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United in Change

December 16, 2019 By meerasub Leave a Comment

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.

Filed Under: agriculture, cattle, climate change, drought, InsideClimate News, journalism, North Dakota, photography, travels Tagged With: climate change, conservation, grief, InsideClimate News, journalism, loss, Nature, Orion, photography, politics, pollution environment

perimeter perambulations

June 8, 2017 By meerasub 1 Comment

I always try to deny dawn. She slips under my eyelids and I reach for my eye mask, craving one more hour of unconsciousness. But I hear birds. Knew the light was illuminating the unexplored forest behind the house I now find myself living in. Discovered myself pulled up and into clothes warm enough for the cool morning, lacing up my hiking shoes before I quite realized it. My eyes don’t read so well in the morning anymore, but before I walk out the door, I squint at the map for the Perimeter Trail that loops around Sewanee, hugging the edge of the Cumberland Plateau, and figure it should be due west of the house. Why walk along the lanes to find a proper entrance? I tuck my pants into my socks (the default fashion for us in Cape Cod’s tick-infested landscape. Are they here or am I liberated?) and cross the bit of backyard grass and enter the woods. Ten steps in, I flush a herd of white-tailed deer twenty strong, their cotton-burst butts bounding down the hill of the small valley, then up the other side. A hundred feet in and I find a brook I can step across with one stride. Twenty more paces and I’m on the trail. I take a right and go. It’s good to be back in church.

Just before I left Knight Science Journalism fellowship up in Cambridge, Maura O’Connor spoke to us about her new book on wayfinding. She explained the wonders of the hippocampus, how it grows when we challenge it by getting lost and then finding ourselves. I have not (blindly) used a GPS since then. I find a map, preferably on paper, and study it til I can put my finger on the spot where I am. I have loved to do this, always. It felt like a reward when the last page of a test in third grade was a map, the legend reliably there in the corner, a gift of a key that would unlock the mysteries some mapmaker made.Here on the edge of the plateau, there is the added orientation ease of heading towards the almost horizon that appears between the boles of upright trees, that indicates the drop-off of slope and the potential payoff of views. It’s why I went right. But I am distracted. A russula mushroom there in the duff. A widow-maker tree defying gravity until her uprooted roots decide to give out completely. Rounding a bend and finding myself below a sandstone overhang like a chiseled layer cake of rock, seeps staining spots dark, the smell of iron in the air. Did I gasp? I think I gasped. At a fork I go left, each rock outcropping greater than the last. I scramble up a rock to pass through a tunnel of stone and then the sound of water pulls me forward until I’m below the spray of Bridal Veil Falls, oxygenated, awake. [update: that wasn’t Bridal Veil, I discover later. Just some unnamed cascade. Just as lovely, if not as spectacular.]

How many landscapes can one love? How many humans? How many creatures, great and small? Imagine an infinite number and you are correct.

#Sewanee #hiking #waterfall #Tennessee @univofthesouth #schoolofletters #PerimeterTrail #getoutofbed

Filed Under: just another day, peregrinations, travels Tagged With: hiking, Nature, School of Letters, Sewanee, Tennessee, waterfall

New Delhi car ban yields trove of pollution data

February 22, 2016 By meerasub Leave a Comment

2016.01.17Delhi-21Subramanian

photo by Meera Subramanian

I landed in Delhi at the tail-end of an experiment to limit the number of vehicles on the road. Here’s a piece in Nature about how researchers leapt on the opportunity to study the effects. 

New Delhi may be the world’s most polluted city, but it’s making an effort to relinquish that title. With pollution from particulate matter at potentially lethal levels early last December, city officials took a drastic step: they announced that they would temporarily restrict the use of private vehicles by allowing owners to drive only on alternate days, based on the sequence of their number plates.

The initial results of that 15-day trial, which began on 1 January, are now in.

Read the whole piece here.

 

Filed Under: journalism Tagged With: air, air quality, india, Nature, New Delhi, pollution, pollution environment, research, science

the age of loneliness

September 16, 2015 By meerasub Leave a Comment

“Ten years ago, I went into the woods I loved to decide whether or not to leave them….”

Ian Davis, Deliberations, 2015. Acrylic on panel, 20 x 16 in. © Ian Davis. Courtesy the artist and Leslie Tonkonow Artworks and Projects, New York.

Ian Davis, Deliberations, 2015. Acrylic on panel, 20 x 16 in. © Ian Davis. Courtesy the artist and Leslie Tonkonow Artworks and Projects, New York.

The brilliant magazine Guernica just came out with a special issue on the Boundaries of Nature. I think about this a lot, perhaps too much. And when the editors approached me about contributing I’d just returned from a trip to my old beloved forest in Oregon, and to a gathering of EcoModernists in Sausalito, and still my mind spun back to clutching falcons in New York City. All wove together into this essay. Thanks, Guernica.

Read it here.

Filed Under: journalism Tagged With: boundaries, EcoModernism, Guernica, journalism, Nature, New York City, Oregon, rewinding

this is how it happens

April 10, 2014 By meerasub

2014.04.09-23

Lean back til you feel like you’ll tip. Take in the sky. Wasn’t it a steely grey just a minute ago, and now, now, blue like the eggs already in the nest, cluttered with clouds that have broken apart. Soon the marsh grass will erupt. An emerald carpet reaching up, breaking through the brackish phragmites, pounded flat in the last storm, but for now, a wash of pale shades.

2014.04.09-14

This is how it happens, falling in love with a place. [Read more…]

Filed Under: just another day Tagged With: cape cod, home, Nature

california condor faces lead menace

June 28, 2012 By Meera Leave a Comment

After more than three decades on the brink of extinction, the California condor (Gymnogyps californianus) — the largest and most threatened wild bird species in the United States — is making a modest recovery, thanks to intensive captive breeding and medical intervention. But troubling data reported this week suggest that unless hunters change their practices, the condor will require extensive support in perpetuity if it is to survive in the wild. [Read more…]

Filed Under: journalism Tagged With: California, condor, conservation, lead, Nature, science

an ill wind: the trouble with turbines

June 25, 2012 By Meera Leave a Comment

I’ve been following with interest the rapid expansion of wind energy and its impact on wildlife. Excited that I had a chance to delve into the issue for Nature magazine. Here’s how it starts:

Marc Bechard turned a worried eye skywards as he walked among the limestone hills at the southern tip of Spain. It was October 2008, and thousands of griffon vultures — along with other vulnerable raptors — were winging towards the Strait of Gibraltar and beyond to Africa. But first they had to navigate some treacherous airspace. The landscape on either side of the strait bristles with wind turbines up to 170 metres high, armed with blades that slice the air at 270 kilometres per hour. [Read more…]

Filed Under: journalism Tagged With: bats, birds of prey, Nature, science, wind energy

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