Every Day Is… Earth Day. Damn it.

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But, yes, today offers a moment for your consideration. Take a breath. Ah, the miracle of air. Look at a spring leaf unfurling out of seemingly nothing. Ah, the miracle of a life. Quench your thirst. (And covering the planet.) Ah, the miracle of water.

Take nothing for granted. Fight like f#@* for the preservation of the natural world, which is a fight for humans, sure, but also the million-trillion, give or take, other species of life forms that populate this one magnificent planet we all emerged from.

The past week has been full of too many good things to fit here. But some quick snapshots…

A climate movement grows in Brooklyn

Last Tuesday night in Brooklyn, we celebrated A Better World Is Possible: Global Youth Confront the Climate Crisis in the best possible way: co-author Danica Novgorodoff and I together in the same space at Greenlight Bookstore, where the idea of a collaboration on a graphic novel about youth climate activists took root way back in 2020. AND…we were joined by three of the four youth we feature in the book. It was beyond incredible to meet, in person, Shiv Soin of TREEage, Rebeca Sabnam, and Jamie Margolin of Zero Hour. We only wish Xiye Bastida of Re-Earth Initiative could have made it, too. They have all grown into fierce young adults, working in all different ways to change the world for the better, and I was deeply moved by hearing their latest news, from struggles to sweet victories. And huge thanks to everyone that came out to pack the room and swiftly sell out books.

Selling out, in the good way

Speaking of, we are delighted to share that A Better World Is Possible is now heading into its second (paperback) printing and third (hardcover) printing!!! Help us keep the momentum going by:

✅ Giving us a review on Goodreads or (if you must be there) Amazon

✅ Bumping up the 5-star reviews with a 👍🏽

✅ Asking your local library or indie bookstore to get a copy

✅ Sharing news of the book on socials, where you can also follow us (Insta tags @meerasub and @ABetterWorldtheBook and LinkedIn) and privately with friends

✅ Considering it for your next book club

✅ Suggesting the book for fall coursework for schools, ages 12+. We’ve got a discussion guide and are happy to send desk copies to interested educators for their consideration

✅ And of course, buying a copy for yourself and every young person, friend, neighbor’s friend, family member, frenemy, and human you know who likes a liveable planet.

More live events

Danica’s finished up with event for the moment, but you can still find me out and about…

May 13, 2026: Stories from a Warming World
6:00 – 8:30 pm ET | WBUR CitySpace 890 Commonwealth Ave. Boston, MA
with Meera & others from MISI (not exactly a book event, but all about climate)

May 14, 2026: Barrington Land Conservation Trust
7:00 pm ET | 281 County Road, Barrington, RI

May 30, 2025: WBUR Festival
Time TBD | WBUR CitySpace 890 Commonwealth Ave. Boston, MA
Meera with musician Mark Erelli

July 25, 2026: YA Midwest
Naperville, IL (more info to come)

June 20, 2026: Melba’s
1525 Elysian Fields Ave, New Orleans, LA

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Enviro journalists unite

And this past weekend, I was in Chicago for my—I’ve lost count—tenth(?) Society of Environmental Journalists conference. I’ve been a part of this incredible organization for twenty years and marvel at its incarnations, even as the struggles of environmental journalists mount.

The Uproot Project has infused new energy into the gatherings, and panels directly addressed the mental health of those reporting from the frontlines of the climate crisis, which Covering Climate Now has assessed in a new report: “A Burning House, A Quiet Media, A Silenced Majority.” Here’s a discussion about it, live from the conference:

And it was so lovely to be a part of the Author Program along with Joseph Lee, an Aquinnah Wampanoag and author of Nothing More of This Land: Community, Power, and the Search for Indigenous Identity and Adam Mahoney, co-author with Judith Enck of The Problem with Plastic. Cameron Oglesby was a lovey moderator.

Stay the course, friends. Because—repeat after me—every day is…

Photo: NASA

Journalists & writer friends, take note…

  • NASW is again offering its virtual summer mentoring program for graduate and undergraduate students, which will run from June 3 to July 29. Sign up to participate or volunteer to help with mentoring and editing here. Deadline: May 1
  • Applications are open for a new round of NASW Peggy Girshman Idea Grants. Individuals or groups are invited to apply for grants of up to $10,000 to support projects and programs that will help science writers in their professional lives and benefit the field of science writing. Deadline: May 15
  • Open call for the Pulitzer Center’s Rainforest Investigations Network Fellowships. In its sixth year, the network will select a new cohort of journalists to receive financial and editorial support to investigate the most pressing issues driving deforestation in the Amazon, Congo Basin, and Southeast Asia. Deadline: May 22

