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In Texas, Wind Power is Job Security

December 26, 2017 By meerasub Leave a Comment

Kaitlin Sullivan, wind energy student at TSTC, peeks in from the top of a 300′ wind turbine in Texas. Photo by Meera Subramanian

 

Here’s the latest in Finding Middle Ground series, from Sweetwater, Texas:

All along the straight-shot roads of Nolan County in West Texas, wind turbines soar over endless acres of farms, the landscape either heavy with cotton ready to harvest or flushed green with the start of winter wheat. The turbines rise from expanses of ranches, where black Angus beef cattle gaze placidly at the horizon. Here and there are abandoned farmhouses dating to the 1880s, when this land was first settled and water windmills were first erected. Occasionally a few pump jacks bob their metallic heads, vestiges of a once-booming oil industry still satiating an endless thirst.

Every industry creates an ecosystem around it. If the wind turbines that sprouted in West Texas were huge steel trees, spinning sleek carbon-fiber blades 100 feet in length, then the wind farms—including Roscoe Wind Project and Horse Hollow Wind Energy Center, some of the largest in the world—were their forest. Spread out across the expansive vista, invisible air currents feed the structures, their imperceptible roots extending out to the community that contains them.

Read the rest at InsideClimate News here. 

 

 

 

Filed Under: journalism Tagged With: climate change, energy, InsideClimate News, jobs, journalism, oil & gas, renewable energy, Sweetwater, Texas, Texas State Technical College, USA, wind energy

upcoming talks: MIT, BU & Harvard

February 2, 2017 By meerasub 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

  • Joe Romm, acclaimed author, Center for American Progress Senior Fellow, and science advisor to the National Geographic series “Years of Living Dangerously” and named by Rolling Stone as one of “The 100 People Who Are Changing America”
  • Naomi Oreskes,  award-winning and widely-cited science historian and Harvard University professor, co-author of Merchants of Doubt  (2010, Bloomsberry Press) 
  • Seth Borenstein, award-winning national and international science writer for the Associated Press
  • Meera Subramanian, award-winning journalist and MIT Knight Science Journalism Fellow whose work has been published around the world and author of A River Runs Again: India’s Natural World in Crisis from the Barren Cliffs of Rajasthan to the Farmlands of Karnataka(2015, PublicAffairs)

Moderator

  • John Rogers, Senior Energy Analyst at the Union of Concerned Scientists, and co-author, Cooler Smarter: Practical Steps for Low-Carbon Living (2012, Island Press)

More info here.

Filed Under: A River Runs Again, readings Tagged With: A River Runs Again, book tour, Boston, Cambridge, energy, events, india, Knight Science Journalism, pollution environment, readings

Amazing things happen… (in the most polluted city on earth)

January 25, 2016 By meerasub Leave a Comment

#HelpDelhiBreathe protest. Photo by Meera Subramanian

#HelpDelhiBreathe protest. Photo by Meera Subramanian

In which I report for Vice magazine from New Delhi, which the WHO determined to be the most polluted big city on the planet. It sure feels like it. 

New Delhi is choking on its own air.

On January 1, India’s capital made an attempt to address its status as the world’s most polluted big city, according to the World Health Organization, by implementing a temporary “odd-even scheme” for automobile use. Private vehicles could only be driven on days that matched their plate number or risk a $30 fine. There were loads of exemptions, including the two-wheelers that dominate the roads, hybrids, and cars driven by VIPs or women (with no men in the vehicle). There were jokes about “men riding in the dickey” — the trunk — of cars and more serious conversations about immediately buying a second car to get around the restrictions. But after the 15-day plan came to end, overall sentiment was high as researchers rushed to declare it a success or failure.

Read the rest at Vice.

Filed Under: journalism, travels Tagged With: air, energy, india, photography, pollution, science, travel

UChicago Center/EPIC presentation: New Delhi

January 21, 2016 By meerasub 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
RSVP here.

