Table of contents for May / June 2010 in Orion

AS THIS ISSUE goes to press, the 2010 Major League Baseball season is getting underway. The new season features story lines that baseball fans have grown used to: the Yankees and Red Sox have outspent everybody, there is much affection but little hope for the Pirates and Royals, and several of the Mets are already on the disabled list. And, of course, there is the now-familiar reality of performance-enhancing drugs. For some years there was a fear that the steroid scandal would reduce interest in baseball, attendance at games, and could even destroy the sport. Fans and media protested that drug usage had turned the game into a farce. But even though the shadow of drugs has not lifted, concern about them seems to be diminishing — baseball is more…

We were delighted to learn that Orion is a finalist for the 2010 National Magazine Award in the category of Essay; the selected essay is Joe Wilkins’s “Out West” (September/October 2009). We are up against stiff competition: National Geographic, The New York Times Sunday Magazine, and Sports Illustrated. The winner will be announced on April 22. In February, Poetry Editor Hannah Fries was a judge at Great Barrington’s Monument Mountain Regional High School for Poetry Out Loud, a national recitation contest created by the National Endowment for the Arts and the Poetry Foundation. Photographer Carolyn Drake has won the Picture of the Year International award in the Science / Natural History Picture Story category for her picture essay “Return to the Center of the World,” published in our March/April 2010…

What if tools grew in your garden? The Growth Assembly project imagines just such a possibility. Designers Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg and Sascha Pohflepp envision the integration of biology and industry to change our conception of how commodities are produced. Their plants are intended to be living robots, engineered to grow product parts that can be harvested and assembled into finished products, replacing mechanical mass production with the diversity and softness of natural growth. Illustrations created in collaboration with Sion Ap Tomos depict the process of making an herbicide sprayer — a tool, Ginsberg and Pohflepp contend, that will be essential to protecting “delicate engineered horticultural machines from older nature.”…

WHY HAVE WE COME to assume that “progress” is always good? The Nazis’ treatment of Jews progressed toward their final solution. And many individual Jews followed a line of progress: get an ID card, move to a ghetto, get on a cattle car, arrive at a camp, work at the camp, go to a gas chamber, get put in an oven, rise as smoke, fall as ashes. A stalker can progress from one stage to another, beginning with e-mails, then phone calls, then moving to the victim’s community, then haunting places the victim might go, then showing up at the victim’s home. Cancer can and usually does progress. Addictions, including cultural addictions, can and often do progress. That’s not to say that progress can’t be good. A friendship or romantic…

A MINER IN THE BOLIVIAN CITY OF POTOSÍ, by the very nature of his endeavor, is a gambler thrust into a savage endgame governed by forces beyond his control: geopolitics, the world economy, nature, and fate. Like Goethe’s Faust, he is obliged to form a pact with the Devil and risk not just his life but his soul for a shot at prosperity. The miners of Potosí have a deep, mystical relationship with Cerro Rico — a mountain that can either make them rich or consume them. In the light of day they are devout Roman Catholics, but upon entering the darkness of the mines they shed all vestiges of Christianity and kneel before a devil-god known as the Tio. His origin is said to be the Quechuan god of…

Sarabande Books, 2010. $15.95, 184 pages. WHEN FLANNERY O’CONNOR insisted that a good short story will resist summary and paraphrase because its mystery and power depend on the reader’s experiencing the author’s creation, she may well have been gazing into a crystal ball and foretelling the work of Alex Taylor. Taylor’s debut collection, The Name of the Nearest River, thwarts any neat categorization. It is realism and tall tale, dirty realism and magical realism, tragedy and comedy. It is North, South, East, and West, the past and the present, and the borderlands in between. It recalls Cormac McCarthy’s dark and violent landscapes, Raymond Carver’s minimalist plots and yearning characters, and Eudora Welty’s photographic eye and comic sensibility. Flowing from the pen of a lesser writer, such confluences might be a…

