Every Day Is… Earth Day. Damn it.

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But, yes, today offers a moment for your consideration. Take a breath. Ah, the miracle of air. Look at a spring leaf unfurling out of seemingly nothing. Ah, the miracle of a life. Quench your thirst. (And covering the planet.) Ah, the miracle of water.

Take nothing for granted. Fight like f#@* for the preservation of the natural world, which is a fight for humans, sure, but also the million-trillion, give or take, other species of life forms that populate this one magnificent planet we all emerged from.

The past week has been full of too many good things to fit here. But some quick snapshots…

A climate movement grows in Brooklyn

Last Tuesday night in Brooklyn, we celebrated A Better World Is Possible: Global Youth Confront the Climate Crisis in the best possible way: co-author Danica Novgorodoff and I together in the same space at Greenlight Bookstore, where the idea of a collaboration on a graphic novel about youth climate activists took root way back in 2020. AND…we were joined by three of the four youth we feature in the book. It was beyond incredible to meet, in person, Shiv Soin of TREEage, Rebeca Sabnam, and Jamie Margolin of Zero Hour. We only wish Xiye Bastida of Re-Earth Initiative could have made it, too. They have all grown into fierce young adults, working in all different ways to change the world for the better, and I was deeply moved by hearing their latest news, from struggles to sweet victories. And huge thanks to everyone that came out to pack the room and swiftly sell out books.

Selling out, in the good way

Speaking of, we are delighted to share that A Better World Is Possible is now heading into its second (paperback) printing and third (hardcover) printing!!! Help us keep the momentum going by:

✅ Giving us a review on Goodreads or (if you must be there) Amazon

✅ Bumping up the 5-star reviews with a 👍🏽

✅ Asking your local library or indie bookstore to get a copy

✅ Sharing news of the book on socials, where you can also follow us (Insta tags @meerasub and @ABetterWorldtheBook and LinkedIn) and privately with friends

✅ Considering it for your next book club

✅ Suggesting the book for fall coursework for schools, ages 12+. We’ve got a discussion guide and are happy to send desk copies to interested educators for their consideration

✅ And of course, buying a copy for yourself and every young person, friend, neighbor’s friend, family member, frenemy, and human you know who likes a liveable planet.

More live events

Danica’s finished up with event for the moment, but you can still find me out and about…

May 13, 2026: Stories from a Warming World
6:00 – 8:30 pm ET | WBUR CitySpace 890 Commonwealth Ave. Boston, MA
with Meera & others from MISI (not exactly a book event, but all about climate)

May 14, 2026: Barrington Land Conservation Trust
7:00 pm ET | 281 County Road, Barrington, RI

May 30, 2025: WBUR Festival
Time TBD | WBUR CitySpace 890 Commonwealth Ave. Boston, MA
Meera with musician Mark Erelli

July 25, 2026: YA Midwest
Naperville, IL (more info to come)

June 20, 2026: Melba’s
1525 Elysian Fields Ave, New Orleans, LA

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Enviro journalists unite

And this past weekend, I was in Chicago for my—I’ve lost count—tenth(?) Society of Environmental Journalists conference. I’ve been a part of this incredible organization for twenty years and marvel at its incarnations, even as the struggles of environmental journalists mount.

The Uproot Project has infused new energy into the gatherings, and panels directly addressed the mental health of those reporting from the frontlines of the climate crisis, which Covering Climate Now has assessed in a new report: “A Burning House, A Quiet Media, A Silenced Majority.” Here’s a discussion about it, live from the conference:

And it was so lovely to be a part of the Author Program along with Joseph Lee, an Aquinnah Wampanoag and author of Nothing More of This Land: Community, Power, and the Search for Indigenous Identity and Adam Mahoney, co-author with Judith Enck of The Problem with Plastic. Cameron Oglesby was a lovey moderator.

