Table of contents for September / October 2012 in Orion

RACHEL CARSON’s Silent Spring, which celebrates its fiftieth anniversary in print this September, is one of the most influential books ever written. In one way or another it drew national attention to the problem of chemical poisons, led to the ban on the pesticide DDT in the U.S. (although it is still used internationally), gave birth to the Environmental Protection Agency, paved the way for the Clean Water Act and Clean Air Act, inspired millions of people to become activists for the environment, gave rise to thousands of grassroots organizations devoted to protecting the health of their communities, and planted the word ecology firmly in the American lexicon. But it is safe to say that if Carson were alive today she would be dismayed at how little people have learned…

Orion Notes & Miscellany In July, Orion celebrated the publication of Thirty-Year Plan, a book of original essays by thirty different writers, at Bascom Lodge atop Mount Greylock in Adams, Massachusetts. Writers Elizabeth Kolbert, Ginger Strand, and Orion columnist Bill McKibben joined the celebration. Thirty-Year Plan is the first volume in the new Orion Reader series. Orion and Public Radio International’s Living on Earth program have collaborated to turn Orion’s popular reader-generated department, The Place Where You Live, into a ten-part audio series. Visit www.orionmagazine.org/place to learn more. In case you haven’t heard, Orion is celebrating thirty years in publication. Are you celebrating a thirtieth birthday in 2012, as well? Write to us at marketing@orionmagazine.org and receive a box of limited-supply back issues of Orion to keep or share with…

BY ALYSON HAGY Graywolf Press, 2012. $24, 272 pages. ON THE SECOND PAGE of Alyson Hagy’s quiet yet striking new novel Boleto, Will Testerman, a young Wyomingite with a restless sadness in him, considers one of his quarrelsome father’s longtime complaints: “Town is eating its way right past us … When I was a kid, you couldn’t pay people to live in this part of the state. Too cold. Too much isolation. Now everybody in America thinks they’re in love with fresh air and loneliness.” Will dismisses his father, a man who has given himself over to a town job he hates to supplement the lean years on the ranch, as a man who has bartered away what he once held dear, as a man unable to dream. Will Testerman,…

BY LACY M. JOHNSON University of Iowa Press, 2012. $19.95, 139 pages. CORNHUSKER. CLETUS. Hillbilly. Honky. Redneck. White Trash. “We are not that,” says Lacy Johnson’s unconventional memoir Trespasses, which documents how race, gender, and class shape collective identity in the rural Midwest. The book reads as a family diary might — a braided series of poignant vignettes woven together with the thread of place. Johnson’s tone, technique, and voice vary with each microchapter as she shuffles between subjects, jumping back and forth in time, momentarily pausing to shine a light here or there between three generations and two families. Her prose is languid and poetic, half memory, half dream. If the book had a soundtrack it would be one of rural ambience — cicadas, lawn mowers, tractors flexing in…

Stephanie Adams-Santos is from Portland, Oregon. Her chapbook, The Sundering, was published in 2009. Rick Bass is the author of thirty books of fiction and nonfiction. He lives with his family in Montana’s Yaak Valley. Randy Beacham is a freelance photographer and writer living in northwest Montana. His photographs have appeared in Big Sky Journal, High Country News, the Wall Street Journal, and other publications. Nina Berman is the author of two monographs, Purple Hearts and Homeland. Her photographs have been published or exhibited in the New York Times, Time, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. Matt Black is a photographer living in rural California. His project The People of Clouds documents the erosion of traditional life in Mexico’s Mixteca region. Colin Cheney is a founding editor of Tongue:…

Owen Maguire Amherst, Massachusetts EVERY SUNDAY NIGHT in Amherst I play hockey; when I’m home, that is. My Dad does too. So does my summer boss and another carpenter on our crew. We have a local radiologist, a real estate agent, a roofer, painter, woodworker, insulator, mechanic, nurse, chiropractor, landscape architect, several students, and a stonemason, to name a few. Collectively we have the skills to build a house, fix a car, save a person, and sell that house. But instead, we just play hockey. Or some slow, awkward version of it. Our oldest skater is pushing seventy, our youngest about twenty-one. Me, I’m turning twenty-four next month. The puck bounces around for an hour and a half, off the boards, sticks, legs, skates, and into the goal. I myself…

