grief – Meera Subramanian

graffiti of girl being lifted by heart balloons

{latest Substack…}

Sentiments can be lost in translation, but also found. I’m out of the US but its mess spreads across the globe like its carbon emissions. The absolute least of it is was sitting in a cafe eating tortilla española and cringing as our new old president declared Spain is a BRICS nation (it isn’t). The most of it is hearing from friends and family about direct impacts: jobs lost, projects frozen, students with questionable immigration status disappeared. Last week, I stood with an Austrian woman and when the subject of our state of affairs came up, both of us speechless about the chaos the 47th has unleashed in a baker’s dozen worth of days, she said, of the country or the man, I’m not sure, that it’s “out of order.”

“Yes, yes! That’s the perfect phrase,” I exclaimed. “I’m going to use that.” And so here we are.

As I walked home afterwards, a woman alone, after midnight, feeling totally safe on the streets of Bilbao even as I walked through a group of a dozen men (oh, the sweet relief of not having cortisol continually coursing through one’s body; consider the whales; consider immigrants now being rounded up), I tumbled the phrase “out of order” around in mind. Out of order can mean broken, nonfunctional. It can indicate an experience of tumult and bedlam. It can also mean when someone steps of out of line, and acts in ways that are socially, ethically, morally improper. With the Austrian woman’s three words, she’d spoken a triple entendre.

To process this moment, I’m alternating between Jeff Sharlet’s Scenes from a Slow Civil War and Katharine Hayhoe’s Talking Climate, somehow finding solace in simultaneously recognizing how bad things are and how good they could be. Be? Maybe? Ayana Elizabeth Johnson reminds us to act locally. My form of protest is to dig deeper into my FRONTIERS fellowship work based at BC3, trying to understand all the dynamics at play in the efforts to shift our energy systems to cleaner forms of wind and solar, something that will continue to happen regardless of the white man in the White House. It’s led me to encouraging conversations about agrivoltaics in France and energy companies that build in community funds voluntarily, but also to a recurring and troubling story of conflict—a chasm between the rural and urban populations of the world—identical to what I’ve experienced in America, especially when I reported on conservative perceptions of climate change for Inside Climate News. I also attended an event, La Agenda Climática en La Nueva Legislatura Europa y su Impacto en Euskadi, The Climate Agenda in the New European Legislature and its impact in Basque Country. And we were right back to the impacts of the global shift to the far right. A sense of nervousness, geopolitics shaky, and the hope that energy independence in the form of renewables can be a part of regional security strategies.

panel discussion on climate and politics

Sweet dreams & flying machines…

There was also, last week, the horror over DC skies. Someone I love deeply and dearly has lost someone they love deeply and dearly in the unspeakable plane crash that ended in the Potomoc. She asked me for hard-won advice, knowing I have lost friends, this one, and this one, and others. Words fail, but I say something about letting the grief come when it will, to not fight it, to let it wash over you when it appears urgent and unexpected, even months, years, down the road of recovery. No, not recovery. Something else. Love and loss burnished into your being. But now the grief is immediate, and the only thing to do is take the unbidden reminder that life is short, precious. Love big. Hold loved ones close. Tell them. This is the other way we can act locally, in our most intimate lives.

As I’m exploring this new place, I’m searching for slivers of joy amid all this grief and allowing myself moments to recognize them. I found one, as the sun broke through the relentless clouds of Bilbao, of the news, on Friday afternoon, when I finally made it up Etxebarri Parkea. Once a factory site that has been transformed into a park overlooking the city, its tall smokestack is a reminder of what once was. There was a pond created to support birds and critters, and a skate park for humans to play.

When I walked by the skate park, I noticed two men on skateboards, then I noticed that one was much, much older than the other. I was intrigued. Circled around the park and returned to watch him as he made a smooth steady run across the shallow end. Then, as the younger skater was leaving, the older one recruited him to help him summit the last lip of his run. “Come help me,” he said. “Stand here, with one foot here and the other there, and then when I come up, take my hand.” The young man did exactly as told. They tried it 5-6 times, and the older man never quite made it. Except that, well, he’s already made it, right?