Green Fondo Berkshires 2026

  • I’m taking part in Climate Ride’s fundraising challenge as part of Team Eco.Cyclers, hoping to raise $1,000 by Sunday! Can you help? Whether you can give $20 or $100, your donation has real impact towards positive climate solutions. Plus, if you donate this week, you’ll be entered into a drawing for a reusable mug from Climate Ride as a thank you! Donate here by April 26…or really anytime. 🚴🏼 🚴🏼 🚴🏼

Coda…

Yes, it can kinda seem like a dumpster fire out there. Find beauty anyway.

Climate talk in the coffee line

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I’m standing in line for an oatmilk latte at Audrey’s Coffee in South Kingston, Rhode Island. Stayed overnight after having a lovely talk with my friend and fellow author, Liz Rush at the Metcalf Spring Lecture. We’re both alums of the Metcalf Institute at University of Rhode Island, which brings together scientists and journalists, helps both learn from each other. If you’re a journalist, I highly recommend checking out their fellowship offerings. The room was full of students and faculty, including from a couple new programs: environmental education within the fold of the College of Education and an Environmental Arts & Humanities degree. (Can I go back to school, please?)

The coffee line’s not moving.

“It’s not usually this busy,” says the guy in front of me as we wait. I tell him it’s my first time here. He asks where I’m from. I tell him Cape Cod. Ask if he’s a local.

“I’m a squidder, but it’s not so good ‘cause of climate change…”

The first thing he says. I swear. (And I’m pretty sure he used the word “squidder”…is that right?)

“You do that at night, right?” I ask, and his face lights up with my tiny morsel of knowledge. I know this fact because of my Metcalf fellowship.

elaborate drawings of octopus and squid by Ernest Haeckel
‘Gamochonia,’ 1899, Adolf Giltsch after Ernest Haeckel © The Royal Society

He goes on to tell me his captain is seeing changes because of acidification, though he can’t elaborate. Admits it’s above his pay grade.

“It is my pay grade,” I say, laughing. “Climate journalist.” He laughs and we keep talking. He tells me about living in Narragansett. How it’s working class. But progressive. Surfers. Weed smokers. “No one voted for Trump,” he says. He can’t believe the new cluster of five million dollar houses that the new owners must have bought sight unseen, since they’re by the waste water plant and it stinks around there.

I ask him if he has to do other work since the squid’s not so great. Yeah, he says, his face boyish though he must be in his thirties. He’s started making fishing nets, but he misses being on the water.

The line moves forward. I learn his name is Joe and shake his hand before he picks up his coffee and leaves.

I tried to pursue a story about ocean acidification’s impact on shellfishing here in New England about eight years ago. Had a hard time finding scallopers or oysterfolks concerned about it, even as institutional reports warned of the impact.

So much has changed. Is changing. On the ground. In the water. I don’t know if squid are affected by ocean acidification. Maybe not, since it impacts shell production, making scallops and oysters much more at risk. But the fact that the warming climate is on the mind, and tongue, of a squidder from Narragansett named Joe, in line at a coffee shop, buoys me.

Here’s a bit more: “In New England, Climate Change Is Moving Fast. The Fishing Industry Is Not,’ co-authored by WBUR’s Barbara Moran, who I’ll be talking with….

A few upcoming events to share:

upcoming events

Other news about A Better World Is Possible: Global Youth Confront the Climate Crisis: hardcover copies have sold out and are heading for a second printing; featured in Book Riot’s spring roundup; conversation with ecoRI News; Q&A with Katy Doughty and me at Smash Pages; and Shelf Awareness featured our new official book trailer:

Journalists & writer friends, take note…

I’m reading/listening…

  • Anne Fadiman’s Ex Libris. S. and I read “Marrying Libraries” in bed one night. Something we still haven’t done. 🙂
  • This marvelous multimedia Guardian exploration of insect migration by Phoebe Weston, Ana Lucía González Paz, Prina Shah and Garry Blight.
  • In the in-betweens, I’m listening to The Loneliness of Sunny and Sonia by Kiran Desai. Don’t know where the story is leading but the descriptive powers of her writing are inspiring.
  • Joe at the coffee shop isn’t wrong. Nature covers a new study showing that climate change is speeding up, the rate of warming surging since 2015. These regular reports, along with the horror of wars upon humans and the environment within US borders and our great leaders carrying the decimation around the world, and I took a break to listen to…
  • …RadioLab’s Snail Sex Tape. I will be on the lookout for love darts this spring.

