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The Nature of Plastics

March 5, 2021 By meerasub Leave a Comment

 

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.

Filed Under: Anthropocene, climate change, journalism, Orion Tagged With: anthropocene, Art, cape cod, lego, ocean, Orion, plastics, sea

The New Nature of Plastic

February 8, 2021 By meerasub Leave a Comment

Join me for a talk at University of Arizona this Wednesday! I’ll be exploring plastics, boundaries, and monstrous ecologies and reading a bit from a forthcoming Orion piece.

Wednesday, February 10, 2021

7:00 pm MT (9:00 pm ET)

Zoom: https://arizona.zoom.us/my/joelajacobs

 

Filed Under: events, readings Tagged With: Arizona, cape cod, conservation, plastics, pollution environment, readings, water

Anger & Angels: Artist Edith Vonnegut Responds to Trump

December 19, 2020 By meerasub Leave a Comment

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.

Filed Under: dissent, Knight Science Journalism, video Tagged With: Art, cape cod, Edith Vonnegut, Knight Science Journalism, Trump

preserve what’s left

December 20, 2019 By meerasub Leave a Comment

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…]

Filed Under: just another day Tagged With: Art, cape cod, Edie Vonnegut, mural

Longreads Best of 2018 / Science & Technology

December 14, 2018 By meerasub Leave a Comment

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.

Filed Under: awards, climate change, InsideClimate News, journalism, Knight Science Journalism Tagged With: Best Of, cape cod, Longreads, sea level rise

Conversations Across America: Talking Climate Change with Conservative Voters

November 7, 2018 By meerasub Leave a Comment

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.

Filed Under: audio, climate change, InsideClimate News, journalism Tagged With: cape cod, climate change, InsideClimate News, interview, Montana, North Dakota, politics, radio, Texas, WCAI

The seas are rising

November 5, 2018 By meerasub Leave a Comment

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.

Filed Under: climate change, InsideClimate News Tagged With: Barnstable, Blish Point, building, cape cod, flood, Massachusetts, Millway, politics, regulations, sea level rise, storm surge

oyster season opening day

November 4, 2018 By meerasub Leave a Comment

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…

 

 

Filed Under: just another day, video Tagged With: Barnstable Harbor, cape cod, food, gathering, oyster

practice resurrection

February 11, 2017 By meerasub Leave a Comment

 

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

Filed Under: just another day Tagged With: Barnstable Harbor, cape cod, fox, poetry, Wendell Berry, winter

falmouth public library

September 10, 2015 By meerasub Leave a Comment

Falmouth

Falmouth Public Library is a stately building on sweet little Main Street in Falmouth, the corner of the Cape near Woods Hole, littered with PhDs and farmer’s markets and ferries bound for the islands. There was a nice turnout, and it was great to meet my doppleganger, a woman whose mother had come from India around the same time as mine and also married a fair-skinned American. Good conversations, during the Q&A, and after. A Punjabi man arrived late, straight from his English classes, and he told me about how he once worked for the water department there. “There is no good water in Punjab,” he said to me, shaking his head. “No good water.”

Filed Under: A River Runs Again, elemental india, readings Tagged With: A River Runs Again, book tour, cape cod, Elemental India, events, readings

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