Table of contents for March / April 2011 in Orion

In a parking lot near the Orion office we found a dead red-bellied woodpecker. It looked disconcertingly out of place, lying there on the asphalt between parked cars with its striking black-and-white stripes and brilliant orangey-red nape. It was unclear why it had died; maybe it had fallen from the grille of a car. One of us picked it up, and we looked at it for a silent moment. Placing it under the bushes of a nearby hedgerow, we were reminded of a passage from Barry Lopez’s story “Apologia”: “Who are these animals, their lights gone out? What journeys have fallen apart here?” Knowing how stressed the planet is, knowing the complexity of the challenges facing the planet and its inhabitants, we wondered if our sadness at the death of…

Amy Leach and Lydia Peelle, whose work has appeared in Orion, received 2010 Whiting Writers’ Awards. We also learned that two Orion stories have been reprinted in the newly published Best Spiritual Writing 2011 anthology: “Barley and Yaks” by Edward Hoagland and “The Return” by Rick Bass. In January, Terry Tempest Williams was in Aspen as special guest for a Winter Words event presented by the Aspen Writers’ Foundation and sponsored by Orion. Orion has also been admitted to the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses’ Lit Mag Adoption Program, through which Orion is made available to creative writing classes. Hal Clifford, Orion’s Executive Editor since 2003, has returned to his beloved West (specifically, Boulder, Colorado), where he has founded Drift Storytelling, a multimedia production company. We will miss his…

I ONCE THOUGHT I KNEW what nature writing was: the pretty, sublime stuff minus the parking lot. The mountain majesty and the soaring eagle and the ancient forest without the human footprint, the humans themselves, the mess. Slowly, fortunately, that definition has fallen flat. Where is the line between what is Nature and what is Human? Do I spend equal times in the parking lot and the forest? Can I really say the parking lot is separate from the forest? What if I end up staying in the parking lot the whole time? What if it has been a long drive and I really have to pee? The problem is, the Nature/Human split is not a split. It is a dualism. It is false. I propose messing it up. I…

BY BRIANDOYLE Oregon State University Press, 2010. $18.95, 320 pages. EVERY DAY BRINGS NEWS of brokenness — wars, feuds, murders, divorces, epidemics, betrayals, extinctions — and, not surprisingly, much art of our day mirrors that brokenness. Rarely, a contrary spirit, fully aware of the world’s wounds, chooses to celebrate healing. Brian Doyle has brought such a spirit to his essays and to his work as editor of Portland Magazine; now he dramatizes the work of healing in his first book of fiction, a rambunctious novel set in a small town on the Oregon coast. Perched on the shifting boundary between land and sea, between realism and myth, the town of Neawanaka hosts some five hundred human souls who suffer a host of ills. A veteran has been traumatized by war,…

Not a picture book in the traditional sense, A State of Change: Forgotten Landscapes of California (Heyday Books, 2010) is nonetheless driven by its visuals. Laura Cunningham has combined scientific investigation, a naturalist’s attention to detail, and a personal concern for cause and effect with an artist’s touch to create a comprehensive survey of California and its myriad landscapes as shaped by both human and other natural forces. The book is both art and science, providing insights into the past as well as visions for the future.…

I AM NOT the tree-hugger of popular environmental mythology; I find forests creepy. It’s flat here in Minnesota, where I live. Flatlands are slow to demonstrate charm, and few outsiders have a knack for appreciating them. When my parents would take me, a young child, on the rare car trip through even flatter stretches of Dakota or Arizona, they’d apologize for the plain desert. So boring, they’d say, offering games of “I spy.” I did not want to spy. I wanted them to be quiet, so I could take in space, which was like oxygen to me. My distrust of tree cover was unexamined, intuitive, and, in the ecological community, furtive, until some fifteen years ago when I spent a sabbatical year in a Pennsylvania forest. People there were proud…

