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Beyond the Promise of Plastic

July 1, 2022 By meerasub Leave a Comment

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.

The Nature of Plastics

If you’re not already familiar with the organization Beyond Plastics, I encourage you to visit their website, sign up for their email list, or follow them on social media at Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.

Filed Under: Anthropocene, events, journalism, Orion, plastics, readings, video Tagged With: Amy Brady, Beyond Plastics, David Farrier, Judith Enck, plastics, Rebecca Altman

Letter to a Stranger

May 28, 2022 By meerasub Leave a Comment

Book cover of Letter to a StrangerIt began in 2013 as a question posed by Off Assignment: Who haunts you? It’s a brilliant premise (and excellent writing prompt): write a letter to someone, anyone, who has stayed with you. I wrote about a man I met in southern India, who spoke to me of dancing cobras.

The stories amassed and writer Colleen Kinder decided to collect them into an anthology. Letter to a Stranger: Essays to the Ones Who Haunt Us came out this spring from Algonquin. Pieces by Lauren Groff, Leslie Jamison, Pico Iyer, Lia Purpura, Lavinia Spalding (who led me to Off Assignment so long back!), Irina Reyn and so many others each tell a story that is short, precise and aching in some deeply human way.

Here are a few links to some of the goodness that emerged around publication:

What had brought you to Auroville? I came because I still sought utopia.

  • Publisher’s Weekly review
  • A nice mention in Shondaland.
  • A lengthy piece in the LA Times. 
  • Lithub featured an event at Greenlight Books on their Virtual Book Channel.
  • Featured on the Frommer’s podcast 
  • A few hot minutes on “What’s the Story” with Joy Lazendorfer
  • And the very last Letter to a Stranger event, hosted by the L.A. Times Book Club

And here’s a video of an event I did with Book Passage in San Francisco  with Colleen Kinder, Lavinia Spalding, Akemi Johnson, Faith Adiele, Emmanuel Iduma, and Anna Vodicka:

Filed Under: anthologies, events, readings

The New Nature of Plastic

February 8, 2021 By meerasub Leave a Comment

Join me for a talk at University of Arizona this Wednesday! I’ll be exploring plastics, boundaries, and monstrous ecologies and reading a bit from a forthcoming Orion piece.

Wednesday, February 10, 2021

7:00 pm MT (9:00 pm ET)

Zoom: https://arizona.zoom.us/my/joelajacobs

 

Filed Under: events, readings Tagged With: Arizona, cape cod, conservation, plastics, pollution environment, readings, water

Art and Urgency: Journalism in the Post-Truth Era

October 29, 2020 By meerasub Leave a Comment

<<SCROLL DOWN TO WATCH A REPLAY>>
It was such a pleasure talking about writing with this incredible group of people. Jeff has long served as a mentor to me, since I studied under him at NYU, and Paul is one of the best editors I know. Getting a chance to step inside Alex and Alexis’s minds to see how they think about their incredible stories was equally inspiring. Have a listen with the link below…
~Meera
MacDowell Journalism Panel Examines the Fragility of Facts and Urgency of Art in a Post-Truth Era. Virginia Quarterly Review Editor Paul Reyes will moderate a discussion with prominent journalists Alex Marzano-Lesnevich, Meera Subramanian, Alexis Okeowo, and Jeff Sharlet.A virtual panel discussion among five award-winning journalists titled “Art and Urgency: Journalism in the Post-Truth Era” took place here on October 26, 2020 at 7 p.m. It examined the importance of solid news reporting and why making art is more important today than ever. The discussion, led by Virginia Quarterly Review Editor and MacDowell board member Paul Reyes, looked into the fragile position of news media at a time when a growing portion of the populace gets its news from suspect sources.“In a media landscape where facts are pliable, where the news has become a hall of mirrors,” said Reyes, “it’s important to appreciate how literary and narrative journalism—which are at the heart of what MacDowell supports—are able to cut through the noise in order to carve out the truth, offering a visceral clarity to the reading public.”Reyes was joined by The Fact of a Body author Alex Marzano-Lesnevich; journalist Meera Subramanian, whose book A River Runs Again: India’s Natural World in Crisis from the Barren Cliffs of Rajasthan to the Farmlands of Karnataka, was a finalist for the Orion Book Award; PEN Open Book Award-winner and writer for The New Yorker and The New York Times Magazine Alexis Okeowo; and bestseller and Virginia Quarterly Review Editor at Large Jeff Sharlet whose latest book This Brilliant Darkness: A Book of Strangers, is a deep, genre-bending immersion into the lives of everyday citizens.

