URI’s Metcalf Institute kicks off 2026 Annual Public Lecture Series with environmental journalist and alum Meera Subramanian – Rhody Immediately

KINGSTON, R.I. – March 13, 2026 – On Thursday, April 2, the University of Rhode Island Metcalf Institute will host a dialog with Meera Subramanian, award-winning environmental journalist and a 2012 Metcalf alum, about her new e-book, A Better World Is Possible: Global Youth Confront the Climate Crisis, which was created in collaboration with New York Times bestselling illustrator Danica Novgorodoff. Subramanian will likely be in dialog with Metcalf 2015 alum Elizabeth Rush, writer of The Quickening: Antarctica, Motherhood, and Cultivating Hope in a Warming World.

Climate anxiousness doesn’t discriminate by age, and Subramanian’s e-book reveals how younger individuals are grappling with it. Through textual content and illustration, A Better World Is Possible conveys tales of motion and hope within the type of 4 youth activists who’ve witnessed the consequences of local weather change up shut — from wildfires within the Pacific Northwest to floods in Bangladesh — and are available collectively to assist set up the world’s largest local weather protest. All ages can be taught one thing from this younger grownup graphic novel.

“Throughout A Better World, there are interludes where we pause the storytelling and drop in the science, to make it more accessible,” Subramanian stated in an interview with Metcalf. “We go through what fossil fuels are and what extreme weather events are. What is environmental justice? What does religion have to do with it? It gets into the misinformation and disinformation campaigns that have happened. The end interlude is about solutions, so you come out with all the things that can be done right now.”

Subramanian’s work has appeared in publications reminiscent of Nature, The New York Times, The New Yorker, Virginia Quarterly Review, and Orion, the place she is a contributing editor, and her first e-book, A River Runs Again: India’s Natural World in Crisis, was short-listed for the 2016 Orion Book Award. She writes narrative nonfiction about house within the private and planetary sense, in a time of local weather disaster.

“Climate change can feel intimidating, and I think that’s a lot of the reason why people of all ages are less engaged,” Subramanian stated. “It feels really important to try to bridge that divide. And that’s what Metcalf Institute is all about. How do we teach scientists and journalists to communicate all this stuff that’s going on that, we admit, can be complicated? Storytelling, of course, is the way to do that.”

Rush lives in Providence, Rhode Island, and teaches artistic nonfiction at Brown University. Her e-book, Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and her work has appeared in The New York Times, Orion, Guernica, and others.

Both Subramanian and Rush participated in Metcalf Institute’s Climate Change Seminars for Journalists in 2015, and Subramanian was a 2012 fellow in Metcalf’s signature Annual Science Immersion Workshop for Journalists, which returns for its twenty eighth yr this June. “Thanks to the Metcalf fellowship, I was able to connect directly to many of the scientists and scholars whose work provides the backbone of the stories that I write. It also gifted me a community of like-minded writers,” Rush shared. Subramanian added, “Metcalf is a chance for journalists to get their hands dirty and fill their heads with enough science to fuel infinite stories.”

Co-sponsored by URI’s Harrington School of Communication and Media, the Department of English and Creative Writing, the Environmental Arts and Humanities program, and the Environmental Education program, and with particular because of ecoRI, the free and open-to-the-public occasion launches Metcalf’s 2026 Annual Public Lecture Series. It will happen on the University of Rhode Island’s Kingston campus within the Hope Room of the Higgins Welcome Center. Join us for a reception at 5:30 p.m., adopted by the dialog at 6 p.m. Books will likely be out there for buy and writer signing. Registration is inspired for in-person attendees and required to obtain the livestream hyperlink. Learn more at URI’s Metcalf Institute website.