Orion July / August 2012

In the editorial of the first issue of Orion, published in the summer of 1982, then editor-in-chief George Russell wondered about the wisdom of launching yet another nature magazine. There were enough nature magazines, he remarked, that it was worth asking why another was needed. But a letter from the remarkable biologist and humanist René Dubos provided the rationale that he and the other original staff were seeking: while many environmental magazines addressed environmental issues, Dubos wrote, none dealt with the creation of “a broad philosophy of nature.” Thirty years later, Orion has been through three cover-to-cover redesigns, changed its frequency of publication from quarterly to bimonthly, and spawned digital iterations of itself that could scarcely have been imagined three decades ago. Various staff members have come and gone, and…

Andrea Cohen’s most recent poetry collections are Kentucky Derby and Long Division, both from Salmon Poetry. She directs the Blacksmith House Poetry Series in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Robert Cording teaches English and creative writing at College of the Holy Cross in Massachusetts. He is the author of six collections of poems, including, most recently, Walking with Ruskin. Sandra Dal Poggetto’s paintings have been exhibited at the Northwest Museum of Arts & Culture, the Yellowstone Art Museum, the San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art, and elsewhere. She lives and works in Helena, Montana. Alison Hawthorne Deming’s most recent book of poems is Rope. She lives in Tucson, Arizona, and on Grand Manan Island, New Brunswick, Canada. Chris Dombrowski’s second collection of poems, Earth Again, is forthcoming in spring 2013 from Wayne State…

In the March/April 2012 editorial, Orion’s editors describe the artists who may have rendered early Snake River petroglyphs found in Washington State as having lives that were “difficult and brutal,” without “any of the contemporary technology and science that make our lives convenient and comfortable, and even entertaining.” The editors go on to say these early people “lived with unpredictability as to what hardships the next season would bring and which enemy might next appear on the horizon.” This is the sort of writing we find in the earliest historical accounts of non-Western peoples — the seventeenth century French Jesuit writings of North America, for instance — and which lingers on into our day. Yet there are contemporary voices that have begun to reconsider this narrow perspective of preindustrial, and…

Brian Doyle’s “The Creature Beyond the Mountains” (September/October 2011) won the 2011 John Burroughs Award for Outstanding Published Nature Essay. It’s the seventh time an Orion essay has won this award since 2002. Robin Hemley won a Pushcart Prize for his essay “To the Rainforest Room” (May/June 2011). Orion celebrated National Poetry Month in April with a thirtieth-anniversary poetry reading in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, featuring Elizabeth Bradfield, Amy Dryansky, Jessica Greenbaum, and Cecily Parks. It was also the final event of the 2012 Berkshire Festival of Women Writers. In May, Orion was a media sponsor for the annual Mountainfilm festival in Telluride, Colorado. Editor-in-Chief Chip Blake conducted an onstage interview of Orion columnist Sandra Steingraber. Orion also hosted a reader meet-up in Boulder. In June, Orion participated in Aspen Summer…

Lauren Keller New Windsor, Maryland A GLANCE IN ANY DIRECTION from my rooftop yields: house, house, house, house. Raise your head a little, extend your view a bit farther, and you’ll see land. There may be corn here, cows there, but all around are farms. New Windsor, Maryland, makes up a small portion of Carroll County, a chunk of land extending down from the Mason-Dixon that no one seems to have heard of. Apparently acres upon acres of crop and pastures do not bring in very many tourists. Of course, occasionally, a fellow Marylander will know of the county, but only in terms of pejorative generalizations. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve been the butt of a hick joke, my friends spouting lines like, “She can’t read; she’s…

WE’RE USED TO thinking of morality qualitatively, not quantitatively — if it’s wrong to shoot six people, it’s not one-sixth as bad to shoot just one. Robbing eight banks or five banks is more or less the same thing, at least in ethical terms. Al-Qaeda was not twice as hideous because they brought down both World Trade towers — they’d already reached the theoretical upper limit for evil. Sometimes, though, you actually have to do the math. And fossil fuel is the perfect example. Three hundred years ago, when we started burning coal, there was no reason not to. We had no idea yet that it could change the climate — and, more importantly, we were burning such tiny quantities that it didn’t really matter. The ease and mobility it…