Table of contents for July / August 2012 in Orion

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…

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…

I tiptoed out across the deadfall, measuring each step with eyes fixed on a boulder at the other shore so as not to glance down at the rushing channel of river beneath me. Closing in on the inverted bough on which my client had snagged his trout fly, reaching to untangle the monofilament leader from ponderosa needles, I did not think: I have worked for the past thirteen summers as a river guide and I know better. I did not think of water’s force, its raw and muscled energy, the way a cliff-borne hydraulic can suck a drift boat into a frothing eddy despite an experienced oarsman’s best, the way the Lower Clark Fork, pulsing in late May with every runoff tributary in the basin, can heave enormous cottonwood trunks…

shoulder heavy bison cascade of running horsesrhino horn repeats dance like a book of stillsmade motion picture as pages flipvulva coaled on pendulous rock these are the inner lifeits demands on the human hand that madethe early mind find time for virtuosity hard won then as nowby quarry in a lightless place where bears had markedrock walls while sharpening their claws so art found shelter thererepeating the animal’s movements but clawless and thinkingI am that and I am not that the animala self-willed power in the mind that containssomething the artist hungers for a self-willed world withinthat disrupts where the mind thought it was goingsomething unsettling that moves the line so the inner can be seen…

Diane Ackerman Tamar Adler Julia Alvarez Marc Bekoff Charles Bowden Joseph Bruchac Deborah Cadbury Craig Childs Yvon Chouinard Anthony Doerr Riane Eisler Severine von Tscharner Fleming Nikki Giovanni Jane Hirshfield Paul Kingsnorth Elizabeth Kolbert Andy Kroll James Howard Kunstler Richard Louv Rubén Martínez Christof Mauch Ralph Nader Helena Norberg-Hodge Andrew Revkin Carl Safina M. Sanjayan Pete Seeger Simran Sethi Ginger Strand Terry Tempest Williams Buy the book at www.orionmagazine.org/books Downloadable teacher’s guide available.…

GROWING UP ON THE PLAINS of eastern Montana, I saw my fair share of westerns. We didn’t have a VCR when I was a boy, and my mother didn’t allow us to watch much TV, but westerns were part of the general atmosphere. The bachelor farmer who lived across the river played them for my brother and me when he baby-sat us. We watched them at school on holidays or when we had substitutes. I have to say, though, I never much liked westerns. They didn’t fit what I saw in the western world around me. Though my mother was a widow raising three children, she didn’t need rescue; she did fine on her own. My grandfather, who quit school after the eighth grade to cowboy for a living, wasn’t…

For thirty years, Orion has been a meeting place for people who seek a conversation about the environment rooted in beauty, imagination, and hope. The community of ideas and people that Orion has gathered together over the last three decades has been made possible by support from readers in the form of subscriptions and donations. Now Orion is depending on you to help sustain another thirty years of conversation and community. To discuss making a gift of stock or securities, an outright gift, or a planned gift to Orion’s 30th Anniversary Fund, please contact Madeline Cantwell, Managing Director, at 413/528-4422 ext. 28, or at mcantwell@orionmagazine.org; or use the envelope bound into this copy of Orion to request more information.…

WINNER The View from Lazy Point: A Natural Year in an Unnatural World By Carl Safina (Henry Holt and Company) FINALISTS Fire Season: Field Notes from a Wilderness Lookout By Philip Connors (Ecco) Oil on Water By Helon Habila (W. W. Norton & Company) Swamplandia! By Karen Russell (Alfred A. Knopf) Raising Elijah: Protecting Our Children in an Age of Environmental Crisis By Sandra Steingraber (Da Capo Press) The Orion Book Award is given annually to a book that addresses the human relationship with the natural world in a fresh, thought-provoking, and engaging manner. Go to www.orionmagazine.org/oba to learn more.…

I WAS SO SMALL I could barely see over the top of the back seat of the black Cadillac my father bought with his Indian Oil money. He polished and tuned his car daily. I wanted to see everything. This was around the time I acquired language, when something happened that changed my relationship to the spin of the world. It changed even the way I looked at the sun. This suspended integer of time probably escaped notice in my parents’ universe, which informed most of my vision in the ordinary world. They were still omnipresent gods. We were driving somewhere in Tulsa, the northern border of the Creek Nation. I don’t know where we were going or where we had been, but I know the sun was boiling the…

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…

JUÁREZ COULD NO LONGER WAIT FOR US, and so, sad-eyed, the city crossed the threshold and began carving out a future while we pretended it did not exist. It became a city of assembly plants, then murder, and, finally, a city where crime is the economy. We have always believed we owned the future. Juárez spits in the eye of our arrogance. Juárez today is full of poor people. Its location was determined by geography — 348 years ago it was the choice crossing of the Rio Grande and linked central Mexico to its imperial outpost in Santa Fe. But the border city we see and its scale only exist because of an international boundary created when the U.S. stole half of Mexico during the Mexican War. Juárez has limited…

