By Joanna Detz / ecoRI News staff
This story was originally published in EcoRI News, a publication partner of Ocean State Stories.
SOUTH KINGSTOWN — For a while, Meera Subramainan and Danica Novgorodoff had been moving in the same social circles in New York City. But at a book event for a mutual friend in 2020, just before the COVID-19 pandemic, the two fell into a conversation that would prove serendipitous.
At the time, Novgorodoff, an illustrator, was working on a graphic novel about climate activists, but she confessed to Subramanian she was getting bogged down trying to distill and communicate the scientific research around climate change. Making sense of complex science for a lay audience was Subramanian’s area of expertise as an author and climate journalist, and she offered her assistance.
The two kept talking through the early days of pandemic lockdown, and, ultimately, Novgorodoff brought Subramanian on as a writer for the project. The results of their collaboration came to life in book form earlier this month.
In their new graphic nonfiction novel, A Better World Is Possible, published by Macmillan Publishers, Novgorodoff and Subramanian recount experiences from their own lives and the lives of four young activists as they organize the world’s largest climate protest. Interspersed with the personal stories are interludes that explore climate science, environmental justice, biodiversity, and climate solutions.
For Subramanian, who now calls West Barnstable, Mass., home, working in collaboration was an adjustment, but a welcome one.
“As a journalist, I’m usually working solo, and it’s been really great doing this collaboration,” Subramanian said. “It was really fun and very challenging to figure out how to digest all of the big stuff that we wanted to convey into this sort of haiku format.”
The two worked over the course of several years to finalize the manuscript for the book before Novgorodoff even began working on her hand-drawn illustrations in watercolor.
When they were first envisioning the story arc of the book, they knew they needed a narrative anchor. Novgorodoff had gone with her 2-month-old baby to the September 2019 Global Climate Strike march in New York City. Subramanian thought the protest was a great centerpiece.
“There was so much momentum at that moment. Greta Thunberg had sailed across the Atlantic to arrive in the city. That climate march ended up being — they think it was — the largest climate march in the world,” Subramanian said.
In fact, there were an estimated 250,000 people on the streets of New York City for that march, which was primarily youth led.
Once they decided to center the book’s narrative on the protest, Subramanian and Novgorodoff set out finding real youth activists who had been a part of that protest to feature in the graphic novel.
“I just became the journalist. I found the YouTube [recording of the] event and listened to the whole thing, writing down every speaker that was there, and looking through newspaper articles to figure out who was quoted, because there were lots of people who were not on stage, who were still part of the part of the organizing,” Subramanian recounted.
She and Novgorodoff came up with a short list of people, and they started reaching out to them. Four youth rose to the top of the list.
The four youth activists featured in the book are: Xiye Bastida, who grew up in central Mexico, Jamie Margolin from Washington, Rebeca Sabnam, who was born in Bangladesh and raised in New York City, and Shiv Soin, son of Indian immigrants, who was born and raised in New Jersey.
Since 2019, the four have grown up and continue to advocate for the climate. Margolin has started an environmental nonprofit called Zero Hour. Bastida is the executive director of Re-Earth Initiative, a global youth-led organization. Soin co-founded TREEage, a vehicle to elect climate justice champions and inform climate justice policy in New York City. Sabnam is a Columbia University student and advocate with Cafeteria Culture, a nonprofit that transforms school cafeterias into youth action hubs that address food waste and plastic pollution and promote local composting.
“They’re just so amazing and inspirational,” Subramainian said. “They’ve got a lot of adversity being handed to them. It’s incredibly unfair, but they’re responding powerfully.”
One section of the book that stood out in Subramanian’s mind was the section on eco grief.
In that section, she and Novgorodoff are talking about needing to help each other and support each other. “That is part of the climate fight — finding community and finding people who care about this with you and knowing that you’re not alone. And Danica drew this panel of her reaching out of the square of the panel for my hand and lifting me up into it … it captured so much,” Subramanian said.
Even in the face of intense eco grief, Subramanian tries to remain what she describes as a “cynical yet dogmatic optimist.”
“There are all these tipping points that we seem to be approaching — or that are already underway, and they’re scary,” she said. “But I also believe in human tipping points. There are so many times when we think that nothing can change, and then suddenly, radical change happens really, really quickly.
“Nobody thought the Berlin Wall was going to fall; nobody thought that all these communist regimes were just going to implode because of people rising up. Things happen when we least expect them. I’m just kind of holding on to that. And so I stand by, stand by the title. A better world is possible. It’s up to us to see if that can be.”
Note: Meera Subramanian, a Metcalf Institute alumna, is the guest speaker at the Metcalf Institute’s Spring Lecture scheduled for April 2 at 5:30 p.m. at the University of Rhode Island in Kingston. Author and fellow Metcalf alumna Elizabeth Rush will be moderating the conversation. “A Better World Is Possible” is available at abetterworldthebook.org.
The Metcalf Institute is an advertiser with ecoRI News.
