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.

The Nature of Plastics

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Artwork: Steve McPherson

 

EARLY IN 2004, a buoy was released into the waters off Argentina. Half of the buoy was dark and the other light, like a planet in relief. The buoy sailed east, accompanied by the vastness of the ocean and all the life it contains, the long-lived great humpback whales with their complex songs that carry for miles, and the short-lived Argentine shortfin squid. Along the way, many thousands of minuscule creatures were colonizing this new surface, which had appeared like a life raft in the open waters of the South Atlantic.

The researchers who’d dropped the buoy followed its movement in hopes of learning more about ocean currents than generations of science and sailing history had revealed. They watched the buoy float into the wide-open ocean between South America and Africa, those twin coastlines that struck me, as I gazed at them on the pull-down map in first grade, as two puzzle pieces that once linked. They surveilled its movements by GPS. Eighteen months later, the signal ceased. Silence from the satellites.

The buoy continued along the currents of the South Atlantic, free from surveillance, sheltered and shocked by sun and clouds and storms overhead. It was likely molded out of a thermoplastic polymer called acrylonitrile butadiene styrene, or ABS, which, like most plastics, was crafted from the extracted remains of long-ago life-forms. ABS was engineered in the lab to endure—rigid, resilient, capable of withstanding all that being let loose at sea may foist upon it.

All plastic begins in a factory. That much we know. But where it goes next remains poorly understood. Only 1 percent of the plastic released into the marine environment is accounted for, found on the surface and in the intestines of aquatic animals. The rest is a little harder to measure. Some presumably washes back ashore. An untold amount settles, sunk by the weight of its new passengers. (One study found four times more plastic fibers in the sediment of the deep-sea floor than on the surface of the ocean.)

And some, like the buoy, just keeps drifting along.

***

I have spent thirty years fixated on environmental issues, spawned during my own oceanic migration in the fall of 1989….

Read the rest at Orion Magazine.

Anger & Angels: Artist Edith Vonnegut Responds to Trump

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After President Trump’s inauguration in 2017, artist Edith Vonnegut was outraged. Her response? She embarked on a creative frenzy of artistic works, one a day, for the first 100 days (except on the days that the new president was playing golf), with a few pranks along the way.

Meanwhile, I was a Knight Science Journalism fellow at MIT, taking a class in short docs with Vivek Bald. Thanks to Edie for letting me follow her around, filming, learning as I went along.

Here’s her story.

preserve what’s left

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Photos by Meera Subramanian

Lord God, it’s good to be home. The sky over Cape Cod is slack and grey, coughing up sleety rain that crunches and slides underfoot, but still there is a surge of delight, leaving the comfortable wood fire after wrapping too many gifts for too many Christmas revelers and heading out to meet Edie Vonnegut at the underpass (underpants! I think every single time I pass under it…and giggle). I was responding to her text:

I need a turpentine helper. Hold my ladder? 20 minutes max. 

[Read more…]

Longreads Best of 2018 / Science & Technology

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So insanely honored to have one of my InsideClimate News Finding Middle Ground pieces mentioned in Longreads Best of 2018 list for science and technology stories. I’m still blushing, reading these words from…

Deborah Blum
Director of the Knight Science Journalism program at MIT and author of The Poison Squad.

They Know Seas Are Rising, but They’re Not Abandoning Their Beloved Cape Cod (Meera Subramanian, InsideClimate News)

For more than a year, Meera Subramanian has been traversing the country for InsideClimate News, creating a series of vivid and wonderfully balanced portraits of small communities wrestling with the havoc of climate change (whether they admit it or not). This one from October, focused on an increasingly flood-washed area called Blish Point, stands out for me. It’s a tapestry-like picture woven of relentlessly rising seas, threatened homes and businesses, the politics of climate change science, and pure, stubborn human reluctance to give up on a beloved way of coastal living.

Subramanian never raises her voice or treats any viewpoint with less than respect — although she occasionally deftly slides in the scientific arguments that counter climate denialism. She has an elegant way of making both people and place live on the page. The result is a compelling and compassionate narrative in which this one small, beautiful, vanishing strip of Massachusetts, perched on the edge of an encroaching ocean, becomes a microcosm for the much bigger story of change — and its reckoning — now being realized around the world.

