The Future is Fungi

June 2, 2025 By meerasub Leave a Comment

dreamy dual image of mushrooms and forest after fire — Art by iStock and Orion designer Ella Frances Sanders.

“Let’s talk about mushrooms. That’s a really good story. I love the mushroom story.”

That was Margaret Atwood’s response to Ezra Klein when he asked her about what what is not being discussed, but should be. Something fundamental. (Go to 1:03:30 here to listen.) I suspect he was expecting a response a little more on-the-nose about authoritarianism, but Margaret’s right. Mushrooms utterly break down hierarchies, and categorization, along with biomass. Spend any time considering the mushroom and you will have your mind blown, no ingestion necessary.

The latest issue of Orion magazine is all about fungi. It includes pieces from some of my favorite writers: Maria Popova, Erica Berry, Eula Biss, and Lia Purpura. There’s a conversation between Merlin Sheldrake, Jeff VanderMeer, Kaitlin Smith and Corey Pressman. And so much more! I encourage you to subscribe to Orion if you don’t already. It’s a beautiful, nonprofit, ad-free magazine about nature and culture that, in print, is an absolute pleasure to hold.

I had the honor of writing a piece, too. The Food & Environment Reporting Network helped fund the story “Out of the Ashes,” (thank you!), which considers the future of fungi (and us) in a warming world. I was drawn to the stories of Christian Schwarz and Ron Hamill, of their encounters with fungi and fire, of discovering newly named “exuberant cindercaps” but also watching mushroom flushes that felt like last hurrahs. Their stories make up the piece. But, honestly, one of the hardest parts about reporting is that so much never makes it into the story, but still informs me in so many ways. People are so generous with their time, with their experiences, their knowledge. Pages of notebooks filled. Tape running. And then it sits in my files forevermore. Please go read the final story, but I thought I’d use this space to share some of the outtakes:

hand holding mushroom — Photo by Meera Subramanian.

Return to Oregon

I was able to get back out to my old stomping grounds in Oregon at peak mushroom season to do reporting. Or, rather, what should have been peak mushroom season. It’s late October but it’s dry. Too dry. I took a mushroom identification class back in 1996 or so with Joe Spivack, and he proved a generous guide for this story. I stay with him and his wife, who are both good friends of mine. They have a weather station perched on their deck, the monitor affixed to their kitchen cabinets. The rain what was supposed to come that week registered a pathetic tenth of an inch.

We slip in a mushroom hunt on our way to the coast for the Yachats Mushroom Festival on the coast, bumping two miles up a logging road into the Cummins Creek Wilderness. The air of the forest is intoxicating. Cathy points out European buttercup, an invasive, that covers the ground, but also elderberry, sorrel, nettle. Names of plants I once knew come back to me. Western hemlock. Spruce. A few Douglas firs. Many of these species have close associations with mushrooms. We find a boletus, a false chanterelle, a short-stemmed russula, clavilina corral mushroom, Inocybe, a pile of Suilus, and Agaricus subrutilescens, which is good eating, the first find worth saving after twenty minutes of mushroom hunting. But Joe sees what’s not there. The mushrooms that are missing.

Finally we work our way up a steep hill to get off the trail and deeper into the forest, and almost immediately, Cathy finds chanterelles buried beneath sword ferns so immense they wrap our waists and disappear our legs. We lean down. We look. We ready our knives. Joe explains they’re slow-growing, and probably came up with the rains that were “normal and good” in September. We eventually get a few pounds among us, cleaning them off as we put them in our baskets and bags. “We should find like 60 species up here. We’ve found—what?—maybe nine, ten?” he yells to the trees as much as to me and Cathy. “This place is fungally devoid!” which makes me smile, even though there’s a pit in my stomach when you see these indicators of a changing ecosystem.

We leave with our small haul, winding the rest of the way on 101 into Yachats, crossing the Yachats River where bald eagles soar and seals frolic in the waves that pound the beach.

people climbing up steep sand dune — Climbing steep dunes as the day heats up. Photo by Meera Subramanian.

We never stop moving

It’s 9:15 in the morning and there’s still a chill in the air when Joe and I pull up into a parking lot at the Oregon Dunes Natural Resource Area. We’re met by Frankie, a black dachshund-pit bull mix whose human is forager and chef Joseph Crawford. I’m tagging along with him, Trent and Kristen Blizzard of Modern Forager, and their friend Jeem, everyone loaded up with gathering baskets, bags, knives, paintbrushes, and walkie-talkies. Water and sandwiches are already stashed in backpacks and the Gaia app set into motion. We walk across the parking lot, into the sand towards the edge of the shore pines—about 90 seconds of movement—before Trent cries out, “Matsi!”

