Table of contents for January / February 2012 in Orion

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…

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…

This newness of snow. This boot-ringingas the snow warms in the sun to crush. These holeswe wind around the witnessing pines. Thisviolation of white. This slowness of moose.This counting of steps. This counting of scarsin the bark: the warty burl bulging lowon the trunk, the black-scratchings leftby a bear learning to climb. This countingof sleeps between this country & the next countrywe call home. These branches shucking offthe statuesque in avalanches of needles & ice.This progress, as in the wind-scalloped snowmeadow pretending to be moon. This love that sets us scramblingover the map’s last ridge, our red hoods brightin shrunken sky. This metallic weather in which weare the ore. This alder. These crimson-tipped willowsreverberating next to a river of turquoise ice. Thisfollowing the deep tracks of one coyote steppingwhere another…

I’m tired of turning away from all this stuffthat keeps everything up & running — all the prosaic pipes and conduit in the air that R. Crumbswore, once and for all, he had to draw,if he was going to get the world right — all the manic sprouts of wire ducting overhead,lines crisscrossing a road from which someone’sNike sneakers hang, the squat cylinders of transformershumming substation canisters, ceramic insulators stacked like frisbees,the lattice steel transmission towers of Linden,the flywheels of Weehawken, the benighted,misunderstood industrial parks of New Jersey,all transit and hub and bad air.I’m tired of the unfunny jokes flickering in television light.I’m tired of the lyric disconnect between cattail and tamarisk,a lone blackbird sitting there on a post,and the screaming turbines of Elizabeth,the kilovoltage crackling in the air,as you…

BY MAURICE SHERIF University of Texas Press, 2011. $150, 384 pages. Like its multibillion-dollar namesake, photographer Maurice Sherif’s seventeen-pound, trilingual, quadritoned, two-volume book The American Wall: From the Pacific Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico is a physically imposing monument that is hard to ignore — and should not be ignored. Since mid-2006 (when the U.S. started construction of “the wall”), Sherif has been making photographs along the U.S.-Mexico border, one hundred of which are presented in book one of this project. Book two is made up of the writings of authors, artists, academics, and activists Charles Bowden, Miguel Diaz-Barriga, Margaret E. Dorsey, Denise Gilman, Scott Nicol, James Tryon, and Martha Davidson, each exploring, from their varied perspectives, the issue of immigration between Mexico and the U.S. Sherif’s images, photographed…

ORION AT 30 In 2012 Orion marks its thirtieth anniversary. We’ll be celebrating all year long in print, online, and at various gatherings around the country. Keep your eye on the Orion website for all the news, and share your reflections on thirty years of Orion at orionmagazine.org/thirty. ORION FOR KINDLE We’re sympathetic to the Orion reader who suggested that smartphones and other such gadgets should all be recycled into park benches, but we also know that some of you like paperless reading. Enjoy your print edition of Orion at home, and subscribe to the Kindle edition to take Orion with you wherever you go. Go to orionmagazine.org/kindle for more information. THE PLACE OF NATURE Join Paul Kingsnorth for a live web event discussing his article in this issue of…

Activism at its best is refusing to accept things,” said Tim DeChristopher — aka Bidder #70 — two months before being sent to jail for his nonviolent civil disobedience. His words read like an anthem for the new crop of activists, from Wall Street to Main Street, who are making it their business to stop accepting the unacceptable. Read more about the power of resistance in an intimate conversation between Tim DeChristopher and Terry Tempest Williams in this issue of Orion.…

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…

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…

TAKE IT AS A deposit in the bank of long returns, or as an exchange in a drawn-out conversation we hold with the children of people who have not yet been born: my five-year-old son, sedulously plunging his hands into a big bowlful of what we call blue corn kernels (even though they aren’t quite blue) that my wife and I have laboriously been removing from their cobs, incautiously spills a passel of seeds into the crack at the back of the new easy chair, and when I try to remove them they slip down into the slick imitation-leather crevice and are lost forever, for it’s a cut-rate chair from China that we bought on deep discount from World Market, and the cushion can’t be removed. No matter. There are…