Table of contents for May / June 2013 in Orion

IN THE PROLOGUE TO Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut tells his friend he’s going to write an anti-war book. “You know what I say to people when I hear they’re writing anti-war books?” his friend replies. “I say, Why don’t you write an anti-glacier book instead?” His point is well taken—there have always been wars, and it’s hard to imagine a realistic chance for a future without them. But that doesn’t mean we can’t, like Vonnegut, strive for such a future. Wars, after all, cause incalculable human misery, often to the most innocent among us. They are cripplingly expensive, draining critical funds from education, health care, and other social needs. They generally just beget more wars, inviting more aggression and retaliation, while making the rich richer and the poor poorer. Not surprisingly,…

Last winter, Orion readers in Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, and upstate New York volunteered to host reader meet-ups in their towns, and they gathered at local cafés, farms, and restaurants to meet and mingle. To learn about hosting a reader meet-up call us at 413/528-4422, ext. 31. In April, the Commonwealth Club of California hosts a panel about Thirty-Year Plan with H. Emerson Blake and several of the book’s contributors. See www.orionmagazine.org for more information. Writer and longtime Orion columnist Robert Michael Pyle wrote in with a correction to Bennett Sims’s short story, “Destroy All Monsters” (January/February 2013): moths have four wings, not two. We regret the anatomical miscalculation. It’s the time of year when we announce the 2013 Orion Book Award, which we give annually to a book that addresses the…

IMAGINE MY SHOCK. I was living in Massachusetts for the first time. Adjusting. The first time I saw snow falling past my Somerville apartment window, I told a woman on the phone that a neighbor was on the roof shaking out a pillow. Not many snowstorms in my desertified homeland. The first time I saw ice on the sidewalk, I thought a prankster had smeared Vaseline on the bricks to watch businessmen fall down. This old world was all new to me. I was manhandled by quotidian revelations, wrenched by the duende of Yankee cultural hoodoo. So when I realized I could walk over to Porter Square (where the porterhouse steak was first hacked out of some Bostonian cow) and catch a commuter train to Concord, to Walden freakin’ Pond,…

SEÑORA CLOTILDE TORRES had woken, rubbed her eyes, with some difficulty gotten herself up from the bed, put her feet into her slippers, gone to the bathroom, then to the kitchen to start the morning coffee, no different from any other day, she said. She had opened the kitchen curtains and looked out at the lemon tree in the yard—it was all just sticks this time of year, no leaves, no fruit, just as if someone had been practicing with a sword and these were all the swoosh marks the sword made in the air, the air sliced so much and in so many ways but all in the shape of a tree. It was a drawing of a tree, an idea. “I know what you mean about how trees…

When the gods gave us all the holesleading into our darkness, they plannedon our needing a mystery. It amuses themthat what is inside the bodyis more body. The same body, but different. They first said the bodies should be mostly mossinside. But they kept coming back to the mystery.Moss, they said, can be seen outside,and what is outside can be accountable. Though they liked that moss would have kepteveryone soft and green, they decided it was bestto fill each thing with itself, which would then be hiddenwithin the other. Look at stones, they said.Look at water, which is like the throat of water.…

BY MELANIE CHALLENGER Counterpoint, 2012. $28, 332 pages. THE COVER OF Melanie Challenger’s book On Extinction: How We Became Estranged from Nature is stark and haunting: an empty bird’s nest sketched on a white ground. It’s a fitting image for an extended rumination on the loss of species, languages, and ways of life—what extinction means culturally, biologically, and personally — as she travels across the globe. The book’s three sections, or “peregrinations,” as she calls them, describe three separate journeys: the first, on foot, across the Cornwall region of her native England; the second, by sea, to Antarctica and the Falkland Islands; the third, by ship, train, and turboprop, to the Canadian High Arctic. Most writing about extinction focuses on tragic stories of individual species: the great auk, the Eskimo…