http://www.orionmagazine.org/oba The Orion Book Award is conferred annually to an outstanding book that is ecological in context and has its foundation in the human relationship with the natural world. Go to orionmagazine.org/oba to learn more about the 2010 Orion Book Award and see pictures from the award ceremony. Announcing the 2010 Winner and Finalists Winner Some of the Dead Are Still Breathing: Living in the Future By Charles Bowden (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) Finalists The Wayfinders: Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in a Modern World By Wade Davis (House of Anansi Press) Rewilding the West: Restoration in a Prairie Landscape By Richard Manning (University of California Press) Reasons for and Advantages of Breathing: Stories By Lydia Peelle (Harper Perennial) The Barbaric Heart: Faith, Money, and the Crisis of Nature By Curtis White…

D. Graham Burnett is an editor at Cabinet magazine in Brooklyn and a faculty member at Princeton University. He is author of Descartes and the Hyperbolic Quest and Trying Leviathan, which won the New York City Book Award. Amy Casey received the 2009 Cleveland Arts Prize for Emerging Artists and a Creative Workforce Fellowship. Her paintings have been exhibited in galleries and institutions nationally and internationally. She is represented by Zg Gallery in Chicago. Karen Glaser’s photography is in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston. In 2011, the Southeast Museum of Photography will feature a survey of her Florida Project. Tony Hoagland’s most recent book of poems is Unincorporated Persons in the Late Honda Dynasty. He received the 2005 Mark…

IT IS ODDLY distressing when someone kidnaps your favorite word. For a long time, I have loved the word “freedom” in all languages: libertadea, la libertad, liberty. They shine, these words, they glow in the dark like fireflies. But, stealthily, “freedom” and “liberty” have been seized by promoters of a singular kind of freedom: “free” trade, the freedom of some individuals to consume, the freedom of companies to pollute, damage, and destroy. Liberté, which for me had always been the French revolutionary twin of egalité, is held hostage by Libertarianism, one of the most anti-egalitarian of all political positions. Explicitly espousing freedom as its cause, a Libertarian movement in the UK now campaigns for the expansion of airports and the “right to fly,” deliberately pitching itself against climate change campaigners.…

JANUARY 7, 2008, 8:03 A.M. — thirteen minutes past sunrise but who can tell. Drizzles sketch the winter grayscale, slates to charcoals to umbers: sky, water, island, shore. I’m taking my usual walk along the riverfront path, the river today all drift-silt, rain-mottled skeins of mocha. But soon my eyes are drawn up to glass and steel. The John Ross turns its thirty-one-story oval elegantly sideways to the view, imperial, convincing. Its neighbor, Atwater Place, is all Bauhaus severity, but two other towers, Meriwethers West and East (where I’m staying), are faced in granite of a soft, almost buttery color. Is this really a “neighborhood,” as the real-estate brochures insist? Four condo towers in varying states of habitation and emptiness, two more half-built, and a medical high-rise linked by its…

[1] THE TERM HAS BECOME so widely used that it is in danger of meaning nothing. It has been applied to all manner of activities in an effort to give those activities the gloss of moral imperative, the cachet of environmental enlightenment. “Sustainable” has been used variously to mean “politically feasible,” “economically feasible,” “not part of a pyramid or bubble,” “socially enlightened,” “consistent with neoconservative small-government dogma,” “consistent with liberal principles of justice and fairness,” “morally desirable,” and, at its most diffuse, “sensibly far-sighted.” [2] NATURE WILL DECIDE what is sustainable; it always has and always will. The reflexive invocation of the term as cover for all manner of human acts and wants shows that sustainability has gained wide acceptance as a longed-for, if imperfectly understood, state of being. [3]…

ROMESH WAKES FROM THE DREAM — a catch of fish spilling onto a pier, endless pour of slick, shining scales, beautiful in that spilling, their iridescent shimmering. No sign of anyone doing the spilling, just the spilling itself going on endlessly. Then the image dissolves, and he’s awake and remembers the prisoners. The suffering of the incarcerated obsesses him. He’s convinced that if the powers that be would give each guy in lockup the $22,600 it costs to keep him there for a year, each one could fund his own start-up and thrive. It could work, if only a bold warden would try it. You’re an idealist, Beatrice once chided, stepping out of her steaming bath. No, he’d countered. I’m a visionary! The world needs visionaries. What are life forms…

