by Meera Subramanian

It was a pleasure to speak with Helen Palmer of PRI’s show Living on Earth about A River Runs Again, exploring questions about organic agriculture’s ability to feed humanity, how to handle ambivalent respect for well-intentioned nonprofits, and vulture survival. Here’s the intro…

Investigative journalist Meera Subramanian crisscrossed India examining its environmental problems and searching for homegrown solutions described in her new book A River Runs Again. She tells Living on Earth’s Helen Palmer that everywhere she looked, she found serious concerns, but also hope for a better future.

Listen to the 17-minute segment here.

 

wnyc: bringing India back from the brink

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It was with great delight that I entered into the studios of WNYC on Varick Street to sit down and talk with Arun Venugopal, who was guest hosting the Leonard Lopate Show. We talked about the costs of the Green Revolution, of Hindu priests who asked, “What is your duty?” to a farming family considering going organic, of holy waters. Our conversation ended too quickly, and I didn’t quite get to elaborate on my answer to his last question, about the direction PM Modi is taking the country. I said Modi has a choice. What I felt like I didn’t make clear enough is that he can develop India at the expense of the environment, the direction he seems to be heading now, or choose to tap into the exploding number of opportunities to develop in a more sustainable way, providing a model for the world. I’m rooting for the latter, and met the people in India who hope so too.

Listen to the full interview here.

landour lecture series

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It was a pleasure to join Camille Buat and the locals and travelers and students of Landour for a double-talk evening. Camille spoke about the complicated forces at work within the labor movement of the jute industry in 1930s’ Calcutta (sometimes labor won!), and I shared some photos and thoughts on the work-in-progress of Elemental India.

it’s a PublicAffair (and HarperCollins India, too)

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Days before I got on a plane to head to India to continue researching and reporting my book, it was sold in the USA. (HarperCollins India will be publishing it in South Asia.) Here’s the official announcement:

Meera Subramanian’s ELEMENTAL INDIA, a bittersweet tapestry of five stories dealing with life, loss, and survival set against the lush backdrop of India’s natural world that renders the storm of opinions around natural resources into an intimate drama, to Clive Priddle at Public Affairs, by Elise Capron at Sandra Dijkstra Literary Agency (NA).

Now, to work…

school poisoning a window into a world of pesticides

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spraying pesticides on cotton

The death of 23 schoolchildren last month in Bihar after they ate a free school lunch that was tainted with an abundantly used pesticide is just a reminder of the extensive presence of these chemicals in all facets of life in India. Last week, I spoke with radio host Carol Hills of PRI’s The World about the issue. Thanks to Peter Thomson for producing it.

mucking about

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It begins something like this…

I was expecting more dead bodies in Varanasi – really, burning bodies everywhere – for this is the place Hindus come to die, hoping for instant liberation from the cycle of birth and rebirth. But instead I discover that only two of the dozens of ghats are “burning ghats,” stacked with wood and smoldering funeral pyres. Most everywhere else, people are just very busy living. Some do cremate their loved ones here, but most engage in more quotidian tasks.

They wash dishes, wash clothes, wash their bodies. Mothers cook, feeding twigs into compact wood cook stoves and food into hungry mouths. People sell things; they buy things. They pray and dunk themselves in the water vigorously, jumping up and down as they fulfill a lifelong Hindu requirement to bathe in the waters of the Ganges. Others light candles and incense and circumambulate the grand broad-leafed pipul trees where I’m sure all these deliciously pagan-disguised-as-Hindu rituals originated, the idea of God and greater things tumbling from the branches like dappled sunlight.

Read the rest of Mucking About: Stepping into the Unknown on the Banks of Ganges here at Gadling.

And, even better, find a bookseller near you next month when The Best Women’s Travel Writing, volume 9 comes out and you can find Mucking About and a profusion of other great tales from travelers of the female persuasion. Or don’t delay and pre-order now.