BY BILL STREEVER Little, Brown and Company, 2013. $26.99, 368 pages. “A MILLION MILLION thermonuclear explosions warm my face.” That’s sunbathing, according to Bill Streever, author of the new natural history Heat: Adventures in the World’s Fiery Places. When Streever goes out on a walk, “[t]he tip of [his] walking stick, made of soft rubber, bursts into flame.” This magmatic encounter on the slopes of Hawaii’s active Kilauea volcano is but one of countless burns in a firebug’s tireless quest to reach high temperatures. Armed with an infrared thermometer that he aims at everything from a Dutch peat fire to the sands of Death Valley to his own feverish companion, Streever, a biologist and author of the bestselling companion book, Cold, has produced a fine, thorough profile of the world’s…

BY MICHAEL BENSON Abrams, 2012. $55, 208 pages. MICHAEL BENSON’s Planetfall: New Solar System Visions is a stunning look at the “visual legacy” of the last decade of space exploration. Drawing from raw black-and-white data collected from NASA and other space agencies, Benson has assembled these large full-color images of our solar system, from the surface of the sun and the elegant rings of Saturn, to the strangely terrestrial desert landscapes of Mars. Perhaps most striking are the photographs of Earth as “just another sphere within the Solar System.” Dust storms from desertification and smoke from slash-and-burn deforestation are visible in some of these; as Benson says in his introduction, “if signs of planetary distress can be captured from an altitude of 64,000 miles, these symptoms are something we cannot…

WHERE I LIVE, in upstate South Carolina, May brings wild roses blooming in pink clusters on the roadsides, and June fills the ditches with tiger lilies. What I love best is driving those back roads early on a Wednesday to the jockey lot outside town. Every week, people park their vehicles and walk across a little bridge, either to hunt for treasure or to get rid of whatever’s weighing them down. The offerings spread there ask, What do you believe? and What’s it worth to you? Once, a woman with a cigar box stacked with cash sold me embroidered hankies, neatly pressed, for a dollar apiece: one with Texas bluebonnets, one with pink posies. “If I didn’t like you,” she said, “I’d double the price.” I believe it, and believe,…

Jennifer Boyden’s forthcoming poetry collection is The Declarable Future. She is working to create a new writing and arts residency program dedicated to collaboration and ecology on the Oregon coast. Ricardo Cases was born in Spain. He holds a degree from the Universidad del País Vasco, Bilbao, and joined the Blank Paper Photography Collective in 2006. Jody Gladding’s newest book, Translations from Bark Beetle, is forthcoming from Milkweed Editions. She teaches at the Vermont College of Fine Arts. Josie Iselin is the photographer, author, and designer of many books on natural forms, including Beach Stones, Beach: A Book of Treasure, and An Ocean Garden: The Secret Life of Seaweed, which is forthcoming. She lives in California. Teddy Macker’s recent work appears in the Southern Humanities Review, Columbia, and Water~Stone Review.…

1. BLACKSMITHING. To learn how to live in a post-petroleum world, recall the pre-petroleum world where blacksmiths made everything: tools, nails, hinges, lamps, hooks, gates, and railings. Wheels, even! With a barrel and some fire, a blacksmith could turn rusted car panels into cookware. Think of all the scrap metal we’ll have when the oil’s all gone. 2. KNOT TYING. Find a shoelace and a copy of The Shipping News. Knots can weave rugs, fashion snowshoes, repair almost anything. A diamond hitch holds a load on a mule or a sled. A bowline to cinch a tarp, a Prusik to climb a tree. While fighting a forest fire, a friend once fixed a shovel with parachute cord, half-hitches, and pine pitch. And when the parachute cord runs out, there’s plenty…

BY ELLEN STROUD University of Washington Press, 2012. $26.95, 212 pages. THE STORY OF northeastern U.S. forests that I’ve always imagined goes something like this: Native Americans use and manage the land. Settlers arrive and start to clear it. There’s an intense period of sheep farming, industrial growth, and so much logging that the log runs fill up the rivers. Then farms are abandoned. The forests regrow—easily, naturally, on their own — and today’s forested landscape is born. I hadn’t realized, until reading Ellen Stroud’s Nature Next Door: Cities and Trees in the American Northeast, that there was more to this story. The forests that now characterize the Northeast did not regrow easily or on their own, but rather took the concerted efforts of urbanites with political influence and strong…