ON A CLEAR, COLD MORNING in the Bronx, I am standing in front of a giant boulder labeled Deegan Rock, feeling — I have to confess — annoyed. This was supposed to be the starting point of the Tree Museum, a public art installation by Katie Holten commissioned by the Bronx Museum of Arts in honor of the one hundredth anniversary of the Grand Concourse Boulevard. The famous boulevard starts just behind me, near an undistinguished BP station and an overpass, and according to Google Maps, the first of the installation’s hundred marked trees is supposed to be right here. It all looked very straightforward when I went to the Tree Museum’s website before heading to the Bronx. You can start anywhere along the Grand Concourse! the website assured me.…

Free Press, 2010. $25, 272 pages. GOOD LITERATURE envelops the reader in a whole world; it invites us to be visually, verbally, and sensually present in that place. While absorbed in a good book, we lose ourselves to extraordinary possibilities and come back to our quotidian lives a little richer, a lot more compassionate. Birdology is, plain and simple, good literature. After you set the book down and step back into your daily chores, you’ll notice a tinge of difference in just about everything you perceive. For instance, by now, it’s fairly common knowledge that birds are dinosaurs. But Sy Montgomery renders this abstract notion palpable. When we interact with birds, she reminds us, “we are communing across a gap of 300 million years”—making birds a little like stars, whose…

Down East Books, 2009. $21.95, 192 pages. LIKE BEADS IN a wampum belt, writers carefully stitch together words to create images, but what is conveyed by a solitary word? To Kerry Hardy, a single word can reveal important connections between people and the landscape in which they live — more specifically between the Wabanaki and their ancestral homeland in Maine. Hardy, whose background is more in ecology than ethnography, unexpectedly found himself delving into indigenous culture and language through a simple observation and question. Why did his road in Rockland, Maine, “wiggle” when so many of the town’s other streets ran in straight lines? That question led to his discovery of numerous old Indian paths that radiated throughout Maine from a trading post established in 1628 by Pilgrims at Cushnoc,…

ON THE AFTERNOON that I am not offered the job that I do not want, I take my three sons and a friend to wade in the creek near our house. It is the first day of summer vacation, and the children are as ecstatic as I am numb. The phone call came before lunch. They had offered the job to someone else, but thanked me for applying. Thank you, I understand, I say, and yes, thanks again, and goodbye. I do not cry, of course, because it does not make sense to cry about not getting a job one does not want. We lower ourselves into the creek by stepping on the ropy roots of trees. The water runs fast and cold around our calves. The boys lean over…

Amy Irvine’s essay “Spectral Light” (January/February 2010) is a beautifully written and honest account of not only an event but also the challenge to all of us to cross the borders of our worldviews. In my native Alaska, we are all too familiar with the difficulty of balancing the old and the new. I do take issue with Irvine’s statement that “we are back on [the] menu.” We have never been on [the] menu. While there are clearly incidents resulting from encroachment on habitat, our self-exclusion from this habitat is the only thing that has allowed us to suffer under any delusions that we are not still prey. The necropsy performed on the bear that mauled the two Alaskans mentioned in Irvine’s piece, who the authorities said “did everything right,”…

Whales and dolphins live in a rich acoustic world that is often inaccessible to us because it’s underwater in an ocean under aural siege, and sometimes far beyond the range of human hearing. They can be experienced in a different form through the work of Mark Fischer, who makes digital artworks out of whale sounds. An engineer who previously worked for defense and communications companies, Fischer turns these sounds into images using a technical process called wavelet analysis, which is the same kind of magic that compresses your photos for e-mailing as JPEG files. The parameters of this mathematical process can be adjusted for greater simplicity or more wild beauty — Fischer has chosen the latter course to bring us pictures of amazingly complex symmetry. In this sense his images…