1. Rachel Carson, the ecologist who kicked the hornet’s nest, wrote a book that needed no subtitle. Published fifty years ago this September, Silent Spring rocketed to the top of the bestseller list, prompted a meeting with the president’s science advisers, occasioned congressional hearings, and circled her neck with medals of honor. It also let loose swarms of invective from the pesticide industry. Throughout it all, Carson remained calm. Friends and foes alike praised her graceful comportment and gentle voice. Also, her stylish suits and trim figure. Nevertheless, her various publicity photos (with microscope; in the woods; outside her summer cottage in Maine; at home in Maryland) look as if the same thought bubble hovers above them all: I hate this. 2. In the later portraits, Carson was dying of…

There is no help for it after all,nothing to keep one’s unlived livesfrom dragging their heavy chainsalong the bottom of the sea,full fathom five and so forth.The heart wants what it wants,which is everything. The brineair and the hundred-year firsand the secret music cuppedin the polished nothing of a shell.There is no way to feel in the handthe solid mass of the life one haslived, to know what it is. There isonly the walk down to the shoreand the stones held in the palm,and only the sea to look to, as faras one can, which is only so far.…

I I’d say an anchor is wedged in the transomheart, the sun a roost of heat: a bloodline coursing in whiteray, through all history, extends the star. II The crawl of swamp-life has dwelledin the amphibian mass of the tongue and fed once on the plump gristleof the slough lived in and by the light.Travel of matter never ceases. III Now the leaves themselvesopen all these casings as I look up, and wagerfor that shook magnet. Light touched down on the leavesand made green windows. I lay below it.…

BY FLORENCE WILLIAMS W. W. Norton, 2012. $25.95, 336 pages. I SETTLED into Florence Williams’s Breasts: A Natural and Unnatural History expecting to be delighted and entertained by stories of the amazing biology of the mammary glands, much as I’d been entranced by Natalie Angier’s Woman: An Intimate Geography a decade earlier. And science writer Williams’s witty and engaging style delivers as she dives into the evolutionary history of breasts, from the reasons that women’s breasts are so irresistibly attractive to the opposite sex to the development of the physical apparatus that turns mere ornaments into highly functioning lactating machines. Along the way she spends some time discussing the American obsession with big boobs, and even goes to one of the top breast augmentation clinics in the country to have…

BY EDWARD HUMES Avery, 2012. $27, 277 pages. EACH OF US living in the U.S. produces, on average, 7.1 pounds of garbage a day, a cumulative annual load that exceeds the weight of the nation’s entire adult population by a factor of eighteen. Stretch all the world’s plastic bags end to end, and they’d encircle the globe 776 times. And yet these “flimsy white sleeves of petroleum” represent only the small, visible portion of the garbage being dumped into landfills, the ocean, and, actually, who knows where else? Four million pounds of “ghost plastic” disappear from the Environmental Protection Agency’s ledgers each year, traces of modern consumer culture gone missing. In Garbology: Our Dirty Love Affair with Trash, veteran journalist Edward Humes sets out to exhume the sixty-four-ton lifetime legacy…

BY BARBARA NATTERSON-HOROWITZ, MD, AND KATHRYN BOWERS Knopf, 2012. $26.95, 320 pages. TALK TO ANY VETERINARIAN and they will tell you doctors are in denial, acting as though humans are essentially different from all other animals. The rest of us are not so far behind the doctors in humming this tune. The human species as a whole acts like the one Harvard alumnus in a trailer-park family who pretends to have sprung fully formed from a Williams-Sonoma catalogue. Veterinarians understand this pretension is ludicrous. After all, what is a doctor, but a veterinarian who deals with only one animal? What are all of us, but a species of great ape more related to our cousin the gorilla than most warblers are to one another? Dr. Natterson-Horowitz, a cardiology professor at…

HERE, I’ll prove to you that there are no tiny moments, no dull moments, no little things, only a general failure on our parts to see the wild and amazing slather of miracles that come unbidden and will, for each of us, too soon end — All too soon — but not yet. Yesterday I was idling in the social ramble, in a rare splurge of sunshine here in the Pacific North Wet — a burst of light so startling that people emerged dewy from their mossy holes and mooed in delight and held crucifixes and talismans aloft in praise and fear — and I noticed a child, age one and change, crawling free in the ocean of grass; she was remotely attended by her father, who kept one eye…