For the next six hours straight we move, sometimes together, sometimes spread out, always within a holler of each other, or a two-note whoop that Kristen has for her husband, or resorting to the walkie-talkies when the distance gets too far. When it’s time to eat, Joseph pulls a sandwich out and takes a bite…and continues to move. There are logs to sit on. We do not sit on them. Instead it’s burritos al camino and sips of water sucked from Camelbaks.

We pass through a forest, spy bear prints that look quite fresh, cross a highway of sand dodging ATVs that appear suddenly. The dunes curve, the forest changes, from shore pines to pokey spruce forests that look like a fairyland of green amid a desert. Each ecosystem a world unto itself. There we—meaning the pros—find King boletes, Boletus edulis. We duck under the boughs of spruce, step through salal and kinickkinnick with bright red berries. The ground is spongy underfoot. We want to lie on it, sleep on it. I want to lie on it, sleep on it. But no, we keep moving! Trent is off ahead, nearly out of range, and Kristen checks in on him on channel 2 every once in a while. He sees a what we learn later is a ruffed grouse that seems to be following him. I think it’s my spirit animal, he says over the walkie talkie. The bird comes to me and Kristen. Keeps following our group, in spite of Frankie chasing it, causing it to fly into the low branches of spruce. Joseph is in awe. Tells me later, if I was alone, I would have stayed for an hour with it, meditated with it. He is wonderstruck. We all are.

Kristen Blizzard of Modern Forager finding *Boletus edulis*. Photo by Meera Subramanian.

In one rare moment, our group of six stops moving, Joseph and I grazing on an evergreen huckleberry bush festooned with dark purple berries that pop in our mouths. We talk about what is known about fungi. Frankie is grazing on the lower branches, lapping off the berries with his tongue.

“The black trumpets that grow here in Willamette Valley show up in random-ass places,” Joseph says. He is less interested in what we know and wants to revel in the mystery. “I’m trying to say we have no fucking idea why something grows there… There’s something super complicated and super confusing about fungi.” And that’s the beauty.

Joseph Crawford holding massive matsutake mushroom — Joseph Crawford holding massive *Boletus edulis*. Photo by Meera Subramanian.

Hours into our journey, I learn to see. It brings me to my knees, which sink into the sand. I reach for my knife. I cannot see the matsutake mushroom, but I know it is there. The dark asparagus-like stalk of a late-stage candystick/candy cane/sugarstick, Allotropa virgata, is a giveaway, since the parasite cannot live unless it thieves carbon from the green plants, those sun drinkers, around it, using the hidden underground threads of matsutake mycelium as the energy conduit.

A foot away from the candy cane is a hump pushing up the duff of the forest floor an earthly eruption. This is puhpowee, visible. I dig the point of the knife down around the stem as far as I can, as I’ve watched the experienced mushroom hunters I’ve been with for hours do repeatedly. I unearth a perfect 8” mushroom. My companions, whose bags are already laden with matsutakes and boletes, share the joy. I have found my fungi lens in these coastal Oregon dune forests.

Jeem hands me the cheap paintbrush we’re using to brush the sand off the bulbous base of the stalk, revealing creamy white. Before tucking it into my sack, I bring it to my nose to breathe its singular smell, piquant and woody, and that evening, I breathe in the scent again when I slice the firm flesh into thin slices and drop them into ramen broth. I take it into my body. The satisfaction of finding one’s food, plucking it alive from the earth. When I ask Kristen, “Why mushrooms?” she tells me it’s all about the community. She can open a bottle of preserved mushrooms and memories flood back of the day they were picked, the friends she was with. “So much of the terroir, that you recall with that smell.”

“I mean ‘looking’ not just in the sense of ‘seeing’ but also ‘looking for,’ to seek without the certainty of finding,” wrote Maria Pinto. “It is a kind of humble attention to the world, using all your senses to open yourself to life and the land.”

pine cone with mushroom being passed to a child — Photo by Meera Subramanian.

Mycologists, next gen.

Susie Holmes has been teaching biology at Lane Community College for 16 years, including mycology. Every year, she takes her students out to the forest that cradles the campus in south Eugene. “It’s a wonderful stand of oak and conifer,” she told me as we sat on strawbales at the Mt. Pisgah Arboretum the day before its mushroom festival. “So a nice set of ectomycorrhizal hosts.” She sends the student out to specific areas to document every single species of mushroom they can find. What is the species richness? Observe everything. Count how many individuals there are, the species abundance. Pay close attention. (This is why I love scientists. And poets. They spend their lives mastering the art of paying attention.) What happens when the adjacent stand is clearcut? The next year, the mushrooms were silent. She showed me a spreadsheet “We identified 397 distinct taxa over 15 years. 334 species.” Abundance. Richness. She teaches at college, but also volunteered at both mushroom festivals I attended. Sparking the next generation, and the one after that, with knowledge.

