Hello! I’m Meera Subramanian, a journalist writing the series Finding Middle Ground: Conversations Across America for InsideClimate News. Please AMA!

Hi there! I’m Meera Subramanian, a freelance journalist writing the series Finding Middle Ground: Conversations Across America for InsideClimate News.

From Georgia peach farmers facing a failed harvest after a too-warm winter to a West Virginia town recovering from a devastating flood, I’ve been exploring how conservative Americans are considering climate change impacts in their own lives. I’ve met Wisconsin dogsledders adjusting to racing on dry land when the snows don’t come and students in West Texas thrilled about their future as wind turbine technicians.

I’ve sought to open conversations in the most red-leaning parts of the country about climate change — an issue that’s become so deeply politicized — and found a complicated middle ground that most Americans inhabit when it comes to changes happening to the places that sustain them. I’ve listened, questioned and listened again, inside city halls and orchards, gun shops and churches.

I want to hear from you. Please AMA about the complex ways people are thinking (or not) about climate change and its impacts

What happens when the crop your family has been growing for five generations is failing because temperatures are rising? When your favorite trout-fishing rivers are closed too many days of the year because there’s no water? When is the weird weather too much to explain away? When do the storms come too close to home? What to make of climate cycles that should be making things cooler, not warmer? Are humans tweaking with Mother Nature?

I’m honored that the series was a finalist for the Scripps Howard Award. You can find more about me and my work here.

My approach to writing is to bring together science and storytelling. Most of my questions revolve around understanding how people are connected to the natural world in which they live. This has led me from the East Coast to the West, where I lived in a barn in Oregon for many years, and back to the East, where I got a graduate degree in journalism from NYU. For the past dozen years, I’ve been freelancing, my writing appearing in Nature, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Orion, and others, as well as anthologies such as Best American Science and Nature Writing and Best Women’s Travel Writing. I also wrote a book: A River Runs Again, India’s Natural World in Crisis (PublicAffairs 2015), about how ordinary South Asians are facing multiple environmental crises. Before I began the Middle Ground series for InsideClimate News last year, I was a Knight Science Journalism fellow at MIT.

Please join me in a conversation, and ask me anything about what I’ve experienced in my reporting, as well as share your thoughts on what you’ve been seeing in your life related to climate change.