Matt Black’s photography of rural California has been widely honored. He received the Robert F. Kennedy Prize for reporting on poverty, as well as awards from Pictures of the Year International and the Alexia Foundation. Catherine Carter’s first collection of poetry was The Memory of Gills, and her second, The Swamp Monster at Home, is forthcoming in Spring 2012. Abbot Cutler is the author of 1843–Rebecca–1847 and The Dog Isn’t Going Anywhere. A third poetry collection is due out in 2011. His poems have appeared in Ploughshares and Blue Sofa Review. He lives in Ashfield, Massachusetts. William L. Fox’s essay is adapted from his current book project All Along the Line, which explores how the world’s largest human-made lines both connect and divide us to and from one another and…

WHEN MY HUSBAND AND I SET OUT to find a nursery school for our daughter, Faith, nearly ten years ago we took the decision seriously. I looked at large parent-run cooperatives and visited small home-based operations. Jeff studied the pink towers and chiming bells at the Montessori school on the hill and considered the wonder balls and wooden fairies at the Waldorf school in the valley. In the end, we chose a nursery school that operated out of a community center close to home. There was a frog pond out front and a play structure out back. The trees were full of chickadees and nuthatches. We had weighed many considerations in the decision-making process, and we all, Faith included, were happy about it. That is, until I discovered that, like…

Here at the Coastal Nevada Zoo,the goal of our program is the yieldof animals viable under the new conditions.It's a work in progress.As you see in the Africa Pavilion,we have sustainable herds of gray zebrasand short-necked giraffes. A few mini-elephantslived past infancy, but we lost them.We had one vegetarian lion;it wasn't my idea to place himin the former petting zoo.Next morning we had bones and sated sheep. The aquarium may be phased out for lack of funds.Our placid sharks would stop swimming and drown;the reef our corals built is handsomebut microscopic. We've kept a fewof the long-legged penguins that won't go near the waterand one blue whale that's bigger than a breadbox.The North American Pavilion is closed:The leprosy-resistant armadillosdied of flu, the bears refuse to move.The Rabbit House is a…

Loan me your best shovel. I will dig the hole.This earth is soft. I kick it with my bootand it chips up. See, the hole is already started. The dog wants to go in the ground.He dug that hole in his yard until his chainwould let him no deeper. I am good with death. Let me show youwith this hole. I won’t let it be too shallow.I will have him in the ground before dark. Make supper, switch on the porch light for me.The other dogs will gladly eat his share.This is where he was going.This is what was down there.…

EDITED BY KATHLEEN DEAN MOORE AND MICHAEL P. NELSON Trinity University Press, 2010. $24.95, 478 pages. IN 2009, the Yale Project on Climate Change and the George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication conducted an extensive study of perceptions concerning climate change and its e=ects. At issue for the researchers was not simply whether or not Americans believe scientific evidence regarding the state of our planet, but also — and perhaps more importantly — the degree to which we are willing to change our behaviors as a result of those beliefs. What these scholars found was sobering: nearly 50 percent of all Americans are, at best, ambivalent about climate science; a full 82 percent of those surveyed admitted that they have made no changes in their lifestyle as a…

BY ROBERT WRIGLEY Penguin Poets, 2010. $18, 93 pages. THE OTHER WEEKEND, on a plane from Denver to Minneapolis, my sixteen-monthold son sleeping fitfully on my lap, I reread Robert Wrigley’s Beautiful Country and felt like some kind of thief, keeping all these breathless, needful, gainsaying poems to myself. I wanted to whisper into the small hollow of my son’s ear, recite to my wife, turn in my seat to the man in the blue suit behind me and say, “Listen.” http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0143118374/oriomaga20 Consider “Finding a Bible in an Abandoned Cabin,” a short, unassuming lyric near the middle of the book, in which the speaker simply tells of how he lifted the old leather cover and “the book / opened like a blasted bird,” how there were no more “familiar and…