Susie Holmes handing mushroom to children — Susie Holmes at Yachats Mushroom Festival walk. Photo by Meera Subramanian.

“We’ll find out.”

By the end of my reporting, I realize I am thinking more about how fungi are changing in a time of climate crisis, which is the direction the story eventually went. Also at the Mt. Pisgah mushroom festival, I sat down with Noah Siegel, who just published a field guide, Mushrooms of Cascadia, with Christian Schwarz, who leads my story. Noah calls himself @mycohobo on Insta, spends months on the road following fungi. He can identify just about anything, and he’s seeing changes. Go into the southern Sierra Nevadas in California, he tells me, and you’ll see it. A third of the trees, dead from the last drought. Over the last handful of years, he’s seen the treeline literally going up in elevation.

“On the north coast of California, southern coast of Oregon, you can really notice the stress in the Sitka spruce,” he says. Summers have 35% less fog than they used to. And the trees need cold, wet summers. Without it, needles tumble off. Trees die back. “It wouldn’t surprise me if that tree disappears from California in the next 50 or 75 years.”

As for mushrooms in those conditions, “You just don’t find anything,” he says, too dry and then, all too quickly, too cold. “I mean, that’s happened a lot lately.”

“How long can that happen before the system…?” my question drifts off.

“…Collapses?” Noah fills the space. “We’ll find out.”

But, he’s not too dire. “You know, all these things have survived far worse droughts than what we’ve experienced lately. And they’ve also survived through ice ages. I mean, they’re resilient. It just may be different from what we’re used to.”

You need a wild forest

I meet Molly Widmer a week before she is to retire from her life of work as a BLM botanist. Her fair skin is brushed with freckles and her body can barely contain the energy of someone, it seems to me, who should be entering the work force, not leaving it. She tells me she likes to remind obsessive mushroomers of the ecosystems that are needed to provide for the delights they gather.

“Do you like chanterelles, boletes, matsutake, russulas?” she asks them. “You cannot have them without a wild forest.”

Yes, you can cultivate some mushrooms, but the vast majority need conditions we can barely understand. A certain plant, this much rain, that much cold.

“Mushrooming,” she says, “lends humility. There they are! There they aren’t! When will they be back? We have no idea.” No fucking idea.

Here’s to humility, and all the wild forests and rank places that bring us the bounty we need to survive and delight in the world.

Journalists & writer friends, take note…

The Institute for Journalism & Natural Resources, in partnership with the Uproot Project, is offering Reporting on the Urban Environment, an expenses-paid workshop for journalists of color. Deadline: June 6
Grants of $5,000 to $10,000 available to support significant reporting efforts that lead to the publication of content connected to the Colorado River Basin from the Water Desk, based at the University of Colorado Boulder. Open to journalists (freelance and staff) and media outlets. Deadline: June 16

And from the Department of Good News…

Scientists at the Alhambra, the thirteenth century Moorish palace, in southern Spain, are ensuring that the grounds preserve biodiversity along with human history, reintroducing lost species and managing to create habitat. Newt sex!

I’m reading/listening…

…to so much goodness!
Martha Park, who was one of our Religion & Environment Story Project fellows, has published her first book, World Without End: Essays on Apocalypse and After. A beautiful inquiry into motherhood, faith, and how to live in the world, written through memoir and reported essays. We had a lovely conversation about it that will be published soon.
Listen (or read) Annabel Howard’s piece Thirty Years in Emergence. I enjoyed listening to her read it in her lush voice.
Spy on Devon Frederickson’s life in Norway via Instagram as she works on her new book about the community of people who coexist with common eider ducks.
Corey Farrenkopf was the librarian at my local library until he shifted farther out on the Cape. He’s been a dogged writer, and and his new collection of short stories, Haunted Ecologies, brings together eco themes and horror, a genre I haven’t read since I binged on Stephen King as a teen. Really, these days, they’re not so far apart. He also has a novel. Go, Corey!
Just finished Via Negativa by Daniel Hornsby, whom I’ll have the pleasure of teaching with in Sewanee School of Letters this summer. It’s about a priest on the run, moving both away from and towards something as he tries to find some sort of peace, an injured coyote as companion. Full of thoughtful luminous lines like, “I felt that a blanket of darkness had been pulled over things. Or a blanket of false light had been stripped away….”
I’m calibrating my consumption of news, and appreciating Trump’s environmental policies quantified by Jeff Tollefson in Nature.
Climate Note, a new report from the great researchers at the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication shows that “ a majority of registered voters want federal agencies to increase their efforts to protect people from the health harms of global warming.”