Stay the course, friends. Because—repeat after me—every day is…

Photo: NASA

Journalists & writer friends, take note…

  • NASW is again offering its virtual summer mentoring program for graduate and undergraduate students, which will run from June 3 to July 29. Sign up to participate or volunteer to help with mentoring and editing here. Deadline: May 1
  • Applications are open for a new round of NASW Peggy Girshman Idea Grants. Individuals or groups are invited to apply for grants of up to $10,000 to support projects and programs that will help science writers in their professional lives and benefit the field of science writing. Deadline: May 15
  • Open call for the Pulitzer Center’s Rainforest Investigations Network Fellowships. In its sixth year, the network will select a new cohort of journalists to receive financial and editorial support to investigate the most pressing issues driving deforestation in the Amazon, Congo Basin, and Southeast Asia. Deadline: May 22

Green Fondo Berkshires 2026

  • I’m taking part in Climate Ride’s fundraising challenge as part of Team Eco.Cyclers, hoping to raise $1,000 by Sunday! Can you help? Whether you can give $20 or $100, your donation has real impact towards positive climate solutions. Plus, if you donate this week, you’ll be entered into a drawing for a reusable mug from Climate Ride as a thank you! Donate here by April 26…or really anytime. 🚴🏼 🚴🏼 🚴🏼

Coda…

Yes, it can kinda seem like a dumpster fire out there. Find beauty anyway.

Spanish lessons in small-town survival

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Wind turbines in the Spanish countryside near Higueruela

Last year, I spent three months on a FRONTIERS science journalism fellowship in Spain trying to understand if the clean energy transition could work better for biodiversity, people and place. I spent the first part of my time based at the Basque Center of Climate Change (BC3) in Bilbao, and the rest traveling to wind and solar farms around the country.

The question was becoming urgent. In 2023, the world’s annual renewable capacity increased by almost 50% to over 500 gigawatts. Current climate goals have that figure tripling by 2030. As a science journalist who has covered environmental issues for twenty years, I recognize both the need to quickly scale up renewables to meet the climate crisis and the risk of treating the clean energy transition as a technological problem alone. In order to succeed, mega renewable energy projects must address local concerns—ecological, cultural and economic—or risk public backlash that threatens to derail efforts. I realized this while standing with South Indian farmers who’d lost their land to a solar farm the size of Manhattan, reporting for a New Yorker feature. With global renewable energy buildout happening now, projects (and their impacts) will be in place for decades, so these controversial projects must get it right from the start. Turbines that don’t kill birds. Solar that doesn’t steal agricultural land and disproportionately hurt women. Power that is affordable. Is that possible?

The Atlantic just published my piece that emerged from that reporting and researching. It begins…

Go looking for wind farms in Spain, and you might quickly end up in Castilla–La Mancha, a region southeast of Madrid. This is the place where Don Quixote, Miquel de Cervantes’s delusional Man of La Mancha, attacked small wooden windmills he perceived as fierce giants and where today giant wind turbines have become an embedded part of the landscape.

There, I met Mayor Isabel Martínez Arnedo, who has run the town of Higueruela since 2019. The region’s distinctive wind whipped her dark curls as she stepped out of her car. “Look!” she said in Spanish. “Windmills, windmills, windmills.”

Read the full piece here.

I hope to share some more stories from my time in Spain here when time allows. Which isn’t now, but hopefully someday. But I did sit down upon a Moorish ruin on a ridge lined with wind turbines that I write about in the Atlantic piece, in the town of Higueruela, at the end of all that exploration. Here’s a video I recorded of me thinking through what I had experienced. Sorry for the whistling of the audio, and the wild hair, but well, wind. (whooosh!)

And for the science journalists out there, applications for the fourth round of the FRONTIERS Science Journalism Residency Programme are now being accepted. All levels of experience can apply.

A Better World Book Tour

How you can help!

  • If you’ve ordered a copy of A Better World Is Possible, first, THANK YOU. We hope you are enjoying it. Both Danica and I are hearing so many good things from people and reviewers. Here are ways you can help us get the word out:
  • Share kind words on Goodreads. Or on Amazon. Or wherever you can leave a review. Those stars are super helpful.
  • Take a picture of yourself with the book and tag us or invite the book & me to collaborate on the post! Here are our socials:
    • Meera Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/meerasub/
    • ABWIP Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ABetterWorldTheBook/
    • Meera Instagram: @meerasub
    • ABWIP Instagram: @abetterworldthebook
    • Meera Bluesky: @meerasub.bsky.social
    • ABWIP Bluesky: @abetterworldbook.bsky.social
    • Meera LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/journomeerasub/
    • ABWIP LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/abetterworldthebook/
  • Follow us on any of those sites!
  • Also tag us if you want to share images that show how the world could be a better place if there were more of X.
  • Ask your local library to buy a copy.
  • Comment or DM me. I’d love to hear how you’re responding to the book. 🙂

More press:

Coda…

A vibrant field covered in pink and yellow wildflowers stretches toward distant blue mountains under a clear sky.
Elliot McGucken via PetaPixel

Photographer drove to Death Valley to capture exquisite images of a superbloom in Death Valley. If you are hungry for color and an riot of life and flower sex, check out more of his images here.