GIVE INSPIRATION FOR GRADUATION Do you have a niece, nephew, child, or grandchild graduating from high school or college this spring? A gift subscription to Orion will honor your graduate’s sense of hope and equip him or her with ideas and inspiration for a bright future. Go to www.orionmagazine.org/graduation. TELL US WHAT YOU THINK We love letters to the editor, and we specifically want to hear what you like (and don’t) about Orion and where you’d like to see the magazine go. Share your thoughts and ideas by taking the 2013 reader survey, which you’ll find at www.orionmagazine.org/survey, or request a paper copy by calling 888/909-6568 ext. 10. JOIN US AT MOUNTAINFILM IN TELLURIDE Join Orion editor-in-chief H. Emerson Blake and contributors Matt Black, Sandra Steingraber, and Douglas Gayeton at…

Thanks to Rebecca Solnit for her essay in the January/February 2013 issue of Orion (“Cyclopedia of an Expedition Around Svalbard”). I read it under weird circumstances: I was in hospital bedclothes, cold and anxious, waiting for a medical procedure in a room full of other cold and anxious patients. My procedure was delayed, and, luckily, I had Orion with me. Solnit’s description of her Arctic journey was like poetry—I felt I had been given the gift of time to read it in almost one sitting. JANET BEDNARZ Bridgewater, Massachusetts As Heather Millar mentions in “Pandora’s Boxes” (January/February 2013), nanoparticles, by their nature, can enter the body and bypass the blood-brain barrier — and yet industry regularly adds them to food, clothing, and consumer products. Why is it okay for a…

BEAVERS ARE, as far as animals go, odd contraptions. The largest rodent in North America, the beaver has webbed feet, a scaly tail, and two front teeth with orange enamel on the front and dentin in the back so that as they wear down they self-sharpen. They are powerful swimmers, chewers of trees, and builders of dams—some of which have been known to stretch for hundreds of feet. They were once trapped in unsustainable numbers for their fur, their fat, and their scent glands, which produce a secretion that has been used for medicinal purposes since antiquity. Pliny the Elder maintained that the smell of the glands was so powerful, much like smelling salts, as to cause a woman to miscarry, although it was later diluted in alcohol for use…

BY MOISES VELASQUEZ-MANOFF Scribner, 2012. $28, 386 pages. YOUR MOTHER would not like this book. It describes in convincing detail the many health benefits of grime and germs and even parasites. In order to understand how this could be possible you should consider what happened after the wolves were brought back to Yosemite. With the deer and elk kept more in balance, the aspen and willow regrew, especially along riverbanks, reducing erosion and providing habitat for more birds and small mammals. Simply through the return of a major predator, the system returned to a richer, more stable state. Our guts, it turns out, follow the same model. Travel to a country without flush toilets, with malaria, parasites, and poor hygiene, and you will have a hard time finding anyone with…

BY MELANIE HOFFERT Beacon Press, 2013. $24.95, 238 pages. THERE IS SOMETHING about living under the scrutiny of a big prairie sky that keeps people from speaking their deepest feelings. “Prairie silence,” in Melanie Hoffert’s memoir of the same name, is not only the way “the people of the prairie mirror the [quiet, hardworking] land”; it is a surreptitious force responsible for the emptying of the region. Like many, she has fled to the city, mostly to avoid sharing that she is gay with her small-town North Dakota, a place “more connected than any social networking phenomenon of the digital age.” When home to visit, she cultivates silence, “rerout[ing] conversations like a politician,” but in Minneapolis, where she has moved, she finds herself dreaming of AM radio and grain elevators.…

BY JIM STERBA Crown, 2012. $26, 368 pages. AS POPULATIONS SOAR and the ten-thousand-year exodus from country to city scurries toward climax, many of us have accrued the intractable belief that nature is both deeply imperiled and a place of infinite harmony. The mantra is well-known: as we distance ourselves from the natural world, we harden to its demise, abandoning a primal fellowship in the process. Jim Sterba’s Nature Wars: The Incredible Story of How Wildlife Comebacks Turned Backyards into Battlegrounds challenges these assumptions—posing that, in our sprawling neighborhoods, we are closer to nature than we might think—and examines what really happens as animals, people, and vegetation make inroads upon one another in an increasingly inhabited world. According to the latest survey, 79 percent of New England is now considered…