And then check out the women making their dream maps in India, showing how they envision restoration of once communal lands.

Coda…

I am still highly distracted by the turkeys that are in the yard continuously. More pulling down books on birds from my bookshelves. More realizations. We live in a lek! An exploded lek! (Not so different than the sage grouse ones that draw tourists from far-flung places out west.) Most of the females have disappeared, presumably to sit on nests, and it’s primarily down to three males vying for the affection of a single female. One fellow is in the lead. There’s been some more fighting among two of the boys (the third hovered longingly, “Doesn’t any one wanna fight me?”), but mostly strutting. So. Much. Strutting. If I were a filmmaker, I’d direct a scene where a woman is quietly eating her dinner with focus while three men flex their muscles and pump their chests behind her. And she pays them no attention at all. But she’ll make her choice, eventually. She seemed close yesterday, letting the lead circle around her like a planet around a sun. And this morning the yard is quiet. Except for the brood of hairy woodpeckers chittering and chirping from the hole in the tree visible from my desk. Heading to Sewanee, Tennessee to teach in a few days. Hoping for woodpecker fledging to witness before I depart, and that the turkeys don’t move in with S. in my absence. They’re getting very very comfortable…

every day is turkey day

April 21, 2025 By meerasub Leave a Comment

Three turkeys with tails fanned out, viewed through a garden gate

I have reluctantly returned to the country of my birth, the place that has always inspired the greatest culture shock after long travels. How quickly I’ve stopped dreaming in Spanish, as the raucous sounds of English fill my mind. Foot travel and cheap trains are replaced by big trucks riding the ass of my Prius as I drive too far to get a dozen eggs that cost six times what they did in Spain. But there are good friends, and my beloved bookshelf, and the yard is teeming with turkeys and other signs of springtime life. Together, it is the antidote to the unraveling.

Between the work of catching up—pitching stories about renewable energy in Spain, preparing for a talk (more below), handling personal crises minor and major—I watch wild turkeys loitering about Cape Cod. Or, I guess, we’re the loiterers. They bear our presence. I could watch them all day. And do.

Woman sitting on deck watching turkeys in yard

Tomorrow is Earth Day, something I find myself resisting—every day is earth day, damn it!—and it comes as years of scientific gains and movement towards climate goals are being bludgeoned, as human rights from clean air to due process are eroded. I gather with my fellow citizens on the rotary who hold signs mentioning kings and oligarchs tight lest they blow away in the fierce wind. My friend and I talk with Andrew, a supporter of 47, a proud participant of January 6th, his language and message perfectly honed in response to any question. “Anything you want to ask us?” I offer, but he shakes his head and responds with a sentence that drifts away in the wind, “No, I have trouble getting my thoughts together…” We’ve all learned how to talk in this age of pontification. Listening is another skill.

We say we are in crisis. The crisis of democracy—the gun—the crisis of climate—the fire, the water, the rain—the crises of our own little lives—debt and Twitter and rage, and most of all the ordinary losses of love and loved ones that feel too vast. But that word, crisis, supposes we can act. It supposes the outcome is yet to be determined. The binary yet to be toggled, a happy ending or a sad one, victory or defeat. As it we have not already entered the aftermath.

Will we save democracy or lose it? Will the earth boil, or will we all drive electric cars? Are the dead gone, or do they live in our hearts forever?

Such imaginations we have.

My imagination wanders, as I watch eight tom turkeys back home, spectacular tail feathers fanned in full display, wings hanging low as they shimmy, faces an explosion of blue and bright red, all glorious and grotesque. The dangling wattle known as a snood draping down over their beaks in the most impractical of ways.

You may have heard the ole story, about Benjamin Franklin and his disappointment that the aggressive eagle had been chosen as our nation’s symbol. In 1784, he wrote in a letter to his daughter:

For my own part I wish the bald eagle had not been chosen as the representative of our country. He is a bird of bad moral character. He does not get his living honestly. You may have seen him perched on some dead tree, where, too lazy to fish for himself, he watches the labour of the fishing hawk; and when that diligent bird has at length taken a fish, and is bearing it to his nest for the support of his mate and young ones, the bald eagle pursues him, and takes it from him. . . . the turkey is in comparison a much more respectable bird, and withal a true original native of America.