Keep blooming, everyone.

Welcome to the world, Spring Green

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I took a bath last night, immersed in hot water and guilt, listening to Louis Armstrong and wishing the world was a kinder place. That there were fewer strongmen running the (shit)show. That fewer schoolchildren were being bombed. That I didn’t feel as powerless as I do. Louis’ voice filled the steamy room. “The colors of the rainbow, so pretty in the sky….” How, I wondered, can we allow space for moments of beauty and calm when there is so much horror in the world?

When did “A Wonderful World” come to be? When can an artist feel like they have the right to lavish in the wonder, when every age brings its traumas? I looked it up this morning. Apparently, Bob Thiele, (who wrote songs under the pseudonym George Douglas), co-wrote the song with George Weiss in the tumultuous mid-1960s. Thiele wrote about his inspiration: “[I]n the mid-1960s during the deepening national traumas of the Kennedy assassination, Vietnam, racial strife, and turmoil everywhere, my co-writer George David Weiss and I had an idea to write a ‘different’ song specifically for Louis Armstrong that would be called ‘What a Wonderful World.’”

You nurture the light when it’s darkest. You aim to be “different” than the gestalt of all that is around you. It’s a way to keep something alive.

This is just about right, and a way in to share with you news of a new album, Spring Green by Mark Erelli, that makes room for recognizing the goodness of the world and people without shying away from the realities of the times in which we live. I am both friend and fan of the this talented singer-songwriter. Last summer, he invited me to write the introduction to the liner notes of his fourteenth solo album, Spring Green. Oh, yes. Yes and yes. I had a chance last summer to listen to it on repeat. Now you have a chance, too. It’s out today, and you can find it on Bandcamp.

Get the whole album so you revel in his music, his songwriting. You can also read all of what I said, but here are some snippets, which Mark put on these lovely graphics that brighten this drizzly, still snowy Cape Cod day…

I hope you’ll buy this album (and anything from his backlist, which is all good), and see if his tour is coming to somewhere near you. His shows will sustain you, and his music does, too. I’ll leave you with a line from Spring Green:

“Days when the sky is gray – the horizon made less colorful,
just wait and you’ll see – how the world can be so wonderful”

Journalists & writer friends, take note…

  • A few years back, my husband, Steve Prothero, and I ran the Religion & Environment Story Project (on hiatus now), and had the great pleasure of spending time with RESP fellow Nina St. Pierre. She wrote an incredible memoir Love is a Burning Thing that deftly explores growing up with a mother both mystical and mad in a world where neither is accepted. Now, you have a chance to study writing with her as she teaches On Writing the Mystical, this spring, in Brooklyn. Sign up now!

And from the Department of Good News…

  • A Better World Is Possible: Global Youth Confront the Climate Crisis is now out in the wild. Thanks to Sturgis Library in Barnstable, MA and Titcomb’s Bookshop for hosting the kickoff event. (Danica had her’s at Carmichael’s in Louisville.) And thanks to all who came out in the cold rain to share the celebration. You can learn more and get your copy here.
  • Orion magazine featured an excerpt from A Better World, one of the interludes that are sprinkled throughout the story of the fourth youth climate activists that frame the book and offer a chance to learn more about the impacts of the climate crisis.
  • Danica and I had a lovely conversation with Itto and Mekiya Outini about creativity and collaboration on the DateKeepers podcast. Have a listen here. More podcasts are coming soon.
  • More book tour events here. Catch Danica or me, or—on April 14 in Brooklyn— both of us along with two of the youth featured in the book!

I’m reading…

  • Birds aren’t doing well, populations declining faster and faster, especially in agricultural areas. (It’s part of why I try to eat organic, not just for my body but other bodies, too.) So these lines from The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann, which I am reading very slowly, leapt out: “Magnificent vistas opened onto regions toward which they were slowly climbing, a word of ineffable, phantasmagoric Alpine peaks, soon lost again to awestruck eyes as the tracks took another curve. Hans Castrop thought about how he had left the hardwood forests far below him, and songbirds, too, he presumed; and the idea that such things could cease, the sense of a world made poorer without them, brought on a slight attack of dizziness and nausea, and he covered his eyes with his hand for a second or two. This passed.”
  • I’ve been on Cape Cod for fifteen years now, but am still learning so much about its deep history. Nothing More of This Land by Joseph Lee is taking me into the lives of the Wampanoag of Martha’s Vineyard and indigenous people far beyond this corner of the world.
  • If you haven’t picked up Neil Shea’s wonderful book Frostlines (you should), here’s a taste in his National Geographic piece “The Vikings who vanished.”

