baby sea turtle release!

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two baby sea turtles on the sand

by Meera Subramanian

S. AND I SIT ON A LOG on a San Pancho beach of western Mexico’s Nayarit coast, watching. Soon, we’ve been told, there will be a release of sea turtles, but we don’t know quite where, so we observe the movement of humans on the beach—couples in beach chairs; groups of young, tattooed surfers smoking cigarettes and weed; a woman reading a book. An older man races by in a dune buggy with a woman beside him, and then returns a moment later without her, rousing a trio of short-legged mutts to chase after him, barking and chomping at the tires. Where he has left the woman, a coalescing is under way, and we move toward it.

There we find Odette Brunel, a Mexican ecologist with long brown hair and reading glasses looped around her neck, holding a tan plastic bin. A hundred tiny turtles writhe within. They’re only a few inches long, dark flippers and dark shells barely containing an eager energy. Nearby, an eleven-year-old named Ananda holds another bin with more. A growing crowd crane their necks to look in. Children gather. Parents gather. Cell phone cameras, including mine, are at the ready.

Odette goes hoarse explaining anything she can to anyone who will listen, in English and Spanish. Her soft voice stretches over the sound of island music blaring from a nearby hotel that reaches its square body onto the sand of the beach.

“We call this tortuga golfina. It’s the smallest of the sea turtles that come here.”

…

Read the rest of the story, published in Orion, about witnessing the dangerous, crucial volunteer work of protecting and releasing baby olive ridley sea turtles in Mexico, here. 

And here’s a rough-cut video I made of the evening:

The Nature of Plastics

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Artwork: Steve McPherson

 

EARLY IN 2004, a buoy was released into the waters off Argentina. Half of the buoy was dark and the other light, like a planet in relief. The buoy sailed east, accompanied by the vastness of the ocean and all the life it contains, the long-lived great humpback whales with their complex songs that carry for miles, and the short-lived Argentine shortfin squid. Along the way, many thousands of minuscule creatures were colonizing this new surface, which had appeared like a life raft in the open waters of the South Atlantic.

The researchers who’d dropped the buoy followed its movement in hopes of learning more about ocean currents than generations of science and sailing history had revealed. They watched the buoy float into the wide-open ocean between South America and Africa, those twin coastlines that struck me, as I gazed at them on the pull-down map in first grade, as two puzzle pieces that once linked. They surveilled its movements by GPS. Eighteen months later, the signal ceased. Silence from the satellites.

The buoy continued along the currents of the South Atlantic, free from surveillance, sheltered and shocked by sun and clouds and storms overhead. It was likely molded out of a thermoplastic polymer called acrylonitrile butadiene styrene, or ABS, which, like most plastics, was crafted from the extracted remains of long-ago life-forms. ABS was engineered in the lab to endure—rigid, resilient, capable of withstanding all that being let loose at sea may foist upon it.

All plastic begins in a factory. That much we know. But where it goes next remains poorly understood. Only 1 percent of the plastic released into the marine environment is accounted for, found on the surface and in the intestines of aquatic animals. The rest is a little harder to measure. Some presumably washes back ashore. An untold amount settles, sunk by the weight of its new passengers. (One study found four times more plastic fibers in the sediment of the deep-sea floor than on the surface of the ocean.)

And some, like the buoy, just keeps drifting along.

***

I have spent thirty years fixated on environmental issues, spawned during my own oceanic migration in the fall of 1989….

Read the rest at Orion Magazine.

On America: Writing & Reading the Environment

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From our home places, we convene. It is tonic. To get a chance to explore storytelling with these talented writers, all approaching their craft from different angles, was such a pleasure. Here’s the full post about the October 1 event, with an expansive suggested reading list. We were: a panel of writers, journalists, and climate change activists considering the formal, structural elements environmental writers can bring to storytelling, how to handle or tell stories that support political stances, and examine the stories out there that can foster a better understanding of our environmental crisis. But it was so much more. Exploring systems of reciprocity, how far writing can reach (will there ever be another Silent Spring?) and, and, and….

Have a look. And then pick up Kerri Arsenault’s rooted true tale Mill Town. And Bathsheba Demuth’s exquisite Floating Coast. Travel the world through John’s latest Freeman’s: Love. Seek out the deeply thought-through essays on climate and the hard questions they force upon us by Emily Raboteau and Meehan Crist.

Thanks to our hosts: Center for Fiction in collaboration with Orion Magazine and the National Book Critics Circle as part of the Brooklyn Book Festival’s Bookends series.

United in Change

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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.

the city & the sea

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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…]