Coda…

Haven’t you always been curious about…

Making Meaning of North Dakota Drought

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Divide County, ND
photo by Meera Subramanian

 

Here’s the latest from my Middle Ground series for InsideClimate News, documenting how people across America are thinking about climate change.

DIVIDE COUNTY, North Dakota — I walk in the front door of Byron Carter’s house as others are entering in the back, and Koda the dog can’t decide which way to direct her barking. I’m in Divide County, North Dakota, but borders seem a little meaningless here. Last summer’s drought, which was calamitous for Byron and the other farmers and ranchers now filing into his kitchen, leaked over into Canada, Divide’s border to the north, and Montana, to the west. By April of this year, they’re on the cusp of a new season, and Byron has gathered his neighbors—defined as anyone living within a 30-mile radius in this sparsely populated corner of the state—so we can talk about drought and climate change.

Drought is an especially wily adversary. As an officer of the North Dakota Department of Emergency Services told me recently, “You can’t put up a sandbag wall to stop a drought.”

Read the rest at InsideClimate News or partner publication High Country News.

And be sure to watch the great accompanying video by Anna Belle Peevey:

 

Cold-water fish. Warming World.

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Craig Fellin fly-fishing on the Big Hole River with his dog Gus, Montana. Photo by Meera Subramanian

Anyone who takes fly-fishing seriously behaves like a scientist. These anglers are biologists, knowledgeable in what’s eating what, when and how. They are hydrologists, studying riffles and stream flow. They are naturalists, observing clouds and sunlight and the circulation of air as their rods flick back and forth across the big sky. They are, in a sense, climate scientists. And some, but not all, are deeply concerned about the effects of a warming climate on the cold-water species that inhabit blue-ribbon trout streams.

But to the extent that they act as climate scientists, partisan politics plays a role in many anglers’ understanding of climate change. Here in Montana, with pristine rivers that are home to some of the best fly-fishing in the country, a majority of votes went for President Trump—and climate change is considered by many of them to be a natural phenomenon beyond human control. Nonetheless, climate change is having a profound influence on fly-fishing, from the timing of insect hatches to the long-term survival of the fish that give this sport its meaning….

Read the full story at InsideClimate News or High Country News.

And I had a great conversation with Nicky Oullet of Montana Public Radio about the story, and you can listen to it here.

In Texas, Wind Power is Job Security

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Kaitlin Sullivan, wind energy student at TSTC, peeks in from the top of a 300′ wind turbine in Texas. Photo by Meera Subramanian

 

Here’s the latest in Finding Middle Ground series, from Sweetwater, Texas:

All along the straight-shot roads of Nolan County in West Texas, wind turbines soar over endless acres of farms, the landscape either heavy with cotton ready to harvest or flushed green with the start of winter wheat. The turbines rise from expanses of ranches, where black Angus beef cattle gaze placidly at the horizon. Here and there are abandoned farmhouses dating to the 1880s, when this land was first settled and water windmills were first erected. Occasionally a few pump jacks bob their metallic heads, vestiges of a once-booming oil industry still satiating an endless thirst.

Every industry creates an ecosystem around it. If the wind turbines that sprouted in West Texas were huge steel trees, spinning sleek carbon-fiber blades 100 feet in length, then the wind farms—including Roscoe Wind Project and Horse Hollow Wind Energy Center, some of the largest in the world—were their forest. Spread out across the expansive vista, invisible air currents feed the structures, their imperceptible roots extending out to the community that contains them.

Read the rest at InsideClimate News here. 

 

 

 

Seeing God’s Hand in the Deadly Floods…

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White Sulphur Springs, WV. Photo by Meera Subramanian.

 Second in a series of stories for InsideClimate News. An evangelical mountain town in West Virginia lost eight people to flooding from an extreme rain storm last year. Many residents see the Biblical prophecy of the apocalypse, and welcome it, while some are considering climate change in a new light.

Jake Dowdy is a police officer in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, where he lived a block from Howard Creek, a stream so inconsequential you could usually hop-skip across parts of it without wetting your toes.

It was the morning of June 23, 2016, and a heavy rain was falling as Jake went to the gym for a workout. He wasn’t thinking much about the rain, other than that it’d be good for the garden. When he got home around noon, he had lunch and kicked up his feet in the living room, chilling out for a while before his 4 pm shift. He drifted off to sleep on the couch and awoke when his wife texted, confusing him for a moment; she was concerned about reports of flooding.

