Orion September / October 2010

THE PROMISE OF technology has largely been delivered upon. What inventions have we not welcomed, from the telephone and the television to the airplane and the automobile? These things have, in one way or another, made it easier to live what we call a modern lifestyle. And technologies have continued to modernize at an exponential rate. Nowadays we can, with no wires or connectors of any kind, use a device the size of a pocket calculator to send mail, buy books, pay bills — even watch a live video feed of an oil well a mile under the surface of the sea gushing crude. For some, the sight of all that oil spilling into the Gulf of Mexico, where it continues to destroy fish, fisheries, saltwater marshes, the animals that…

T. Coraghessan Boyle is the author of twelve novels, most recently the New York Times bestseller The Women. “Scorpion Ranch” is adapted from When the Killing’s Done, forthcoming from Viking. Trish Carney is a photographer living in San Rafael, California. Her coyote images are part of her Living with Wildlife series. Benjamin Drummond is currently working in the Pacific Northwest on Facing Climate Change, a long-term documentary project that tells the story of global change through local people. Christopher Ketcham writes for Vanity Fair, Harper’s, and GQ. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, and Moab, Utah, and is currently writing a book about secession movements in the Northeast. Amanda Keller Konya is a Southern California native who received an MFA from Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles.…

Jay Griffiths’s piece, “The God Unbound” (May/June 2010), was excellent — and chilling. It fleshes out what is sick and frightening about American individualism and libertarianism, the dominant ideologies of our culture (which has always been latently fascist). Perhaps her most telling point is that true liberty is shared; it cannot belong to powerful individuals who declare their own freedom at the expense of others (including other species) and at the expense of the health of the Earth. This point in particular dovetails with Derrick Jensen’s understanding of our addiction to progress (“High On Progress,” May/June 2010). Underlying this addiction is the will to power and the attendant desire to apply technology to the end of unbounded mastery of our environment. Neither fascism nor American individualism can abide being bound…

Barry Lopez visited Orion’s offices for two days in May, taking the time to have lunch with the staff and join a roundtable discussion about writing, publishing, and the state of the world. A few days later we learned that his 350-word short story “The Trail,” from our January/February 2010 issue, had been selected for inclusion in Dave Eggers’s anthology Best American Nonrequired Reading. This is the first Orion piece to make it into that anthology. Our multimedia offerings at orionmagazine.org are popular! Between April 2009 and April 2010, downloads of our audio pieces grew to almost twelve thousand a month. Our multimedia work is gaining notice elsewhere, too. The Orion original short documentary “Stone River,” about contributor Jon Piasecki, premiered as a film in May at the thirty-second annual…

Sandra D. Lynn Albuquerque, New Mexico ONLY A FEW BLOCKS from the concrete and glass heart of Albuquerque’s hustle and glare is a ribbon of green, the breathing, chlorophyll backbone of New Mexico. It is called the bosque, Spanish for “woods.” It is a Rio Grande – linked woodland of cottonwoods, willows, many other native plants, and too many fiercely invasive non-natives. The bosque all up and down the Rio Grande has been abused — cleared for agriculture and city-building, carelessly burned, invaded by introduced plants, denied the seasonal flooding that allows it to reproduce and thrive. But in 2010 it still follows the river, still edges it in emerald. In a place of relentless sun and aridity, it is essential to many creatures, including me. Even though the rambunctious…

I DON’T KNOW what it feels like, the thrill of hunting a human being. But I do know something of the fear of being hunted. I was in the Peruvian Amazon a few years back with indigenous Shipibo people who were protesting illegal gold mines on their lands. The previous time they had done so, the police from the nearest town had shot at them and set dogs on them. I can imagine, therefore, something of the terror that India’s indigenous people, the forest-dwelling Adivasis, must feel as Prime Minister Manmohan Singh oversees what is unoffcially known as “Operation Green Hunt.” It began in late 2009 and escalated this year. From West Bengal in the northeast, through Jharkhand, Orissa, Chhattisgarh, Andhra Pradesh, and Maharashtra, a ferociously well-armed state is attacking…