Covering Climate Now Award

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Super honored to join so many other amazing journalists honored with Covering Climate Now Awards yesterdayy! Solutions! Thanks to the great editors at The New Yorker, photographer Supranav Dash & local journalist Elizabeth Mani, the team behind the story—India’s Quest to Build the largest Solar Farms—about the world’s third largest solar farm, located in Karnataka, India.

Here’s what the judges said:

Through deep interviews with peanut farmers, school teachers, government officials, and vulnerable Dalit women — who’ve lost access to farmland they cultivated for generations — Subramanian creates a textured examination of the tradeoffs and power imbalances that the green transition might portend. “Fascinating,” judges said, Subramanian’s work quickly hooks audiences, and her “lovely writing” keeps them reading.

Thanks also to the judges for their time and Covering Climate Now for amplifying these stories that span our warming planet. Check out all the wonderful winning work HERE.

#journalism #climatechange #climatecrisis #awards #amplify

Consider the Vulture

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Line of vultures on curving branch

Vultures stay close to the feeding grounds of the Jatayu Vulture Restaurant, Nepal. Photo by Alisha Vasudev ©

 

For close to twenty years, I’ve covered the catastrophic decline, and tentative recovery, of South Asia’s vultures. In my book A River Runs Again, I took a deep dive into the situation in India. Last year, I went to Nepal to cover a new chapter in the story, as the country’s captive-breeding program came to a close, and the last birds were released back into the wild. The story was published today at The New Yorker. Here’s a bit:

We were in a microcosm of abundance in a landscape of loss: most of the nine vulture species found in South Asia were there in front of us. We watched white-rumped vultures, whose neck ruffles look like seventeenth-century formal wear, and Himalayan griffons, which are larger and paler. We also saw an immense cinereous vulture; a red-headed vulture with fuschia wattles; and a small Egyptian vulture. Nepali pointed out a slender-billed vulture. According to the I.U.C.N. Red List of Threatened Species, there are less than one thousand mature individuals left in the world.

One bird tugged at the cow’s head, which was now detached. The vultures were so gross that they were gorgeous. It’s easy to shun vultures as dirty and disgusting, or as harbingers of death, but they are more like undertakers, performing an essential job and receiving little thanks for their work. As obligate scavengers, vultures survive almost exclusively on what is already dead.

[Read more…]

India’s Quest to Build the World’s Largest Solar Farms

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endless expanse of photovoltaic panels reaching to horizon

by Meera Subramanian

“Electrify everything” is a mantra of the global transition away from fossil fuels. But what does this look like, as the entire planet attempts to transition to a clean energy system? I went to the world’s third largest solar park to find out, and the story is just out in The New Yorker  as part of their special climate issue on #bottlenecks.

Pavagada Ultra Mega Solar Park covers thirteen thousand acres, or about twenty square miles—only slightly smaller than the area of Manhattan. And the way that the public-private partnership secured all that land was through a leasing model that’s being replicated elsewhere. Is it working? I met with peanut farmers and security guards, school teachers and solar farm officials, Dalit women who’ve lost access to the lands they once worked on, now covered with solar.

Teenager standing by her family's small shop.

by Meera Subramanian

Man leads his bullock cart laden with hay along road with large power pylons and solar beside it.

by Meera Subramanian

The massive project was up and running in under four years, but now—four years since then—village roads and schools and other promised development projects are still limping along.

Village man with turban walks on road that is being built, a frontloader with gravel and a cow in the background

by Meera Subramanian

And yet, as I stood in a substation, I marveled at how clean this energy is. Is it possible to make these massive installations work for the locals who find them on their homegounds?

Engineer in Pavagada Solar Park substation, sitting by his computer adorned with a flower.

by Meera Subramanian

Thanks to the incredible editor at the New Yorker Daniel A. Gross, and the photographer @SupranavDash, whose photographs are featured in the piece. Huge appreciation to journalist Elizabeth Mani in Bengaluru for her translation and reporting assistance.