I agree, even though my love of raptors is deep and slightly irrational. But even the morally bankrupt eagle only takes what she needs. Acknowledges the limits of necessity even as he steals from the osprey. But the turkeys do earn my respect as they did Benjamin’s, as they make their own way through the world. Mostly peaceful.

There’s been some fighting, too.

One male jammed his beak down the other’s throat and held it there for so long in a suffocating stalemate that I was thinking there might be a roast turkey for dinner. But one relented, and the other chased the loser away. It always seems to be the boys. The hens just want to eat in peace, and carry on with their task. I thank them for ridding our yard of ticks more than their sparring, strutting cohorts. But all play their part.

How quickly I’ve become accustomed to them. When a fox ran through the yard, they scattered, one even taking a lumbering flight to the treetops where they roost at night, (enormous black silhouettes against the skeletons of still bare oak branches and a gloaming sky draining of color). The daytime yard was empty for hours and a keening loneliness set in that only abated when I once again detected movement out of the corner of my eye.

When I went down to work in the garden to gather my thoughts, they scattered again, only to drift back up and surround me as I turned over the winter cover crop, preparing for what is to come, for another season to unfold. The work of a garden is endless. So is the work of democracy. Or for a habitable climate. I will be the first to admit it is exhausting.

Yet.

The turkeys carry on. And so do I. And so do you. Find our ways to fight and also know that we need to make time to ensure our own sustenance as well. Step away from the socials. Pick up the binoculars. Watch the natural world doing the work of living. The toms, the hens, together. They are all spectacular. These magnificently large creatures, living in our midst. Doing the work of replenishment. Eating. Courting. Creating more.

It wasn’t always like this. Native to North America, Meleagris gallopavo was domesticated by the Aztecs, who introduced them to invading Spaniards, who took them to Europe and then brought them back, while other conquerers nearly annihilated the wild ones. In the early 1800s, only about 30,000 remained, down from many millions. Today, there’s an estimated seven million in North America, in part because of the work of hunters and governments. Disappearance is one possibility. So is abundance.

No wonder I want to turn my attention to them. Especially as I prepare to share stories of disappearance and hopes of resurrection from South Asia about some other very large birds….

Talking vultures

For those in the Cambridge, Massachusetts area or who have access to a computer, I invite you to join me for a talk I’m giving this Friday evening for the Brookline Bird Club, taking place at Harvard’s Geological Lecture Hall. It’s titled South Asian Vultures: Crisis & Conservation. Here’s all the info and here’s a description:

Not too long ago, millions of vultures flew over South Asia, so abundant that no one had bothered to count them. Until the 1990s, when populations of three Gyps vultures collapsed by more than 97 per cent in a decade. It was the fastest avian decline ever recorded. Conservationists scrambled to find the cause and start captive breeding programs. What happens when South Asia’s essential clean-up crew vanishes? Cape Cod-based journalist and National Geographic Explorer Meera Subramanian has spent nearly twenty years searching for the answer to that question and discovered a story of conservation in a time of mass extinctions, a chronicle of biologists strategizing and cautiously celebrating. Join her as she shares photos and stories from covering the crisis in both India and Nepal, where the birds’ absence has had ecological, cultural and even religious implications.

Journalists & writer friends, take note…

The Council for the Advancement of Science Writing (CASW) is accepting entries for the fourth Sharon Begley Science Reporting Award, a career prize for a mid-career science journalist of “unflinching dedication, skill, moral clarity, and commitment to mentoring”. Prize includes a $20,000 grant. Deadline: April 30, 2025.
Orion Environmental Writers’ Workshop (June 15-20, 2025, The Omega Institute in Rhinebeck, New York) Join a community of writers, improve your craft, and reimagine how you think about nature. Guided by award-winning instructors, the Orion Environmental Writers’ Workshop provides an intimate space to connect with writers, artists, and editors, spark creativity, and renew, illuminate, and deepen your relationship with place. This week-long workshop is cosponsored by the Omega Center for Sustainable Living. Deadline: May 1, 2025.
FRONTIERS open call for application for early-career journalists Round three! This is the same fellowship I just finished up in Spain, but targeted for early-career journos. Deadline: May 6, 2025.
Covering Climate Now announced an updated training program, aimed at helping newsrooms grow their audiences by telling the climate story better. The program is available exclusively to journalists working for CCNow partners. For a list of the specific trainings they’re offering, free of charge and starting this spring, check out the Climate Journalism Training Catalog.

