Photos from the banks of the Ganges River here.
must india ravage to rise?
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?
going underground
I allowed way too much time for my journey, sure I’d get lost or confused along the way. I wanted to avoid a repeat of last night’s sweaty slow slog in a taxi, stuck in bristling traffic, so why not try the Delhi Metro? I’d only been on once before, a few years ago, when the five-line system was still expanding rapidly across the city. Online, the interactive map helped me figure out where to go, and that my journey would cost 19 Rupees (less than 50 cents). I headed out, and found overhead walkways to get me across the busy main street of Lajpat Nagar, no line to get my token, a quick pass through security, following the cues as everyone tossed their purses and backpacks through the x-ray machine and stepped through the metal detector. A woman in a sari additionally swiped me down with hands and wand. I barely had to break my stride to follow huge signs in Hindi and English leading me where I wanted to go. A broad clean platform had a sign perched above it, telling me it would be 4 minutes til my train arrived.
My friend Rashmi Sadana wrote an ethnography of the Delhi Metro, after she approached it the way one would a foreign land, studying it as its framework was being placed within the existing cityscape. [Read more…]
a nighttime dance
It’s late in the evening and I return with my friend in her car, driving through the night streets of Delhi. The congestion of the daytime, or even the evening not so long ago, are gone, and the action consolidates around stoplights. At a red light we stop, and a man wipes a rag over our windshield as my friend waves him away. He steps in front of the car, arms up, as another vender selling colorful whirligigs atop sticks passes behind him, bonks him playfully on the head with one of the whirligigs and continues on. To our left, I see a shadow of a woman from the corner of my eye, holding a baby in her arms, just on the other side of my rolled up window. I’ll always wrestle with these moments of naked asking, of naked refusal. [Read more…]
thank you, sej/fej!
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 disasterTara 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 VegasBarbara 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 EnglandErica Peterson
Louisville, KY
$3,500 for air-testing expenses to support reporting for a radio series about industrial pollution in Louisville, KentuckyMeera Subramanian
West Barnstable, MA
$3,050 for travel expenses to produce articles, and chapters for a book, about sustainable growth and development in IndiaTo 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 member spotlight
Huzzah! Thanks goes out to the Society of Environmental Journalists for featuring me on their member spotlight.
sej outstanding feature story
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
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
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
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.”
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