Related show

  • Author: Meera Subramanian
  • Tour: A River Runs Again / Elemental India Book Tour
  • Date: January 28, 2016
  • Time: 6:00pm
  • Venue: UChicago Center in Delhi
  • City: New Delhi
  • Address: DLF Capitol Point, Baba Kharak Singh Marg, Connaught Place
  • Country: India
  • Notes: Elemental India: The Natural World at a Time of Crisis and Opportunity. Multimedia presentation

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

We Speak Up: Delhi event

January 20, 2016 By meerasub 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?”

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

deadly dinners

May 28, 2014 By meerasub

Cooking on an Envirofit improved cookstove. Photo by Meera Subramanian

Cooking on an Envirofit improved cookstove in Tamil Nadu. Photo by Meera Subramanian

I spent a good chunk of last winter stepping into women’s kitchens in rural India to see what was cooking. Rice. Rotis. Dal. Curries. But regardless of the meal, most rural homes were cooking over open fires. With the incredible support of a Fulbright-Nehru fellowship, I was working on a book about environmental stories across India, including doing research and reporting about what — if anything — was helping women move away from the polluting form of cooking with biomass. Today, the journal Nature published my piece that tells a little bit about what I found. Deadly Dinners (a heavy-handed but unfortunately devastatingly accurate title) begins:

After returning from her nine-and-a-half-hour shift as a security guard, Savita Satish Dadas begins plucking fenugreek leaves from their stems for dinner. She and her two children, along with three of their cousins, gather in a shed-like structure next to their house in the Satara District of Maharashtra, India. As goats and cows settle in for the night a few metres away, Dadas and the children sit down on a packed dirt floor around the family hearth.

Whisps of smoke rise up from their chulha, the Indian name given to a traditional cooking-stove fuelled by wood and other organic matter often gathered from the countryside. Dadas’s stove, like several of her neighbours’, is sculpted out of clay. But many make a rudimentary three-stone fire — a triangle of elevated points to support a pot — that humans have used for millennia. Dadas feeds roughly chopped logs into the stove and her hands shape moistened flour into bhakri bread, the rhythmic movement illuminated by the flickering flames.

With this simple daily act, Dadas shares a connection with more than one-third of the world’s population, the three billion people who depend on solid biomass fuels — such as wood, animal dung, agricultural waste and charcoal — or coal for their cooking needs.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: A River Runs Again, elemental india, Fulbright, journalism, travels Tagged With: A River Runs Again, air quality, cookstoves, Elemental India, energy, environment, india, pollution environment

in praise of geysers

October 10, 2013 By meerasub

geyser

It’s simple. Ten minutes before you plan to bathe, you flip a switch. The light comes on and the water heats up. You wash. You turn the switch off. Geysers, as these small almost-instantaneous-but-not-quite hot water heaters are called in India, are so smart. I don’t keep a kettle simmering all day so that when the urge for a cup of tea strikes, I can have it instantly. (btw, for my tea at home, I use this, one of the best Christmas presents I ever received.) Same idea. Yet this is how we heat water in American homes. It’s the second largest energy expense in the average home, typically accounting for about 18% of the utility bill.

This one in the guest house where I’m staying is particularly cheerful.

Filed Under: travels Tagged With: conservation, energy, india

thirteen miles

May 15, 2012 By Meera Leave a Comment

It took two hours and thirteen minutes to travel the 13 miles from the Barnstable bus stand to Sagamore Bridge, the definitive point between “on Cape” and “off.”  I took a front seat, looking over the bus driver’s shoulder at the road ahead, as we pulled onto Route 6, flying for those first few miles. Then, a long line of brake lights lit up like a Christmas strand. The Sagamore Bridge, where peregrine falcons considered nesting amidst its metalwork last year, is under construction. The pair was spotted only once this year before they fled, surely, from the noise and construction, the men hoisted into the heavens by cranes and lifts, bringing blowtorches and making human thunder. Bridges have always fascinated me, the engineering feat of building such structures that can stand for decades of dedicated use, letting us leap over water, canyons and gullies. [Read more…]

Filed Under: travels Tagged With: cape cod, energy, nuclear

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