I’m reading/watching…

After the Deluge by Gary Greenberg in Harper’s, in which he explores some of the same possibilities I did in this piece I wrote for Orion a while ago, but from the close vantage of a small Connecticut town’s selectman responsible for trying to unite a divided populace in the aftermath of a tornado…and a flood. What climate change?
This consideration of life and death on a Washington farm, from my friend Christopher Solomon, in Orion.
I’ll keep reading Brendan Boyle’s Substack, La Comunidad, on life in Spain. On his post, What does Spain think of Donald Trump?, he captured what I experienced during my travels and conversations across the Iberian Peninsula.
I finished Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s Shadow of the Wind, which descended into darkness that feels like it’s getting closer to today’s America. But I’m holding onto this line, as I turn to new writing projects that still elude me: “Julián had once told me that a story is a letter the author writes to himself, to tell himself things that he would be unable to discover otherwise.”
I love this visual portrayal of land use made by National Geographic Explorer Dan Raven-Ellison, who traveled the length of Great Britain and captured drone footage of suburbia and bogs, fields and forests, seaside and soccer field, with each second representing a percentage of land use.
This morning’s post by Bill McKibben, on the death of Pope Francis, a religious leader who recognized that the real roots of the climate crisis reside in the power imbalance created by a “technocratic paradigm” and viewing the world through a reductionist lens.

Coda…

Years ago, I attended an event in Chennai, India, with Jane Goodall as part of her ceaseless work with Roots & Shoots. I went with my mom and dad, my mom’s hair long and grey and pulled back in a long ponytail that made her look like Jane. Last week, my musician friend Casey Neill saw Jane in Oregon, still ceaseless at 91 years old, and there she was as musician Dana Lyons sang this song for her. Dana’s new record is ‘Cracks in the Heartland,’ which Casey produced. Enjoy, friends.

Don’t stop, ever.

Out of Order

February 4, 2025 By meerasub Leave a Comment

graffiti of girl being lifted by heart balloons

{latest Substack…}

Sentiments can be lost in translation, but also found. I’m out of the US but its mess spreads across the globe like its carbon emissions. The absolute least of it is was sitting in a cafe eating tortilla española and cringing as our new old president declared Spain is a BRICS nation (it isn’t). The most of it is hearing from friends and family about direct impacts: jobs lost, projects frozen, students with questionable immigration status disappeared. Last week, I stood with an Austrian woman and when the subject of our state of affairs came up, both of us speechless about the chaos the 47th has unleashed in a baker’s dozen worth of days, she said, of the country or the man, I’m not sure, that it’s “out of order.”

“Yes, yes! That’s the perfect phrase,” I exclaimed. “I’m going to use that.” And so here we are.

As I walked home afterwards, a woman alone, after midnight, feeling totally safe on the streets of Bilbao even as I walked through a group of a dozen men (oh, the sweet relief of not having cortisol continually coursing through one’s body; consider the whales; consider immigrants now being rounded up), I tumbled the phrase “out of order” around in mind. Out of order can mean broken, nonfunctional. It can indicate an experience of tumult and bedlam. It can also mean when someone steps of out of line, and acts in ways that are socially, ethically, morally improper. With the Austrian woman’s three words, she’d spoken a triple entendre.

To process this moment, I’m alternating between Jeff Sharlet’s Scenes from a Slow Civil War and Katharine Hayhoe’s Talking Climate, somehow finding solace in simultaneously recognizing how bad things are and how good they could be. Be? Maybe? Ayana Elizabeth Johnson reminds us to act locally. My form of protest is to dig deeper into my FRONTIERS fellowship work based at BC3, trying to understand all the dynamics at play in the efforts to shift our energy systems to cleaner forms of wind and solar, something that will continue to happen regardless of the white man in the White House. It’s led me to encouraging conversations about agrivoltaics in France and energy companies that build in community funds voluntarily, but also to a recurring and troubling story of conflict—a chasm between the rural and urban populations of the world—identical to what I’ve experienced in America, especially when I reported on conservative perceptions of climate change for Inside Climate News. I also attended an event, La Agenda Climática en La Nueva Legislatura Europa y su Impacto en Euskadi, The Climate Agenda in the New European Legislature and its impact in Basque Country. And we were right back to the impacts of the global shift to the far right. A sense of nervousness, geopolitics shaky, and the hope that energy independence in the form of renewables can be a part of regional security strategies.

panel discussion on climate and politics

Sweet dreams & flying machines…

There was also, last week, the horror over DC skies. Someone I love deeply and dearly has lost someone they love deeply and dearly in the unspeakable plane crash that ended in the Potomoc. She asked me for hard-won advice, knowing I have lost friends, this one, and this one, and others. Words fail, but I say something about letting the grief come when it will, to not fight it, to let it wash over you when it appears urgent and unexpected, even months, years, down the road of recovery. No, not recovery. Something else. Love and loss burnished into your being. But now the grief is immediate, and the only thing to do is take the unbidden reminder that life is short, precious. Love big. Hold loved ones close. Tell them. This is the other way we can act locally, in our most intimate lives.

