Led by the story

When reporting on climate change, freelance journalist Meera Subramanian expects—and hopes—to be surprised.

“I usually have a working hypothesis,” Subramanian said. “But the best stories are the ones where you get on the ground, you start talking to people, and it just totally transforms.”

She’s seen that unpredictability even in her own environmental work. Subramanian, a panelist at the Feb. 11 “Climate Is Every Story” event, began her career in a non-profit research center in Oregon. There, she helped build and design clean-energy wood cookstoves aimed at making cooking cleaner and safer for particularly women in the Global South.

Later, after she had become a writer, Subramanian visited India on a reporting trip, seeking to cover what she expected would be the positive impacts of those very cookstoves. But what she found challenged her preconceptions.“The story ended up being that nobody was using them,” Subramanian said. “The hypothesis totally went out the window.”

For Subramanian, that experience spoke to the reason why she left climate non-profit work to embark on a decorated journalism career that has produced a broad portfolio of articles and essays and two books. “It basically felt like I was being constrained by nonprofit mission statements,” Subramanian said. “I felt like all the stories were way more complicated.”

So in 2004, she moved from rural Oregon to New York City, where she earned a graduate degree in journalism from New York University. Even in an urban setting, Subramanian kept a tight eye on the natural world. She started reporting on falcons, letting their flight patterns show her around the city.

“The way I was learning the city was by climbing towers with a biologist, looking for the remains that falcons had left,” Subramanian said. “It was just a whole back door into a place and a reminder that even places as wildly urban as New York City can have this wild element.”

After grad school, falcons gave way to vultures—a beat Subramanian has been on for 20 years (she has published stories about vultures in no less than 11 outlets). In award-winning articles, she found that in South Asia, contamination of cow meat in South Asia led to the collapse of the vulture population there—a change that led to a bevy of harmful effects, from the spread of disease to a mass increase in the feral dog population.

It was a story of unintended consequences, Subramanian said. “You had this 99% collapse of a population in a decade—-unbelievable avian collapse—and a whole part of the ecosystem just taken out.”

Subramanian sees animals as a fascinating starting point for climate reporting in that they are both affected by the climate and agents of change in their environment. The reciprocity of effects between the animal and its environment illustrates how deep-reaching the climate issue is. “How does one animal, in this particular case a vulture, open up a whole window into showing how much we rely on the environment in ways that we don't even pay attention to?” she said.

As a freelance journalist, Subramanian finds that being unaffiliated with a single publication lets her tell different kinds of stories on the same beat. “I wrote about plastics for Orion magazine, so that was very lyrical, and I got to go in all sorts of fun directions,” Subramanian said. “Then I also wrote a piece for Nature about what was happening with the global plastics treaty, which was very much, ‘How do we quantify where plastic is going all over the planet.’”

And her newest work is an achievement in that same creative freedom. A Better World is Possible: Global Youth Confront the Climate Crisis, coming out this March, is a nonfiction graphic novel written in collaboration with illustrator Danica Novgorodoff. It centers on a group of teen climate activists at the 2019 Climate Strike in New York City, all of whom had been moved to activism after experiencing extreme weather events.

“Kids are growing up in a world where they're being shaped by the effects of climate change—right now, here,” Subramanian said. “When you've gone through a flood when you're five years old…that shapes your entire worldview.”

Subramanian hopes the graphic novel format will help “get information into young people's minds and hands in a way that both makes them recognize the gravity of the situation, but also empowers them to know what the solutions are,” she said.

Subramanian said she was inspired by her young subjects’ willingness to confront the biggest questions of the climate crisis—the same messy nuances that have been the focus of her journalism career. “The biggest both inspiration and heartbreak at the same time was recognizing that for this whole generation that's coming up, [climate change] is here and it's now. And what are we going to do about it?”