Orion January / February 2012

AS ORION ENTERS its thirtieth anniversary year, it seems noteworthy that Tim DeChristopher (interviewed on page 41 of this issue) is also thirty. Tim, a climate activist who is currently serving a two-year prison sentence for falsely trying to outbid oil and gas companies at an auction of leases on public lands, was born at the same time that Orion’s first editors were planning the inaugural issue of the magazine in their little office in New York City. In at least one sense, Tim’s life reflects the way the movement for nature has changed in the time since Orion was founded. The degree and kinds of danger humans face, and the level of urgency felt around that danger, is fundamentally different for Tim and his generation than that experienced by…

Laura El-Tantawy is an Egyptian photographer living in Egypt and the UK. A freelance photographer since 2006, her work has been exhibited all over the world. Peter Friederici teaches journalism at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff. He is the author, most recently, of Nature’s Restoration: People and Places on the Front Lines of Conservation. Karen Glaser’s Dark Sharks / Light Rays was exhibited in its entirety at PHOTO Gallery in Oakland, California. Selections from the series will be on display at the Corden Potts Gallery in San Francisco in January 2012. Lisa M. Hamilton’s writing and photography focus on agriculture and rural communities. She is the author of Deeply Rooted: Unconventional Farmers in the Age of Agribusiness and Farming to Create Heaven on Earth. Her most recent project is “Real…

The connection between education and democracy cited by Erik Reece in “The Schools We Need” (September/October 2011) is, of course, not a new concept. Poor education leads to poorer governance, and that leads to worsening education. I believe we are already caught in that positive feedback loop, and one need only follow today’s political discourse to see the evidence. But I disagree with Reece that there “doesn’t seem to be a lack of solutions, but rather an absence of will.” Our problems come not from a lack of solutions or a lack of will, but from an inability to acknowledge failure. Government has already implemented “solutions” to improve public education; more testing, No Child Left Behind, and voucher programs are among the damaging examples. We will have to seek different…

Orion columnist Sandra Steingraber, as well as the composer John Luther Adams, who has written for Orion, are among the recipients of the seventeenth annual Heinz Awards, which recognize individuals implementing workable solutions to the world’s problems through education, research, and innovative thinking. Sandra announced she would devote her prize money to the fight against hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” in upstate New York, where she lives with her family. As part of the Mountainfilm World Tour, the Orion produced short film eel*water*rock*man was featured at Lincoln Center in New York City, and at the Bioneers Conference in San Rafael, California, in October. For more about the film, please visit orionmagazine.org/multimedia. Also in October, Managing Editor Andrew Blechman traveled to Miami to attend the annual Society of Environmental Journalists conference. And…

Laura Kerr The Santa Rita Mountains, Arizona COYOTES ARE COMMON where I live. Lately, they’ve left mounds of mesquite-filled scat on the dirt road and down in the wash that spreads across our swath of the Sonoran Desert. Since the monsoons began, I’ve twice stood in the front doorway and found a reddish-brown coyote in the shadow of a large mesquite looking in my direction. Not at me exactly, of whom he is appropriately wary, but with curiosity toward Christy, our furry elder dog, who both times has been asleep. One morning I gazed out the front window to see the coyote’s butt facing the house, its tail raised high in the air. “Christy,” I said, “you have a visitor.” But the coyote departed quickly, leaving only a scented message.…

BUD PICKED ME UP at ten-thirty every night. We had to be at the campground by eleven, to start our shift among the slumbering campers sweltering beside the Southern California bay waters, hoping for some sea breezes amid the drought-parched palms. We checked in at the drop gate to be inspected by the guard, a Samoan roughly the size of a pro wrestler. He seemed to have forgotten our faces each night, and gave us grief — he being the last line of defense between the paying campers and the street scum and “illegal aliens” circling the perimeter. He eased up when I started asking him about his faith — hearing about Bahai was a more pleasant way to kick off the evening than flashlit interrogations. The campground was in…