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

Filed Under: events, InsideClimate News, journalism, readings, video Tagged With: craft, journalism, MacDowell, memoir, truth, VQR

(Cancelled) New Imaginings: Storytelling, Science & Activism

February 22, 2020 By meerasub Leave a Comment

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.

Filed Under: climate change, events, News, readings, teaching Tagged With: climate change, ecology, event, forest, Princeton University, Richard Powers, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Tim Ingalsbee

Sewanee School of Letters reading & conversation

June 10, 2019 By meerasub Leave a Comment

It’s good to be back on the Mountain. Another round of teaching Creative Nonfiction at Sewanee School of Letters, up here on the Cumberland Plateau. If you find yourself nearby, I invite you to  join me for an event this week. I’ll be reading and then having a conversation with School of Letters Interim Director John Gatta. Here are the details:

June 12
4:30 pm
Gailor Auditorium
735 University Ave., Sewanee, TN
Reception following in Gailor Atrium.
Co-sponsored with the Friends of duPont Library

More info here.

Filed Under: events, readings Tagged With: event, reading, School of Letters, Sewanee, Tennessee

Women’s Health & The Environment: Going Up In Smoke

April 11, 2017 By meerasub Leave a Comment

Tomorrow I’ll be heading to the heartland for University of Iowa’s Global Forum to talk cookstoves. With people from a variety of backgrounds — anthropology, engineering, economics, gender studies, journalism, non-profits and more — we’ll discuss the troubling persistence of harm from biomass cookstoves used by three billion people around the world. This multidisciplinary approach seems like a good step away from thinking about this as a purely an engineering problem, or an economic problem, or a development problem. It’s all those things and a whole lot of other messy humanness. It’s what I explored in my book, A River Runs Again and this piece for Nature. The event is free and open to the public.

Filed Under: A River Runs Again, News, readings, travels Tagged With: cookstove, events, fire, health, Iowa, women

upcoming talks: MIT, BU & Harvard

February 2, 2017 By meerasub Leave a Comment

             

Eco Swaraj: Can India’s Model of the Micro Transform Development for the 21st Century?

It’s been a year and half since A River Runs Again was published and my answer to the above question continues to morph. If you’re in the Cambridge, Massachusetts area in the next couple of months, you’ll have a chance to join me as I think out loud about what I found while researching the book over three years and what recent world events make me think now. (You can read a little more on that at the KSJ blog post, here.)

e4Dev student group of the MIT Energy Initiative (MITei)
Tuesday, February 7, 2017
5:30 pm – 6:30 pm
MIT, Building E18, Room 304
50 Ames Street, Cambridge MA
You can find more information and RSVP here. 

Harvard STS Circle
Monday, March 27, 2017
12:15 pm – 2:00 pm
Harvard University, K262, Bowie-Vernon Room, CGIS
1737 Cambridge Street, Cambridge, MA
You can find more info and RSVP here. 
(To get a free sandwich, be sure to RSVP by Wednesday at 5:00 pm the week before!)

I’ll be showing lots of photographs and here’s a description of the talk:

In this exploration of life, loss and survival in modern-day India, Subramanian shares findings and photographs from her book, A River Runs Again: India’s Natural World in Crisis from the Barren Cliffs of Rajasthan to the Farmlands of Karnataka. Using the five elements (earth, water, fire, air, and ether) as a framework, she traveled across India to seek out the ordinary people and micro-enterprises determined to guide India into a more sustainable future. Could India be the perfect place to shift from an outdated model of the macro — big dams, industrial agriculture, nuclear power, all developed in the West — to a new model of the micro? Should it choose this path, India could create a sustainable model of development that could be implemented elsewhere, from industrializing China to electrifying sub-Saharan Africa, to drought-stricken America, with its crumbling infrastructure.

