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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

the city & the sea

April 9, 2014 By meerasub

2013.04.27Orion-484

Last year I went to NYC six months after Hurricane Sandy had struck to look at recovery (and retreat) efforts and to explore the issue of coastal infrastructure in a time of changing climate. Here’s an excerpt from the start of the piece, published in the March/April issue of Orion magazine:

ONCE UPON A TIME, about 2 million years ago, the Pleistocene era locked up the world’s water in glaciers miles thick. Then, it warmed. It was about ten thousand years ago when the water of the melting glaciers was released to reshape the world into the coastlines we now associate with modern-day maps.

By all indications, though, the shape of those coastlines is about to change.

The archipelago of New York City’s five boroughs has almost six hundred miles of littoral zone between solid ground and watery sea, a place of straits and river mouths, bays and beachy backshores. It’s also a place whose contours have been radically transformed by its citizens. A large percentage of the city’s edges were created artificially, filled in and built upon with the false confidence that land taken from the sea is permanently allocated for terrestrial use. But on October 29, 2012, the record-breaking storm surge that swept over New York City flooded fifty-one square miles of that falsely allocated land—and like a finger from a watery grave, the high-water mark traced the coastline that once was and may soon be again. The mayor’s office says that, by the 2050s, 800,000 New Yorkers will live in hundred-year flood plains, double the current number. [Read more…]

Filed Under: journalism Tagged With: adaptation, climate change, environment, infrastructure, New York City, Orion

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