As I’m exploring this new place, I’m searching for slivers of joy amid all this grief and allowing myself moments to recognize them. I found one, as the sun broke through the relentless clouds of Bilbao, of the news, on Friday afternoon, when I finally made it up Etxebarri Parkea. Once a factory site that has been transformed into a park overlooking the city, its tall smokestack is a reminder of what once was. There was a pond created to support birds and critters, and a skate park for humans to play.

When I walked by the skate park, I noticed two men on skateboards, then I noticed that one was much, much older than the other. I was intrigued. Circled around the park and returned to watch him as he made a smooth steady run across the shallow end. Then, as the younger skater was leaving, the older one recruited him to help him summit the last lip of his run. “Come help me,” he said. “Stand here, with one foot here and the other there, and then when I come up, take my hand.” The young man did exactly as told. They tried it 5-6 times, and the older man never quite made it. Except that, well, he’s already made it, right?

I took a picture of them both, then handed my phone to Nico, the 26-year-old German so he can forward it to himself. And Juanjo is telling us he’s famous. “Google me!” he instructed, and indeed there he is on YouTube and TikTok. He is 87 years old, older than ages of the young skater and me, combined. Some lives are unfairly cut short. Others are long, and embraced by the bodies that contain them.

Journalists & writers friends, take note…

For rising juniors and seniors pursuing journalism, consider applying to the Opening Doors, a new initiative aimed at increasing diversity in public media newsrooms. The two-year program will provide skills training, mentorship, and paid internships for ten BIPOC journalism students, with a focus on science, health, and economics reporting. Apply here.
The Uproot Project Fellowship offers funding to seven journalists to pursue reporting projects over the course of a year. Fellows will receive up to $2,000 to cover travel and other reporting expenses for their fellowship project. Learn more about the Uproot Project Fellowship and find this year’s application here. Deadline: 11:59pm on March 1, 2025
And to connect with poets who are using their art to face the climate crisis, check out the Hellbender Gathering of Poets, run by my friend and Sewanee colleague Nickole Brown. They’re gearing up for a fall gathering and having inspiring events along the way.
The Matthew Power Literary Reporting Award is a grant of $12,500 to support the work of a promising early-career nonfiction writer on a story that uncovers truths about the human condition. Matt was one of those dear friends we lost way too early. Deadline: Feb. 19

Take care, friends. Take care of each other.

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baby sea turtle release!

January 17, 2024 By meerasub Leave a Comment

two baby sea turtles on the sand

by Meera Subramanian

S. AND I SIT ON A LOG on a San Pancho beach of western Mexico’s Nayarit coast, watching. Soon, we’ve been told, there will be a release of sea turtles, but we don’t know quite where, so we observe the movement of humans on the beach—couples in beach chairs; groups of young, tattooed surfers smoking cigarettes and weed; a woman reading a book. An older man races by in a dune buggy with a woman beside him, and then returns a moment later without her, rousing a trio of short-legged mutts to chase after him, barking and chomping at the tires. Where he has left the woman, a coalescing is under way, and we move toward it.

There we find Odette Brunel, a Mexican ecologist with long brown hair and reading glasses looped around her neck, holding a tan plastic bin. A hundred tiny turtles writhe within. They’re only a few inches long, dark flippers and dark shells barely containing an eager energy. Nearby, an eleven-year-old named Ananda holds another bin with more. A growing crowd crane their necks to look in. Children gather. Parents gather. Cell phone cameras, including mine, are at the ready.

Odette goes hoarse explaining anything she can to anyone who will listen, in English and Spanish. Her soft voice stretches over the sound of island music blaring from a nearby hotel that reaches its square body onto the sand of the beach.

“We call this tortuga golfina. It’s the smallest of the sea turtles that come here.”

…

Read the rest of the story, published in Orion, about witnessing the dangerous, crucial volunteer work of protecting and releasing baby olive ridley sea turtles in Mexico, here.

And here’s a rough-cut video I made of the evening:

Strange Gardens

October 22, 2021 By meerasub Leave a Comment

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…

Read the rest here.

Take Back What the Devil Stole

December 12, 2020 By meerasub Leave a Comment

Life leads you, one thing to another, one project to another, one person to another.