The deer they said would be there at dawnnever appearedbut the dawn mist instead. Always something insteadlike the little brown pebble on the porchthat turned out to be a frog. Things that arrive on their ownlike the domed Conestogas of afternoon cloud,fat as senators from Mississippi. How there is always a truth, and then underneath thatanother somehowmore elusive truth — All before the pell-mell education of dyingwhen things will be fast but at the same time slow,like the loud dripping of a clock. Instead of the quiet you never noticedhailstones of rain on the roof,after which you could hear the wind. So praise instead;praise the word instead like a treetrunkthat falls across your path. Like a bridge that leadsaway from your destination. You had expected to be dead by now,or…

It is the day of leavingwhen spiderlingsin orders of magnitudehatch and from inward silkunfurl toward a new godcaught by the windand I walk by the silk curtainthe strands that came from a body.It is a shining worldand I think of being attached once from the bellyand what would happen if I could unravel somethingfrom myself. I think it would not be the storyof how it was the spider who crossed waterto bring fire to my peoplein the old world, our first stories,or about the length and brightness of our rivershining in the ribbon of light it createdbut about the cave up there in the high mountainswith the animals made of willow twigsthere before any of us.They are tied with the string of our grassesas if they were saying, we are…

In this hour, let us grant to each other the grace that is ours to give.In each other, let us see ourselves, and ourselves again, That all the times we have looked at our faces in a mirrorShould have added up—each face our own, but a reminder as well We are more than ourselves, that our eyes can seeInto that silver world as far as, and beyond, what we understand. Looking into a mirror, into a window pane, into the water of a lake,A photograph—we are here and over there as well. In that moment All things are more possible. In this hour of ourselves, you and I,One stronger than the other, let us speak evenly, and make plain The hope that all this time has held us. Let us…

Times Books, 2010. $24.00, 272 pages. THE PLANET WE LIVE ON is changing so fast — and so relentlessly — that, according to Bill McKibben, it needs a new name. McKibben dubs our increasingly hot, hungry, and disease-prone globe “Eaarth.” Twenty years ago, McKibben wrote the first book about global warming for a popular audience. The End of Nature was prescient. In the late eighties, it was hard to find tangible evidence of climate change; nevertheless, McKibben saw the dangers ahead and warned the world. Now, as he documents in Eaarth, the evidence of climate change is so overwhelming there’s no avoiding it (although denialists still try to). The fire season in California is nearly three months longer than it used to be; the glaciers in Montana’s Glacier National Park…

Knopf, 2010. $24.95, 256 pages. IT IS FEBRUARY, snowy, and twenty degrees below zero when Laura Bell, recently graduated from college, takes up residence in a sheep wagon in northwest Wyoming. “I’d headed west to find refuge in the empty spaces of this land,” she writes, recalling her decision to relocate from Kentucky in the 1970s. “I didn’t think I knew how to live in the world.” In this deeply felt memoir, Bell traces the journey she’s made — back and forth across Wyoming’s Bighorn Basin, to Utah, and then back — in search of belonging and home. http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0307272885?ie=UTF8&tag=oriomaga-20 Her story begins “between timberline and sky, [where] drifts of snow gave way to pools of wild sweet arnica and sheep spread across the earth like clouds run to ground.” Seeking…

EDUCATION IN A CHANGING CLIMATE Teaching and talking about climate change in the classroom is becoming increasingly complex as both climate and cultural issues accelerate. Join Orion and Unity College August 1–4, 2010, in Unity, Maine, for a workshop offering powerful and practical ways to reach and educate audiences about climate change. See orionmagazine.org for details. VISIT THE READER’S CORNER Join the expanding conversation about books and media at orionmagazine.org. You’ll find new content posted every few days about books Orion editors are reading, related reviews and links, and the opportunity to share your own thoughts and recommendations. A DIGITAL EDITION OF ORION Offered at a subscription price of $19/year, the digital edition of Orion is delivered by e-mail, can be searched and saved, and is easy to share with…