J.B. MacKinnon’s essay, “False Idyll” (May/June 2012), is an incisive critique of the popular Shangri-La view of nature as an idealized backdrop for our personal and spiritual rejuvenation. His essay raised for me the question of whether, by enshrining the natural world in a state of pristine beauty without a shadow dimension of horror, death, and decay, we compromise our ability to be fully awake to its destruction. It was a refreshing reminder of how our imagination, and the stories we tell ourselves, can literally change the future of life on earth. HANNAH LEE JONES Clinton, Washington J.B. MacKinnon does a fine job of describing an experience in nature, but it seems wrong to deny that it is a spiritual experience. Most of the true devotees of wilderness I’m aware…

In 1990, a little-known, self-described democratic socialist, the mayor of Burlington, Vermont, ran as an independent and won a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives, soundly defeating the Republican incumbent. Since then, Bernie Sanders — as of 2006, Senator Bernie Sanders — has not only represented the people of Vermont in Congress, he has been the main proponent of progressive politics in Washington. His is often the lone voice speaking on behalf of children and families, of workers, of our planet, and of our democracy and our future. Pundits often make a distinction between “big D” Democrats and “small d” democrats, and while Bernie Sanders is most definitely one of the latter, he is, above all, a “big I” Independent, pushing back against the corporate takeover of politics and…

At first my favorite of the twenty untranslatablesis the Portuguese for running one’s fingerstenderly through the beloved’s hair, but then C. mentions lice,so now it’s iktsuarpok, Inuitfor “go outside, darling, and check if anyone is coming,”a word from a language that’s almost extinct,and I think of that brink, of worlds falling off gravelly verges into swamps of speechlessnessbrimming with the misty ghosts of the ancestors,all those dumb open mouths and nothing coming out that anybody any longer understands,everybody’s lips rounded in songor the oooo of rising to an occasion, like those trees that seem to be burning,going up in October flames, ignitingthe morning, the oak newly downed. Was it still when the tree fell or did what livedin its hollow core cry out when the pale grasseslining its burrow were…

THERE’S A YOUTUBE VIDEO of an Inuit rapper you got to check out. Two Inuit women wearing miniskirts and sealskin fur vests are throat singing on a stage lit with sherbet-colored light. From the darkness emerges an Inuit teenager in a flashy red coat and a black top hat. At first we only see his back, then he spins around, a large mic to his lips, and produces the craziest string of beats you’ve ever heard. Not words, just sounds, a quick catchy rap riff, like you might hear at a dance club, overlaid by a dim growl, like a man rapping with a monster stuck in his throat. His name is Nelson Tagoona, and the video he stars in was shot at Toonik Tyme, a spring music festival in…

For thirty years, Orion has stood for the values of people who care about nature and culture, and has helped readers think deeply about humanity’s place in the world. 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.…

BY ALAN LIGHTMAN Pantheon, 2012. $24.95, 214 pages. A NOVEL about the creation of the universe, starring … God. My heart sank, even knowing the author was a witty and creative physicist who has written essays, poems, and novels. Aw, this can’t end well, I thought, but soon I was proven utterly wrong, bringing my total egregious stupids to a number only the First Force can count. Blunt take: Mr g: A Novel About the Creation is terrific. Lightman manages the impossible — writing a riveting story, with odd and intriguing characters, that also slips a stunning amount of physics and cosmology into the reader while he or she is absorbed by what will happen next to the universe Mr g christens Aalam-104729. It’s a soup-to-nuts novel, in a sense:…

BY DAVID FITZSIMMONS Wild Iris Publishing, 2011. $19.95, 32 pages. In Curious Critters, by photographer David FitzSimmons, twenty-one common creatures posed for stylized studio portraits. But this is more than just a picture book. Each entry includes a “transcription”— written in the individual “voice” of each animal — of what they told David during their session. Curious Critters is a lighthearted book for young readers, with just enough natural history to teach as well as entertain.…

THIRTY-YEAR PLAN In Thirty-Year Plan, a new book published on the occasion of Orion’s thirtieth anniversary, thirty writers describe what humanity will need in order to build a better future. Find out more and order your copy at www.orionmagazine.org/books. ORION FOR EDUCATORS It’s back-to-school season, and Orion offers a range of materials for educators at www.orionmagazine.org/education, including the popular three-book Nature Literacy Series, free downloadable teacher’s guides, and “essential questions” for classroom discussions about nature and culture. THIRTY YEARS OF ENVIRONMENTALISM Join Orion for a special thirtieth anniversary live web event featuring columnist Sandra Steingraber, contributing editor Terry Tempest Williams, and Thirty-Year Plan contributor Simran Sethi. We’ll talk about the last thirty years of environmentalism and what needs to happen in the thirty years to come. The event is on…