I took a picture of them both, then handed my phone to Nico, the 26-year-old German so he can forward it to himself. And Juanjo is telling us he’s famous. “Google me!” he instructed, and indeed there he is on YouTube and TikTok. He is 87 years old, older than ages of the young skater and me, combined. Some lives are unfairly cut short. Others are long, and embraced by the bodies that contain them.

Journalists & writers friends, take note…

For rising juniors and seniors pursuing journalism, consider applying to the Opening Doors, a new initiative aimed at increasing diversity in public media newsrooms. The two-year program will provide skills training, mentorship, and paid internships for ten BIPOC journalism students, with a focus on science, health, and economics reporting. Apply here.
The Uproot Project Fellowship offers funding to seven journalists to pursue reporting projects over the course of a year. Fellows will receive up to $2,000 to cover travel and other reporting expenses for their fellowship project. Learn more about the Uproot Project Fellowship and find this year’s application here. Deadline: 11:59pm on March 1, 2025
And to connect with poets who are using their art to face the climate crisis, check out the Hellbender Gathering of Poets, run by my friend and Sewanee colleague Nickole Brown. They’re gearing up for a fall gathering and having inspiring events along the way.
The Matthew Power Literary Reporting Award is a grant of $12,500 to support the work of a promising early-career nonfiction writer on a story that uncovers truths about the human condition. Matt was one of those dear friends we lost way too early. Deadline: Feb. 19

Take care, friends. Take care of each other.

[Read more…]

Photo by Meera Subramanian

As a reader I find there are stories that just stick with me; I can’t shake them. But as a journalist, I experience this a thousand-fold. What appears in print can feel like a haiku, with too many interviews and notebook jottings ending up on the cutting room floor. The histories of place I unearthed through research. The letters to the editor in the thin pages of the local newspaper. The anecdotes shared by those who didn’t make it into the piece. The deep story revealed behind and between their words, too big for the bounds of the word-count.

As I finished up each of the nine pieces that were part of the series Finding Middle Ground series for InsideClimate News that I worked on for most of 2017-18, about perceptions of climate change in conservative parts of the country, I would find filaments linking them with each other that I didn’t have room to explore. I’d get tangled in threads leading to stories I’d reported in other parts of the world, a lament I heard from a peach farmer in Georgia echoing what a rice farmer had said in India. There were strands of sinew between what I learned in the field and what I knew from my own personal life, a peripatetic journey that’s granted me multiple vantage points, making me feel at home both nowhere and everywhere at once.

Last year I became a contributing editor of Orion magazine, a publication I’ve read for many years, enjoying the lush richness of its pages, the images and poems and book reviews and NO ADS. (Yes, this is a nonprofit endeavor, and, yes, you can support it by subscribing.) With this piece for Orion, I finally had a chance to reach up for some of those disparate threads that have been floating around in my head since I finished the ICN series and try to weave them into something that made sense. Or, at least, began to make sense. Still, it feels like a haiku. Still, there is so much unsaid at the edges. Because the story of climate change at this moment in time is immense, and shifting. We’re all living this in real-time, the scientists and storytellers and skeptics all. Much of what I found over 18 months of reporting is deeply troubling, the changes underway stirring so much into uncertainty, but I also hold onto the possibility of the disruption as a great opportunity. No rain without thunder and lightning, Frederick Douglass reminded us. And the storm of climate change is here, now. Anything could happen.

The piece begins…

For the past couple of years, I traveled across my country, falling in love with strangers. I sought them out—farmers, ranchers, fly fishermen, evangelicals— and stepped into their lives, uninvited but nearly always, inexplicably, welcome. I sought some kind of connection, asking them questions few seemed to be asking them, about their lives and what they care about and what they believe in. Who they vote for and why. What they remember from before and what they expect in the future, which to their collective grief are often different things.

Read the rest here.

Out of Order

United in Change