Spread the word!

AND….

…I’ll also be joining a great panel hosted by Boston University Institute for Sustainable Energy & Union of Concerned Scientists:

Science & Environment: A Journalist’s Perspective
Thursday, February 16, 2017
4:00 pm – 5: 30 pm
The Westin Copley Place Hotel
10 Huntington Avenue, Boston, MA 02116
Panel Discussion followed by cocktail reception and hors d’oeuvres.
This event is free & open-to-all.

Science and policy issues in energy and the environment have become a rich source of material for authors and journalists across the media spectrum.  In particular, both the science of climate change and the reportage on that science have both become heavily politicized, posing unique challenges for journalism.

This panel discussion explores the evolving role of authors and journalists who work in the energy and environment fields.  Each panelist will discuss the evolution of their professional experience and the challenges of writing and reporting in this field, especially in the wake of the 2016 presidential election.

Panelists

  • Joe Romm, acclaimed author, Center for American Progress Senior Fellow, and science advisor to the National Geographic series “Years of Living Dangerously” and named by Rolling Stone as one of “The 100 People Who Are Changing America”
  • Naomi Oreskes,  award-winning and widely-cited science historian and Harvard University professor, co-author of Merchants of Doubt  (2010, Bloomsberry Press) 
  • Seth Borenstein, award-winning national and international science writer for the Associated Press
  • Meera Subramanian, award-winning journalist and MIT Knight Science Journalism Fellow whose work has been published around the world and author of A River Runs Again: India’s Natural World in Crisis from the Barren Cliffs of Rajasthan to the Farmlands of Karnataka(2015, PublicAffairs)

Moderator

  • John Rogers, Senior Energy Analyst at the Union of Concerned Scientists, and co-author, Cooler Smarter: Practical Steps for Low-Carbon Living (2012, Island Press)

More info here.

Filed Under: A River Runs Again, readings Tagged With: A River Runs Again, book tour, Boston, Cambridge, energy, events, india, Knight Science Journalism, pollution environment, readings

Mumbai events

February 1, 2016 By meerasub Leave a Comment

2016.01.31-271
I’m in Mumbai this week speaking about Elemental India, as the air is thick with the residue of the Deonar dump fire, as we think about solutions.  Here are a few events:
 
  • Green Drinks at Bombay Connect Thurs. Feb. 4 at 7:30 pm
  • Mumbai Press Club Fri. Feb. 5 at 4:00 pm (journalists only)
  • Kala Ghoda Arts Festival Eco-Arts panel Sat. Feb. 6 at 6:45 pm, where I’m excited to explore the power of the arts in enacting ecological change. With Ravi Agarwal, Sonia Mehra Chawla and Arati Kumar-Rao.
See here for specific details, as well as information on other book events happening around India. 

Filed Under: elemental india, readings Tagged With: book tour, Elemental India, events, Mumbai, readings

UChicago Center/EPIC presentation: New Delhi

January 21, 2016 By meerasub Leave a Comment

Epic
I’ll be giving a full multimedia presentation about Elemental India at The Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago- India (EPIC India), an interdisciplinary research group at U.Chicago on energy and environmental policy and economics. Join us!
Thursday, January 28, 2016
6:00 PM
UChicago Center
DLF Capitol Point
Baba Kharak Singh Marg
New Delhi
RSVP here.

Related show

  • Author: Meera Subramanian
  • Tour: A River Runs Again / Elemental India Book Tour
  • Date: January 28, 2016
  • Time: 6:00pm
  • Venue: UChicago Center in Delhi
  • City: New Delhi
  • Address: DLF Capitol Point, Baba Kharak Singh Marg, Connaught Place
  • Country: India
  • Notes: Elemental India: The Natural World at a Time of Crisis and Opportunity. Multimedia presentation

Filed Under: A River Runs Again, elemental india, readings Tagged With: A River Runs Again, book tour, Elemental India, energy, events, india, readings

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