BECOME A SUSTAINING PARTNER Become an Orion Sustaining Partner by signing up to make a monthly donation of $10 or more, and we’ll automatically renew your subscription. It’s an easy way to support Orion, and you’ll never have to send in another renewal form. Go to orionmagazine.org/donate, and select the monthly giving option. WILDBRANCH WRITING WORKSHOP June 5–11, 2011, Craftsbury Common, Vermont Cosponsored by Orion and Sterling College, Wildbranch is for those interested in honing their ability to write powerfully about the natural world. Faculty includes Craig Childs, Alison Hawthorne Deming, Sandra Steingraber, and Orion editors. Visit orionmagazine.org/wildbranch to learn more. Application deadline: March 11, 2011. 2011 ORION BOOK AWARD The 2011 Orion Book Award will be presented in mid-April to the 2010 book that best deepens our connection to…

Thanks to Terry Tempest Williams for her article “The Gulf Between Us” (November/December 2010) and her e=orts to raise awareness in the Gulf. I believe it is going to take a cooperative movement on all our parts to push these issues to the forefront. Unless one is living in the Gulf region, most Americans are not aware of the extent of the damage. There has been an airtight lid placed on all issues related to the Gulf in the national media, for reasons of “national security.” Only a handful of local television stations are willing to cover stories that contradict what is being disseminated by the state and federal agencies. The statements such agencies purport to be true — that the oil is mostly evaporated, that the oil/dispersant mixture is…

It had always been twilightand it would always be twilight, God'shour or the dinosaurs' or, morelikely, just the sweet unendingamoeba's, as each split itselfoff from the original and eternalcell: one myriad amoebaon the rocking sea-faceand the faint glint of starsnever setting, circlingthe pole like a bear's hip,a water wheel. Then,change. Thensome primordial ape-animalstanding out on the sandycape of forever looked overher shoulder and said,in her clumsy grunt,"yesterday…"She didn't know what she hadstarted. Probably she onlymeant to say, "yesterdaywas like today," but it was enough.The sea began to heave.The endless twilight beganto end, peeling westwardlike stripped skin. The starscovered their eyes as the newthing dragged upits bloody, fiery crownout of the deep. Gears clashedin the brightening air, deadlinesfor reports began to pourin, atoms everywhere synchronizedtheir watches for millenniaof slow, precise decay,as…

Two sticks in drifted snowmark the trench where I laid the leeksin cool dirt in October.Now I dig down through oldfrozen crust to damp dark hayto the thick grey green leavesof the leeks and pull themfrom the piled earth andshake dirt from their whitehairy roots. They come uplike creatures from underthe ocean. In the half-cold,half-light the odor of earthgone all these long monthswraps around me, and it is as ifthese leeks have come froma world where there are greatpleasures of the body, wherethe mind grows smaller, wherelibraries mold in the dark,where worms in purple and brownrule the streets, and the corridorsof power are moist and richin a way that radio voicescan't conceive of, and the talkis of the thick trunkof seasons, the noseof rootedness, the eyethat works its way through,hair…

BY JONATHAN WATTS Scribner, 2010. $17, 448 pages. CHINA, GREEN OR BLACK? As the country continues its rapid development, this may prove to be the defining question of the twenty-first century. In When a Billion Chinese Jump: How China Will Save Mankind — Or Destroy It, Jonathan Watts has given us the most comprehensive investigation yet, and the way you know he’s an honest reporter is he’s not sure. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/141658076X/oriomaga20 I read this beautifully reported book just after finishing a short piece of my own on the subject, one equally equivocal but much less fully reported. It’s a tribute to China’s opaqueness that even a trip like the one Watts makes, which takes him to every corner of the country, isn’t enough to really reach a conclusion. On the one…

BY ANDREA PEACOCK CounterPunch and AK Press, 2010. $15.95, 320 pages. THE TITLE of Andrea Peacock’s Wasting Libby: The True Story of How the WR Grace Corporation Left a Montana Town to Die (and Got Away With It) tells the gist of the story. What follows is a fact-packed, kaleidoscopic account of the author’s multiyear investigation of corporate malfeasance in a remote mining town in the northwest corner of Montana. The corporation is WR Grace & Co. The product it mined was vermiculite. And the element that poisoned Libby is a deadly type of asbestos called tremolite, which was released during the mining and processing of ore. To this day, Libby lives under threat that a cloud of asbestos-laden dust might waft over town whenever a big wind kicks up.…