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

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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.

the dancing cobras

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Every writer on assignment ends up accruing tales that don’t fit the purpose — but that are still worth telling. Such is the inspiration behind the new magazine Off Assignment, where “the detour is the story.” I just had the pleasure of writing a piece for their Letter to a Stranger column, inspired by Pico Iyer’s quote: “…And writing is, in the end, that oddest of anomalies: an intimate letter to a stranger.”

Mine tells of a candlelit evening in South Asia and a man with a half-century-old story to tell about when he saw the cobras dance…

Read (and listen to me read) it here.

Amazing things happen… (in the most polluted city on earth)

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#HelpDelhiBreathe protest. Photo by Meera Subramanian

#HelpDelhiBreathe protest. Photo by Meera Subramanian

In which I report for Vice magazine from New Delhi, which the WHO determined to be the most polluted big city on the planet. It sure feels like it. 

New Delhi is choking on its own air.

On January 1, India’s capital made an attempt to address its status as the world’s most polluted big city, according to the World Health Organization, by implementing a temporary “odd-even scheme” for automobile use. Private vehicles could only be driven on days that matched their plate number or risk a $30 fine. There were loads of exemptions, including the two-wheelers that dominate the roads, hybrids, and cars driven by VIPs or women (with no men in the vehicle). There were jokes about “men riding in the dickey” — the trunk — of cars and more serious conversations about immediately buying a second car to get around the restrictions. But after the 15-day plan came to end, overall sentiment was high as researchers rushed to declare it a success or failure.

Read the rest at Vice.

found on Haul Rd

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2015.07.27Pluck-68

Still, always, I am enraptured. The sense memory of a peregrine falcon remains in my hands though it has been years now since I held one. But this gyrfalcon is new to my skin, new to my eyes. I think she’s a she, larger than a female peregrine, and she is dead and frozen on the table in the trailer of Lab 1 at Toolik Field Station on the North Slope of Alaska. Dalton Highway, better known as Haul Road for the semis that carry supplies back and forth between inland Fairbanks and Deadhorse on the Arctic Ocean, parallels the spine of the pipeline through this part of Alaska. On that road, the gyrfalcon most likely made contact with some vehicle passing through. Toolik people found her on the side of the road, intact, limp, just a dollop of blood at the edge of her beak. I found her in the -80 freezer, clouds of coolness pooling at my feet when Seth, the Toolik naturalist, opened the double door and found the plastic bag with her remains. He sets her out on the table. Switches on the light. He lets me hold her, the weight hefty for the hollow-boned fighter. Ice crystals glaze her beak, sweep over her eyes, cinched shut. Her tail is long, barred with bands of smoky grey and and smudged tan, the striations of feathers running on the diagonal. Her head tucks in toward one rounded shoulder, a demure pose, cozy and shy and frozen in place like the permafrost that lies below this northern land. On a piece of paper in the bag are the details: “Found on Haul Road btwn Slope Mtn & OKs culverts 7.17.2015″

Life forms larger than a mosquito are few and far between here on the halo of the earth. Ground squirrels scrambling along the tundra underfoot and the arora borealis, a different type of life force, invisible but existent overhead, masked by the eternal daylight this time of year. There is a buzz with each wolf or grizzly sighting, a coveted moment of witnessing great bigness. The ground is alive with microorganisms, and bees hover around the purple glow of fireweed blooms that are hopeful that a seed might form before the killing freeze arrives. But today there is one less gyrfalcon flying through these wide open skies. Seth slips her back into the bag and returns her to the raptor morgue.

@toolik @Mblscience #eulogy #gyrfalcon #raptor #Alaska #truestoryshort

the pluck

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2015.07.27Pluck-79

About 35 years ago, when most ecologists were still musing about how we’d deal with the ice age that models then showed was on its way, young scientists Gus Shaver, Terry Chapin and John Hobbie set up camp on an old abandoned airstrip at Toolik Lake on the North Slope of Alaska. Scientists tinker and so when they gazed at this wild and beautiful yet nutrient-poor place, bereft of nitrogen and phosphorous found in the temperate regions of the globe, they wondered what might happen [Read more…]

fishscape on the kuparuk river

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At the Woods Hole portion of the MBL Logan Science Journalism fellowship, we worked with researcher Linda Deegan. Fishscape, one of her projects, is underway here at Toolik. She’s not here now, but I went out today with her research team as they collect data along the Kuparuk River, studying the impact of climate change on the Arctic grayling, a freshwater fish in the salmon family. The commute, via a Roberston-44 helicopter, was pretty thrilling. And, is it just me, or did the face of Jesus appear in the tundra around :30??

The ride was over much too quickly, and [Read more…]

getting my bearings straight

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2015.07.22Fairbanks-6

Strolling through Fairbanks, Alaska is the Chena River, all glassy and glorious beneath a sky miraculously scrubbed of smoke from the fires that clouded it a day before I arrived. A visit to Alaska has been a wish for quite a long time and it’s great to finally be here on my way to Toolik Field Station as a Logan science journalism Arctic fellow with the Marine Biological Lab (MBL).

The first part of the MBL fellowship took place [Read more…]

deadly dinners

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Cooking on an Envirofit improved cookstove. Photo by Meera Subramanian

Cooking on an Envirofit improved cookstove in Tamil Nadu. Photo by Meera Subramanian

I spent a good chunk of last winter stepping into women’s kitchens in rural India to see what was cooking. Rice. Rotis. Dal. Curries. But regardless of the meal, most rural homes were cooking over open fires. With the incredible support of a Fulbright-Nehru fellowship, I was working on a book about environmental stories across India, including doing research and reporting about what — if anything — was helping women move away from the polluting form of cooking with biomass. Today, the journal Nature published my piece that tells a little bit about what I found. Deadly Dinners (a heavy-handed but unfortunately devastatingly accurate title) begins:

After returning from her nine-and-a-half-hour shift as a security guard, Savita Satish Dadas begins plucking fenugreek leaves from their stems for dinner. She and her two children, along with three of their cousins, gather in a shed-like structure next to their house in the Satara District of Maharashtra, India. As goats and cows settle in for the night a few metres away, Dadas and the children sit down on a packed dirt floor around the family hearth.

Whisps of smoke rise up from their chulha, the Indian name given to a traditional cooking-stove fuelled by wood and other organic matter often gathered from the countryside. Dadas’s stove, like several of her neighbours’, is sculpted out of clay. But many make a rudimentary three-stone fire — a triangle of elevated points to support a pot — that humans have used for millennia. Dadas feeds roughly chopped logs into the stove and her hands shape moistened flour into bhakri bread, the rhythmic movement illuminated by the flickering flames.

With this simple daily act, Dadas shares a connection with more than one-third of the world’s population, the three billion people who depend on solid biomass fuels — such as wood, animal dung, agricultural waste and charcoal — or coal for their cooking needs.

[Read more…]

parting notes

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2014.02.08Pudu-154

Five months of a Fulbright-Nehru fellowship is coming to a close. Given that the fellowship involves both the US  and Indian governments, there was just a wee bit of paperwork. At. Every. Step. [Has anyone else ever known where I’ve slept each and every night?] As it all wraps up, there was a final report. Actually, two. A couple questions seemed worth sharing. [Read more…]