CORPORATISM is the dominant controlling framework of the U.S.government’s functions, budgets, domestic and foreign politics, and appointments. Giant multinational corporations are willing to spend whatever it takes on electoral campaigns and to devote their command of mass media toward corporatizing our society. These corporate giants, as artificial legal entities, have almost all the constitutional rights of real people. In addition, their ever-expanding privileges and immunities make a mockery of equal justice under the law between real people and the ExxonMobils, Pfizers, Aetnas, Monsantos, Citibanks, and Lockheed Martins. Corporatism — that is, the corporate state — and democracy are also incompatible. According to the most celebrated free-market philosophers and theorists, corporatism, with its concentration of power, is incompatible with both conservatism and liberalism. In a message to Congress in 1938 to…

BY CHERYL STRAYED Alfred A. Knopf, 2012. $25.95, 315 pages. GRIEF TAKES UNEXPECTED TURNS and never unfolds according to predictable timetables. Such is the case in Cheryl Strayed’s heartbreaking new memoir, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail. After her mother dies within months of being diagnosed with cancer, Strayed goes on a wrecking-ball tour of her life involving the usual suspects — sex, drugs, and divorce. We first encounter her somewhere high on a mountain ridge in northern California, thirty-eight days into a haphazardly planned solo hike of a portion of the Pacific Crest Trail (1,100 miles, from Mojave, California, to Ashland, Oregon). In the opening scene, the narrator watches one of her hefty Raichle hiking boots (which she has removed to attend to her battered…

BY NATHANIEL PERRY American Poetry Review, 2011. $14, 60 pages. NATHANIEL PERRY’S Nine Acres is quiet, thoughtful, and often profound in its simplicity. In fifty-two lucid poems reminiscent of the work of Robert Frost and Perry’s former professor, Maurice Manning, Perry’s speaker practices husbandry in every sense: as husband to his wife and father to a young son, as a steward of resources, and as a man learning to farm in rural Southside Virginia. Like Manning’s recent book Bucolics, in which a man who works the land addresses God (as “Boss”) in each poem, Nine Acres is centered on one subject and uses the same form for each poem. Each poem is four stanzas long, with four lines in each stanza, and four beats in each line. Poet Marie Howe,…

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…

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…

THE ANTI-WAR POET AND SOLDIER Siegfried Sassoon reports that toward the end of World War I, Winston Churchill told him that war is the normal occupation of man. Challenged, Churchill amended this to “war — and gardening.” Are the two opposites? Some agriculture is a form of war, whether it’s clearcutting rainforest, stealing land from the poor, contaminating the vicinity, or exploiting farmworkers, and some of our modern pesticides are descended from chemical warfare breakthroughs for the First World War. But gardening represents a much wider spectrum of human activity than war, and if war is an act of the state, gardening is far, far more ancient than city-states (if not nearly so old as squabbling). Can it be the antithesis of war, or a cure for social ills, or…

HOLLIS HAD NEVER CALLED on anyone’s god until the day he watched a deer fall through the sky. It happened as he was driving his minivan along a four-lane highway, Joel snoring beside him. They had just hauled a leather love seat to Lexington, only to find that it wouldn’t fit through the doorway of his daughter’s condo, so Hollis had to unscrew each wooden foot while Cheryl kept rubbing at the scuff on the doorway and sighing like her mother. Hollis was paying Joel sixty bucks for his pains, a sum that seemed adequate for a three-hour job. Joel’s mother had volun-teered him for the excursion, and Hollis had been grateful to her, having heard admirable things about Indian work ethic. The only thing Joel worked hard at was…

In the corner of an antique storehanging by a nail, I bumped intothis water-stained, frayed-edge chart.Ingenious at getting twenty-six birds—from chimney swift to chipping sparrow,all life-sized — on 27 x 42 inches,Fuertes painted his stiff birds posedin characteristic attitudeson a convenient streamside dead tree, on reeds,and on the wing in the background sky. After I bought the chart and hung itnear the stairs, I found almost all twenty-sixare right here, going byat various times outside my window.Seeing the little golden crown on a kinglet,or the tail-splash of red that sets offthe catbird’s silky grey, puts me in good cheer.And there’s the sudden paradise of intimacywhen I turn my binoculars toward a house wrennesting under the skewed lid of my propane tank. None of this is life-changingor halts the numbing dailiness…

I TRAVEL THE WORLD giving talks. It’s part of my work, and I like surprising an audience, so my hosts usually know not to ask what I’m going to say. Often, though, they can’t help offering oblique warnings about third-rail topics in their region. “Thrilled you made it,” they say when I land, “can’t wait to hear you tonight, but maybe you might avoid _____” and here insert “wolves” in Wyoming or “climate change” in Alabama. It’s a bit of a game to me to figure out what is going to be verboten where. When I was invited to speak at an environmental film festival in Telluride, Colorado, last year, the warning was straightforward and oddly specific. Stay clear, my contact said, of talking about the Gunnison prairie dog, a…