Conversations Across America: Talking Climate Change with Conservative Voters

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As the InsideClimate News Finding Middle Ground series nears an end, I had a chance to speak with the lovely Heather Goldstone of WCAI’s Living Lab about some of the experiences I’ve had as I traveled across the country.

Click here to listen.

The seas are rising

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Barnstable Harbor, Massachusetts, during Nor’easter March 2018. By Meera Subramanian

Seventh piece from “Finding Middle Ground,” the series I’ve been working on for InsideClimate News about perceptions of climate change: 

“It flooded in early January, and then it happened again two or three months later,” says Matt Teague of Barnstable, Mass., about the slew of storms that hit Cape Cod in the winter of 2017. “We’re like, what are we doing here?” he says, opening his arms skyward.

It is now the peak of summer as I stand with Matt in the seaside community of Blish Point at the front door of the house he owns—a house that’s about to be demolished. Matt, 43, with a trim graying beard and a belt buckle in the shape of a fishhook, is the owner of REEF Design & Build, which works all across Cape Cod. He bought the house with his brother and father more than 10 years ago as an investment. Blish Point, an area where native fishermen once laid out their nets to dry, today contains a couple hundred homes nestled between the mouth of Barnstable Harbor and the verdant marsh of Maraspin Creek. Some of the homes are upscale; others are simple cottages. The Teague house, one of the simple cottages, was ruined by flooding: five major storms in the past three years alone have struck this area, and two of the four nor’easters last winter inundated the ground-level home.

Matt pushes his sunglasses atop his head, revealing a pale strip of untanned skin along his temple, as he stretches out his hand 2 feet above the door’s threshold to show me where the water rose to during the storms. Over his shoulder, a hungry excavator sits ready to begin its work….

Read the rest  of “They Know Seas Are Rising, but They’re Not Abandoning Their Beloved Cape Cod” here.

oyster season opening day

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It’s an annual ritual, this first day of the oystering season. Some falls I’ve been off traveling, but I’m home this time, and get off a phone meeting just in time for the approach to dead low tide at 2:42pm. The downpour of earlier has lifted though gusts of wind are still wrenching colors from the trees. No, stay, just a little longer….! But to everything there is a season, and the leaves must go, but the oysters are now ours to take. I gathered my half bucket in about 3 minutes, barely moving my feet, they were so plentiful. And then I played around with video. Have a look…

 

 

practice resurrection

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Home growing up and home now means inhabiting the edge dividing land and sea. We go there to eat sandwiches in the cab of the truck, sheltered from the icy wind that lifts the waters of Barnstable Harbor into whitecaps. Beyond the water, the dunes of Sandy Neck glisten white with snow, the Handy shack popping out in dark relief.  Before the first bite is taken, a flash of fur to the right. A fox, tiny, on the hunt, nose to snow, a few steps, another sniff, more steps, her footprints left behind in the layer of snow.

The markings join the other imprints of other creatures that have passed since the snow fell two nights ago, an extended exposure of all we never see.

She shifts to her right. She comes towards us, our truck gracing us a cloak of invisibility. She passes close by, and she’s gone.

It’s always a good time for Wendell Berry’s “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front,” but seeing her reminds me of it. A good reminder. A necessary refresher. I reread the whole thing, and I’d say you should too, but here’s the last bit:

Go with your love to the fields.

Lie down in the shade. Rest your head

in her lap. Swear allegiance

to what is nighest your thoughts.

As soon as the generals and the politicos

can predict the motions of your mind,

lose it. Leave it as a sign

to mark the false trail, the way

you didn’t go. Be like the fox

who makes more tracks than necessary,

some in the wrong direction.

Practice resurrection.

And I am humming “Ouroboros” by Casey Neill and focusing in on the word “practice,” an active word, ongoing, if there ever was one.

#CapeCod #fox #BarnstableHarbor #WendellBerry #poetry #winter #resist #persist