Climate talk in the coffee line

By Leave a Comment

I’m standing in line for an oatmilk latte at Audrey’s Coffee in South Kingston, Rhode Island. Stayed overnight after having a lovely talk with my friend and fellow author, Liz Rush at the Metcalf Spring Lecture. We’re both alums of the Metcalf Institute at University of Rhode Island, which brings together scientists and journalists, helps both learn from each other. If you’re a journalist, I highly recommend checking out their fellowship offerings. The room was full of students and faculty, including from a couple new programs: environmental education within the fold of the College of Education and an Environmental Arts & Humanities degree. (Can I go back to school, please?)

The coffee line’s not moving.

“It’s not usually this busy,” says the guy in front of me as we wait. I tell him it’s my first time here. He asks where I’m from. I tell him Cape Cod. Ask if he’s a local.

“I’m a squidder, but it’s not so good ‘cause of climate change…”

The first thing he says. I swear. (And I’m pretty sure he used the word “squidder”…is that right?)

“You do that at night, right?” I ask, and his face lights up with my tiny morsel of knowledge. I know this fact because of my Metcalf fellowship.

elaborate drawings of octopus and squid by Ernest Haeckel
‘Gamochonia,’ 1899, Adolf Giltsch after Ernest Haeckel © The Royal Society

He goes on to tell me his captain is seeing changes because of acidification, though he can’t elaborate. Admits it’s above his pay grade.

“It is my pay grade,” I say, laughing. “Climate journalist.” He laughs and we keep talking. He tells me about living in Narragansett. How it’s working class. But progressive. Surfers. Weed smokers. “No one voted for Trump,” he says. He can’t believe the new cluster of five million dollar houses that the new owners must have bought sight unseen, since they’re by the waste water plant and it stinks around there.

I ask him if he has to do other work since the squid’s not so great. Yeah, he says, his face boyish though he must be in his thirties. He’s started making fishing nets, but he misses being on the water.

The line moves forward. I learn his name is Joe and shake his hand before he picks up his coffee and leaves.

I tried to pursue a story about ocean acidification’s impact on shellfishing here in New England about eight years ago. Had a hard time finding scallopers or oysterfolks concerned about it, even as institutional reports warned of the impact.

So much has changed. Is changing. On the ground. In the water. I don’t know if squid are affected by ocean acidification. Maybe not, since it impacts shell production, making scallops and oysters much more at risk. But the fact that the warming climate is on the mind, and tongue, of a squidder from Narragansett named Joe, in line at a coffee shop, buoys me.

Here’s a bit more: “In New England, Climate Change Is Moving Fast. The Fishing Industry Is Not,’ co-authored by WBUR’s Barbara Moran, who I’ll be talking with….

A few upcoming events to share:

upcoming events

Other news about A Better World Is Possible: Global Youth Confront the Climate Crisis: hardcover copies have sold out and are heading for a second printing; featured in Book Riot’s spring roundup; conversation with ecoRI News; Q&A with Katy Doughty and me at Smash Pages; and Shelf Awareness featured our new official book trailer:

Journalists & writer friends, take note…

I’m reading/listening…

  • Anne Fadiman’s Ex Libris. S. and I read “Marrying Libraries” in bed one night. Something we still haven’t done. 🙂
  • This marvelous multimedia Guardian exploration of insect migration by Phoebe Weston, Ana Lucía González Paz, Prina Shah and Garry Blight.
  • In the in-betweens, I’m listening to The Loneliness of Sunny and Sonia by Kiran Desai. Don’t know where the story is leading but the descriptive powers of her writing are inspiring.
  • Joe at the coffee shop isn’t wrong. Nature covers a new study showing that climate change is speeding up, the rate of warming surging since 2015. These regular reports, along with the horror of wars upon humans and the environment within US borders and our great leaders carrying the decimation around the world, and I took a break to listen to…
  • …RadioLab’s Snail Sex Tape. I will be on the lookout for love darts this spring.

Coda…

Haven’t you always been curious about…

Welcome to the world, Spring Green

By Leave a Comment

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!

By Leave a Comment

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.

upcoming talks: MIT, BU & Harvard

By 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

Moderator

More info here.

Elemental India tour continuing south…

By Leave a Comment

 

2016.01.31-27

More events coming up for Elemental India. Specific details here. Hope to see you and do share the word with others you know in the following cities:

Pune:
• 11 Feb: Fergusson College
Chennai:
• 15 Feb: MIDS
• 16 Feb: IIT-M Research Park
Bengaluru:
• 19 Feb: Azim Premji University
• 19 Feb: IISc Centre for Ecological Sciences
Hyderabad:
• 26 Feb: University of Hyderabad

Mumbai events

By 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. 

UChicago Center/EPIC presentation: New Delhi

By 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

Related show

We Speak Up: Delhi event

By Leave a Comment

Feminism Beyond Boundaries 25Jan (1)“We Speak Up: Can a Generation of Indian Girls Find their Voice?” 

Another Delhi event coming up on Monday, when I’ll be speaking at Apne Aap‘s Feminism Beyond Boundaries series. I’ll be focusing on the fifth element in my book, in which I traveled to Bihar to explore population growth along with reproductive and sexual health training for teens. One girl transformed her life when she slipped a note into her father’s pocket….

Join me Monday, January 25, 2016 at the Oxford Bookstore Connaught Place (81, N Block, Connaught Place), 4:00 pm, to hear more.

Check out the Facebook event page here.

Related show

  • Author: Meera Subramanian
  • Tour: A River Runs Again / Elemental India Book Tour
  • Date: January 25, 2016
  • Time: 4:00pm
  • Venue: Oxford Bookstore
  • City: New Delhi
  • Address: N-81, Connaught Circus
  • Country: India
  • Notes: “We Speak Up: Can a Generation of Indian Girls Find their Voice?”

The Dogs: an excerpt

By Leave a Comment

IMG_7716

Bikaner carcass dump, Rajasthan. Photo by Meera Subramanian.

An excerpt from Elemental India / A River Runs Again, featured in The Caravan.

The vultures are gone, but the livestock carcasses they once consumed by the millions remain. Many are collected and deposited at carcass dumps like the one called Jorbeer on the outskirts of Bikaner, where dogs run wild amid an endless supply of food.

As I travelled around India, I kept hearing about aggressive dogs. Soon after I arrived in Bikaner, someone told me about two local girls, eight or nine years old, who were attacked by dogs at night, while they were sleeping. They were such easy prey. “They were hurt so badly, but not killed,” the man told me.

“The police came and took the dogs away, but I was so astonished…how can there be dogs like this?”

Read the rest at The Caravan. 

India Book Launch: New Delhi!

By Leave a Comment

ElementalIndiaLaunchINVITE

Join me, Delhiites! I’ve landed in India for the release of Elemental India: The Natural World in a Time of Crisis and Opportunity, and hope you’ll join me at one of the upcoming events. This is the official book launch, Tuesday, January 19th (tomorrow!) at The American Center at 6:00 pm. I’ll be in conversation with the wonderful Aseem Shrivastava, co-author of Churning the Earth.We’ll be touching upon faith in a seed, vanishing vultures, rivers reborn, choking air, population pressures, and the eternal question of hope. And there’ll be refreshments. Co-hosted by The American Center, HarperCollins India, USIEF (Fulbright) and Caravan magazine. Do come! Details here.

Update: Here’s a podcast of our conversation:

More events in the works for Mumbai, Bengaluru, Hyderabad, and Chennai over the next month. Find all details for confirmed events here.