#India #solar #renewable #energy #climatechange #climatecrisis #climateemergency #renewableenergy #globalwarming #solarpanels #green #nature #solarpower #environment #cleanenergy  #climate #solarenergy#greenenergy #sustainability #design #earth #sun #environmentaljustice #justtransition #livelihood

Read the story here.

more on Chennai’s water crisis

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The summer Southwest monsoon has brought some rain and momentary relief to Chennai, but the question of how to mitigate water shortages (and excesses) are not gone. After my New York Times op-ed last month, I’ve had a chance to speak about water with others interested in the story. These issues are not disappearing anytime soon. From the World Resources Institute:

New data from WRI’s Aqueduct tools reveal that 17 countries – home to one-quarter of the world’s population—face “extremely high” levels of baseline water stress, where irrigated agriculture, industries and municipalities withdraw more than 80% of their available supply on average every year.

I spoke to Mark Goldberg on the Global Dispatches Podcast. In essence, do all the small stuff first: restore wetlands, enforce rainwater catchment mandates, educate on conservation, fix leaky pipes, capture water across the landscape with small-scale systems that work with nature, and not against it. Can India develop a new 21st-century model of sustainable development? The opportunity is still there, though hard to see evidence of embracing such possibility. Listen to the podcast here:

On the BBC’s podcast Beyond Today, I spoke with host Matthew Price about the crisis. BBC’s Rajini Vaidyanathan also reported from Chennai directly. Have a listen here.

I also make a cameo appearance in this Al Jazeera The Stream news piece, featuring Veena Srinivasan, a senior fellow with Ashoka Trust, Raj Bhagat Palanichamy, a data manager with World Resources Institute India, and T.M. Krishna, a musician, artist, and activist. Watch the episode here:

And then sit back and watch/listen to T.M. Krishna’s haunting song Poromboke:

Chennai’s Water Crisis

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Rebecca Conway for The New York Times

 

While researching and reporting A River Runs Again (aka Elemental India), I explored small-scale, across-the-landscape solutions for water crises in India. Even just a few years later, the world is warmer and there are more people in need of water. When the major South Indian city of Chennai, where my father is from and where many in my extended family live, ran out of piped water during its current drought, I wrote an op-ed for The New York Times about how India might consider a new approach to development that might embrace the methods I wrote about in the book. Here’s how it begins:

India’s water crisis offers a striking reminder of how climate change is rapidly morphing into a climate emergency. Piped water has run dry in Chennai, the capital of the southern state of Tamil Nadu, and 21 other Indian cities are also facing the specter of “Day Zero,” when municipal water sources are unable to meet demand.

Chennai, a city of eight million on the Bay of Bengal, depends on the fall monsoon to provide half of the city’s annual rainfall. Last year, the city had 55 percent less rainfall than normal. When the monsoon ended early, in December, the skies dried up and stayed that way. Chennai went without rain for 200 days. As winter passed into spring and the temperature rose to 108 degrees Fahrenheit, its four water reservoirs turned into puddles of cracked mud.

Some parts of the city have been without piped water for five months now. Weary women with brightly colored plastic jugs now await water tankers, sometimes in the middle of the night. On June 20, the delayed summer monsoon arrived as a disappointing light shower.

These water crises are now global and perennial….

Read the rest of “India’s Terrifying Water Crisis” here at The New York Times.

a letter from 2049

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Shutterstock

 

I don’t normally do speculative fiction, but when In These Times told me they were doing a special climate issue and asked me what our world might be like if we were to achieve a net zero carbon economy, I found myself writing a letter to my cousin-brother. 

Dear Harish,

Hello, my sweet, faraway cousin-brother! As we approach our—gasp!—80th birthdays, I felt inspired to resurrect the old tradition of letter writing.