His disorientation turned to panic when he set his feet on the carpet and felt it squish soggily beneath his soles. He had just enough time to grab the cat and wade through thigh-high rushing water to his truck.

Read more at InsideClimate News or West Virginia Public Broadcasting. 

In Georgia’s Peach Orchards, Warm Winters Raise Specter of Climate Change

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 First in a series of stories for InsideClimate News.

MUSELLA, Georgia — Three generations of Robert Lee Dickeys share the two chairs in the cozy office of Dickey Farms, the younger always deferring to the elder. For 120 years, the Dickeys have been producing peaches so juicy they demand to be eaten over the kitchen sink.

Robert Lee “Mr. Bob” Dickey II, 89, is slightly stooped but moves quickly, dropping in just for a morning read of the Wall Street Journal. His son Robert Dickey III, 63, and his grandson, who goes by Lee, age 33, stick around all day, fielding calls and customers, checking the orchards. The next-generation Dickey is having her morning nap and will appear later in a tiny flowered dress, cradled in the arms of her mother, Lee’s wife, Stacy.

Just outside the office is the retail shop, where I watch customers drift into an open-air porch with white rocking chairs and a breeze, to consider peaches. Or, rather, the lack of peaches.

It’s mid-July, what should be peak season, but…

Read the full story here at ICN or in the partner publication, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

life large & small in Sewanee

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This is my last Sunday in Sewanee. I fell asleep to the deafening sound of cicadas, a thrumming from the upper branches of the trees that surround the house. In spite of stories of escaped convicts, I can’t help but keep the sliding doors open so I can hear the sound. The land is alive with the cacophony. Bring it on. The more there is, the merrier I am. It was the brilliance behind Rachel Carson’s book title. Two words. No rambling subtitle telling all. Just two words, three syllables, that spoke volumes: Silent Spring. Give me noise from the natural world. Remind me, unceasingly, that there is life. Keep the silence at bay.

I’ve just finished reading [Read more…]

Finding Middle Ground

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As the Knight fellowship comes to a close, I prepare to return to the world of freelancing. I couldn’t be more excited that one of the first projects I’ll be working on is with InsideClimate News, a Pulitzer Prize-winning, non-profit, non-partisan news organization dedicated to covering climate change, energy and the environment. You can help make it happen. ICN is fundraising, but I’m also eager to hear from you about what’s happening in your American towns that are far from the coasts and the homes of mainstream news outlets. Check out the full description below and then please feel free to contact me via Twitter (@meeratweets) or email.

Your Guide to Finding Middle Ground

Few issues expose the nation’s current ideological divide more starkly than climate change, and we need your support to plunge headfirst into the abyss. We don’t know what we will find there. That’s exactly why we want to send a seasoned and talented writer, Meera Subramanian, on an extended reporting assignment to explore this unknown territory. [Read more…]

to the Commons & beyond: Women’s March for America

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On Friday, Donald J. Trump was sworn into office as America’s 45th president. Websites were wiped clean of mentions of climate change and the country tumbled officially into the realm of #AlternativeFacts. For journalists, and citizens, the operative word going forward is “vigilance.”

On Saturday, upwards of 1.5 million people took to the streets around the country and world in solidarity with Americans who support human rights, equality, science, access to health care, and real facts (over alternative ones).

The Women’s March on Washington had grown into a national and international tidal wave of action. I was in Boston where the Women’s March for America was anticipating a crowd of about 80,000. On the T ride toward the Boston Commons, an ever-growing wave of women (and men) donning pink pussyhats boarded while more rode bikes across the Longfellow Bridge with protest signs lashed to their baskets, and  it began to seem like there might be more in attendance than expected. Many more. Many many more. As Boston Commons filled and cell phone service crashed, there were speeches by Mayor Marty Walsh, Senator Elizabeth Warren, and the Reverend Mariama White-Hammond.

By the time the crowd was to make its one-mile loop for the march, the only possible movement was a slow-mo shuffle. It took hours for everyone to make their way peacefully through the streets. They chanted “This is what democracy looks like!” and sang out Fiona Apple’s “We don’t want you tiny hands anywhere near my underpants!” I saw a little girl belting out “My body! My choice!” and a lone man with a severe face holding a poster: “Trump. Make America Great Again.” Passerbys ignored him.

By this morning, city officials estimated there were at least 125,000 people. [UPDATE: Make that 175,000.]

Inching through the masses, camera in hand, here’s a selection of photos I took during what felt like an historic day:

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