While I was a Knight Science Journalism fellow at MIT in 2016, I took a photography class with B.D. Colen. I was trying to hone a lifelong passion of taking photographs into something more skilled than just setting the aperture. He pushed us to take brazen photos of strangers on the street, and create a 24-hour time capsule of our lives (the only photos we would be able to look at for the rest of our lives when we were shot into space). We had to get dozens of good shots with the restriction that our subject and our own feet could not move at all once planted (thanks, Lauren Whaley!). He had us document the 2016 presidential election as it unfolded, imploded, and he documented me the morning after the election, when we bagged classwork to watch Hillary Clinton’s concession speech (remember those?) during class. [Read more…]

United in Change

December 16, 2019 By meerasub Leave a Comment

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.

life large & small in Sewanee

July 9, 2017 By meerasub 2 Comments

This is my last Sunday in Sewanee. I fell asleep to the deafening sound of cicadas, a thrumming from the upper branches of the trees that surround the house. In spite of stories of escaped convicts, I can’t help but keep the sliding doors open so I can hear the sound. The land is alive with the cacophony. Bring it on. The more there is, the merrier I am. It was the brilliance behind Rachel Carson’s book title. Two words. No rambling subtitle telling all. Just two words, three syllables, that spoke volumes: Silent Spring. Give me noise from the natural world. Remind me, unceasingly, that there is life. Keep the silence at bay.

I’ve just finished reading [Read more…]

to the Commons & beyond: Women’s March for America

January 22, 2017 By meerasub Leave a Comment

On Friday, Donald J. Trump was sworn into office as America’s 45th president. Websites were wiped clean of mentions of climate change and the country tumbled officially into the realm of #AlternativeFacts. For journalists, and citizens, the operative word going forward is “vigilance.”

On Saturday, upwards of 1.5 million people took to the streets around the country and world in solidarity with Americans who support human rights, equality, science, access to health care, and real facts (over alternative ones).

The Women’s March on Washington had grown into a national and international tidal wave of action. I was in Boston where the Women’s March for America was anticipating a crowd of about 80,000. On the T ride toward the Boston Commons, an ever-growing wave of women (and men) donning pink pussyhats boarded while more rode bikes across the Longfellow Bridge with protest signs lashed to their baskets, and it began to seem like there might be more in attendance than expected. Many more. Many many more. As Boston Commons filled and cell phone service crashed, there were speeches by Mayor Marty Walsh, Senator Elizabeth Warren, and the Reverend Mariama White-Hammond.

By the time the crowd was to make its one-mile loop for the march, the only possible movement was a slow-mo shuffle. It took hours for everyone to make their way peacefully through the streets. They chanted “This is what democracy looks like!” and sang out Fiona Apple’s “We don’t want you tiny hands anywhere near my underpants!” I saw a little girl belting out “My body! My choice!” and a lone man with a severe face holding a poster: “Trump. Make America Great Again.” Passerbys ignored him.

By this morning, city officials estimated there were at least 125,000 people. [UPDATE: Make that 175,000.]

Inching through the masses, camera in hand, here’s a selection of photos I took during what felt like an historic day:

[envira-gallery id=”3898″]

#VQRTrueStory

December 8, 2015 By meerasub Leave a Comment

Last year, at the Boston University Narrative Arc conference (one of my favorite of these journo gatherings), Jeff Sharlet, Neil Shea & Darcy Courteu sat on a stage in front of a not-so-large audience, talking about an Instagram revolution. They were not looking to share food porn, nor adorable pictures of themselves or their offspring or their feline companions. They were journalists who observe their world, and whose work can sometimes take them to distant worlds (whether Iraq in midday or a New England Dunkin Donuts at 3 am), and they watch with a close eye. They listen with a close ear. But what to do with these stories, how to share the stories of the lives, loves, losses they encountered? Answer: iPhone camera. Visceral quick writing. Way more characters than Twitter allows. All the stuff that doesn’t fit into the story you were sent to get. I was inspired, but not quite to action. Til now. Happy to jump onto Jeff & Neil’s platform and with the help of editor Paul Reyes over at Virginia Quarterly Review (one of my favorite publications: solid, serious and sumptuous all), kick off ‪#‎VQRTrueStory‬.

My week takes you to the cotton fields of Punjab, her hand upon mine. Buries your nose in live soil and let’s you feel the heat of a wood fire, the smoke in your lungs. It sets you at the feet of a girl in Bihar, who is reaching, reaching up.

Here’s the whole series in VQR.

We’re recruiting.