It seems like yesterday we were sitting on your parents’ rooftop, taking in the night sounds of Besant Nagar, in the days when I would impulsively buy a ticket from Boston to Chennai without much of a thought beyond my bank account balance.

Remember when a ticket cost a few weeks’ pay instead of six months’? Has it really been 20 years since I last flew to India? I have forgotten the smell of the jasmine flowers women sold along the streets. Remind me again of their fragrance…

Do you see more stars now that the coal plants have shut down? Are the streets quieter without the roar of motorbikes? I suspect the electric vehicles still honk just as frequently and drive as wildly.

Perhaps everything is a little calmer, without the overwhelming crowds? But I imagine there’s an eeriness to that calm, knowing the cost at which it came.

Read the rest here.

On ‘Writing the Book You Can’t Not Write’

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Between the Lines: Subramanian on ‘Writing the Book You Can’t Not Write’

For the latest installment of SEJournal’s author Q & A, “Between the Lines,” Meera Subramanian talks to book editor Tom Henry about the research and writing process behind her debut, “A River Runs Again: India’s Natural World in Crisis,” a 2016 Orion Book Award finalist that travels from the barren cliffs of Rajasthan to the farmlands of Karnataka.

SEJournal: What inspired you to write “A River Runs Again?”

Meera Subramanian: I have visited India all my life to see my father’s family and couldn’t help but observe how things were done there compared to my home in the United States. I’d be older with each trip, viewing with a new perspective, but India was changing, too, and when the country opened up its economy in the 1990s, that change ramped up to a frantic pace.

But who was getting left behind as the IT boom swept South Asia? Where was this country that is now poised to become the most populous nation on Earth heading in terms of development? What were they doing right and what were they doing wrong in a place where a growing population was colliding with limited natural resources, where everyone wants to satisfy their basic needs — and then some?

But this wasn’t just describing India; it was the state of the entire world. I decided to start with India, a place I could view with the fresh eyes of an outsider but also with a touch of insider knowledge.

Read the entire interview here.

the dancing cobras

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Every writer on assignment ends up accruing tales that don’t fit the purpose — but that are still worth telling. Such is the inspiration behind the new magazine Off Assignment, where “the detour is the story.” I just had the pleasure of writing a piece for their Letter to a Stranger column, inspired by Pico Iyer’s quote: “…And writing is, in the end, that oddest of anomalies: an intimate letter to a stranger.”

Mine tells of a candlelit evening in South Asia and a man with a half-century-old story to tell about when he saw the cobras dance…

Read (and listen to me read) it here.

upcoming talks: MIT, BU & Harvard

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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

Moderator

More info here.

cloned sheep, cattle-driving maps & the disease of gigantism

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2016-10-01iph-402

I had grand hopes of frequently blogging while on the Knight Science Journalism fellowship. Alas… With a nod to Harper’s Findings, I was able to manage this instead:

Telomeres, the mysterious ends of chromosomes whose lengths can reveal age, seemed to know that Dolly the cloned sheep, was older than she was. Massachusetts’ city kids thrive in charter schools more than suburban kids. Second Chance, the cloned replica of the beloved gentle Brahman bull Chance, was just like his original, except for that he had a tendency to maul his owners. If you wanted to drive your cattle from Texas to Fort Yuma, California, you would consult the map my great-great grandfather drafted in 1870. Jardin de Lorixa, a comprehensive 14-volume herbal detailing the plants of Bengal in the 18th Century, sat unstudied for over two centuries. After embracing Western models of big development, Jawaharlal Nehru had a belated change of heart, wondering if India was suffering from a “disease of gigantism.” Of the planet’s coastal poor, 27% are Indian.  When a Boston clock maker wanted to make a model of the solar system in 1776, the Grand Orrery, he called on Paul Revere to cast the bronze elements. (But the orrery in this photo was prettier.) #KnightKnowHow @KSJatMIT @SophiaRoosth @JPAL_Global #clone #botany #India @sunilamrith #JamesDelbourgo