Coda…

The turkeys are brightening up with their breeding colors. They’re also getting closer…

happy book birthday!

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Woohoo! A Better World Is Possible: Global Youth Confront the Climate Crisis, my new graphic novel made in collaboration with Danica Novgorodoff, is OUT TODAY!

I hope you’ll order your copy of the book and/or come to one of our book release events:

TONIGHT! March 3, 2026: Titcomb’s Bookshop & Sturgis Library
5:30 pm ET | 3090 Main Street, Barnstable, MA
with Meera

March 5, 2026: Carmichael’s Bookstore
7:00 pm ET | 2720 Frankfort Avenue, Louisville, KY
Danica in conversation with Festival of Faiths Program Manager
Sally Evans & climate journalist Lyndsey Gilpin

April 2, 2026: All Peoples Unitarian Universalist Congregation
7:00 pm ET | 4936 Brownsboro Rd, Louisville, KY
Danica at All Peoples Justice Center book event on religion & climate change

April 2, 2026: University of Rhode Island Metcalf Institute
Reception at 5:30 pm ET, followed by conversation at 6:00 pm | Hope Room, URI Welcome Center, Kingston, RI
Meera in conversation with author Elizabeth Rush

April 8, 2026: MassEnergize Community Climate Leaders Annual Conference
8:00 am – 5:00 pm ET | Bentley University, 175 Forest Street, Waltham, MA
with Meera

April 14, 2026: Greenlight Bookstore
7:30 pm ET | 686 Fulton Street, Brooklyn, NY
Danica & Meera and special guests, Jamie Margolin & Shiv Soin, youth climate activists featured in book

April 18, 2026: Society of Environmental Journalists Conference
3:15 pm CT | 725 W Roosevelt Rd, Chicago, IL
Meera part of author program along with Joseph Lee & others.

See the full list of events here

(SLIGHT) SPOILER ALERT: this book ends with a view of the Grand Canyon, and the idea that while we are each as small as individual raindrops, we can come together in community to form a river—a movement, the climate movement—with immense power and agency.

Here were my first scribblings as that scene came together in my head…

Both Danica and I have made it to the Grand Canyon since we crafted that scene. To enter such deep geologic time, literally descending through millions of years of rock and earth, is to gain perspective.

Like Danica experienced, too, I was in such awe of the landscape and felt so much renewed passion to protect the natural world, which is the only world we have. School Library Journal’s review of A Better World states:

“This title not only answers the question, ‘how can I help?’ but also offers readers a glimmer of hope… This brilliantly ­illustrated ­graphic novel explores the actual crisis, as research shows, the world is facing—climate change.

By ­allowing readers to see the interconnectedness of the issues and how typical teenagers took small actions to build community and organize advocacy events on behalf of protecting our world, it is easy to understand the following quote: ‘Every single action is a raindrop. They flow together, becoming a force unstoppable as that of ­gravity. Remember that water has the power to cut through rock.’

This would be a powerful addition to any ­collection.”

I hope you will join us—in the movement, at a book event, in standing against inaction and despair, in building hope.

“Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.” —Arundhati Roy

Thank you to the everyone who helped breathe this book into life. The four powerful youth who shared their stories with us (Xiye Bastida, Jamie Margolin, Rebeca Sabnam & Shiv Soin). The whole team at First Second Books (Robyn Chapman, Benjamin A. Wilgus, Michael Moccio, Sunny Lee, Mark Siegel, Morgan Rath, & so many others). Fact-checkers (Amy Westervelt, Susan Joy Hassol, Lucy Prothero, & Rose Andreatta). And Stephen Prothero, who was there every step of the way. And finally to the readers, past, present and future. Everything is possible.

Love,
Meera

Coda….

Also, I saw the lunar eclipse this morning, bundled up in 18-degree weather, a warm coffee my husband fixed for me in my hand and his body behind me to keep me warm as we watched the nearly full moon vanish, our earth’s shadow cast across the only true earth satellite. There are dark forces at play in the world. Seek out the light and people to nurture it with. Onwards, friends.