Orion November / December 2010

THE HUMAN CAPACITY for denial runs deep. It may have evolved as a protective measure during the relatively short history of our species, giving us the courage to carry on under tough circumstances — when the rains failed to come, or when they came in torrents that flooded our fields. If we could stay focused not on the predicament but on getting out of it, we might live to see another season. But in the first decade of the twenty-first century, as we stood wrapped in our robe of technologies, denial morphed into an almost all-out rejection that a predicament even exists. The majority of us in this country carry on, day by day, without the weight of anything amiss on our shoulders or our consciences. What we choose not…

Brian Adams is a freelance photographer based in Brooklyn and Anchorage. His work has been featured in the New York Times, Newsweek, the Guardian, the Observer, and Time. Ellen Bass is author of The Human Line from Copper Canyon Press and Mules of Love from BOA Editions. She lives in Santa Cruz, California, and teaches at Pacific University. Mark Dowie is an investigative historian and contributing editor of Orion. He lives in Willow Point, California. His story was supported by the Christensen Fund. J Henry Fair is a photographer based in New York City. His work has appeared in National Geographic, Time, and Harper’s. His first book, The Day After Tomorrow: Images of Our Earth in Crisis, is forth-coming from powerHouse Books. Dana Fritz teaches at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln.…

Bill McKibben makes an excellent point in “Duty Dodgers” (July/August 2010). Perhaps our lawmakers are not like us in that they cannot envision working “really, really hard” more than once a year or so. It is hard to face the sort of opposition your garden-variety environmentalist does — though few Congresspeople might be characterized as such. And it is really hard for an elected official to roll up his sleeves continuously because of all the dry cleaning it ultimately involves. As a result, we’ll have to do the heavy lifting McKibben describes. We’ll have to bring our spades and our shovels and our cooperative spirits; we’ll have to hammer in solar panels; and we’ll have to crawl around in the dirt hoping for the best from a world that rarely…

We were pleased to learn that Lia Purpura’s essay “On Coming Back as a Buzzard” (September/October 2009) has been awarded a 2011 Pushcart Prize. In the wake of the National Magazine Award in April, the American Society of Magazine Editors is putting together an anthology of award winners and finalists; Orion finalist Joe wilkins, nominated in the essay category for “Out West” (September/October 2009), was selected to be included. Our multimedia work continues to gain recognition. The Orion original short documentary “Stone River,” about contributor Jon Piasecki, was just accepted to the Port Townsend Film Festival in Port Townsend, Washington, and has been requested by the Wild & Scenic Environmental Film Festival in Nevada City, California. In August, Editor-in-Chief Chip Blake served on the faculty at the Squaw Valley Writers…

Alvilde Falck Oslo, Norway TO LIVE IN THE PLACE where I live, you have to embrace a certain cold rhythm. Half the pace of human heartbeats, it is the clickety-clack of winter boot heels on ice-glazed pavements. My most vivid childhood memory is the feeling of my hair banding into icicles as I walked home from a swimming session through snow so dry it creaked under my feet, brazen sunbeams behind rows of Norway spruce — soon-to-be Christmas trees. The frost and snow were romantic to me. A true Norwegian girl, I skied under nights wild with stars and wrote the name of my childhood sweetheart in the same yard in which I made hundreds of snow angels. Oslo is a blend of forests, sea, and lit city roads like…

I LIVE IN A TEMPERATE redwood rainforest. I see dozens if not hundreds of redwood trees each day. The same used to be true of tadpoles. I’ve seen rivulets so full of tadpoles, they were pushing each other out of the water. All spring I used to see hundreds of tiny egg masses from Pacific tree frogs and dozens of larger masses from northern red-legged frogs. No longer. I was just talking to a herpetologist at U.S. Fish and Wildlife who knows someone who thirty years ago used to see thousands of rough-skinned newts at a time, and who now sees only a couple per year. At one point it would not have been a big deal to see a passenger pigeon either; after all, there were something like six…