A COUPLE OF YEARS AGO, my husband, Bill, and I took two trips far into the interior of rural Haiti from my native Dominican Republic. The first trip occurred six months before the earthquake to attend the wedding of a young Haitian friend, Piti; the second one took place six months after the earthquake, when we returned with Piti and his young wife and their baby to check in on their families. I did not know that the poorest country in this hemisphere, and one of the poorest in the world, would teach me so much about how to live sustainably and joyfully on this planet. Of the many lessons learned was how little we really need, especially when we share what we have with others. Take the wedding we…

THE KIDS have been up since seven-thirty playing computer games and watching cartoons. What a travesty for them to be inside on such a beautiful day, you harrumph to yourself. On the refrigerator, you notice the schedule of events from the nearby nature center. “Let’s Get Face to Face with Flowers,” it beckons. Just the thing! It’s a sparkly May morning. Buds are bursting. There’s a warm breeze full of the aromatic scent of the woods just waking up. You trundle the kids into the minivan. They despondently consent. “Do we have to do a program? Programs are boring,” the older one complains. But as soon as you pull into the parking lot at Happy Hills Nature Center, their faces brighten. They fling the sliding door open and scamper down…

BY GINGERSTRAND University of Texas Press, 2012. $25, 264 pages. SETTING OUT TO WRITE a history of the stupendous U.S. interstate highway system, Ginger Strand took an offramp into one of history’s darker rest areas, where she encountered the disturbing social repercussions of the biggest civil engineering project the world has ever seen. She discovered it produced a particular species of psychopathic killer that was the perfect expression of what is most sordid in America’s collective soul. Like any ecological system, the U.S. interstates offered niches for specialized organisms to thrive in, and the modern-day serial killer found nirvana in the mastery of vast and impersonal distances offered by the endless highway. Strand’s lively and hugely intelligent narrative, Killer on the Road: Violence and the American Interstate, begins with the…

BY MICHAEL SHUMAN Chelsea Green Publishing, 2012. $17.95, 288 pages. THE FINANCIAL COLLAPSE and the Occupy movement that has surfaced in its wake have raised important questions about the nature of the corporate-led global economy. Today more than any time in recent memory, people are considering solutions that address not just the symptoms of our multiple crises, but their underlying causes. For that reason, Michael Shuman’s new book, Local Dollars, Local Sense: How to Shift Your Money from Wall Street to Main Street and Achieve Real Prosperity, is the right book at the right time. The changes in investment and spending advocated by Shuman form part of an overall shift toward what many are now calling “the new economy.” At its core, the new economy is about relocalization — bringing…

BY AUDREY SCHULMAN Europa Editions, 2012. $15, 352 pages. SOMETIMES IT’S EASIER to see a situation more clearly when you’re standing on the outside looking in. It’s no coincidence, then, that Audrey Schulman has created Max Tombay and Jeremy Turnkey as the two main characters in her new novel, Three Weeks in December. Max, an ethno-biologist with Asperger’s, works for a pharmaceutical company in present-day Rwanda. Jeremy is a gay man overseeing construction of a railroad in Kenya in 1899. In a narrative that stretches across centuries, Schulman weaves two alternating and taut story lines and draws a graceful arc illustrating that environmental exploitation is not specific to the twenty-first century, and colonialism is not specific to the nineteenth. Outsiders in these distant countries, both characters become caught in a…

THIRTY-YEAR PLAN The five essays on pages 49–59 of this issue are excerpted from Thirty-Year Plan, a book published on the occasion of Orion’s thirtieth anniversary. In this book, thirty writers describe what humanity will need in order to build a better future. Find out more and buy the book at www.orionmagazine.org/books. MORE ON CITY FARMING Join Orion for a live web event devoted to growing food in the city, as discussed in Rebecca Solnit’s essay “Principal Crops” (see page 16). The event is on July 17 at 7 p.m. (EDT); it is free but registration is required. Find out more and register at www.orionmagazine.org/news. 30TH ANNIVERS ARY GATHERINGS In celebration of Orion’s thirtieth anniversary, we’re getting out and meeting as many readers as we can. See the full list…

Diane Ackerman Tamar Adler Julia Alvarez Marc Beko= Charles Bowden Joseph Bruchac Deborah Cadbury Craig Childs Yvon Chouinard Anthony Doerr Riane Eisler Severine von Tscharner Fleming Nikki Giovanni Jane Hirshfield Paul Kingsnorth Elizabeth Kolbert Andy Kroll James Howard Kunstler Richard Louv Rubén Martínez Christof Mauch Ralph Nader Helena Norberg-Hodge Andrew Revkin Carl Safina M. Sanjayan Pete Seeger Simran Sethi Ginger Strand Terry Tempest Williams Read an excerpt on page 49 of this issue; buy the book at www.orionmagazine.org/books.…