Orion Spring 2021

IN JUNE 1984, a young writer filed a review of Richard Nelson’s Make Prayers to the Raven in Orion Nature Quarterly. In just three hundred words, the review noted many things dear to both writers: authenticity, relationship, complexity, respect, specificity. The reviewer had written several books himself and had a new work on the eve of publication. That work would go on to become the first “environmental book” ever to win the National Book Award: Arctic Dreams. A year later, Barry Lopez’s first feature-length piece appeared in Orion, exemplifying the qualities he admired in Nelson. “The Passing Wisdom of Birds” opens with a harrowing account of Hernando Cortés entering Mexico, openly delighting in the aviaries tended by the people of Tenochtitlán, and then burning them to the ground with “unmitigated…

THE PURPOSE of the trip was to see my mother’s father one last time, but on the way in we stopped for a day in Mumbai to stretch our legs. I’d drawn a whole map for myself on the plane and now was following my dotted line through various markets and bakeries, culminating in a visit to the CSMVS, the city’s largest art museum. As with many other of India’s cultural institutions, the price for admission varies for local visitors and international tourists, and as I thumbed through my wallet in the queue, I realized that I’d overspent at the underground zine fest and only had enough cash left to cover the local rate. I don’t speak Hindi, but I thought, if I kept my mouth shut, I might look…

THE DAY IS COLD and bright as I walk up the quiet road through small wet fields edged with hawthorn and gorse bushes. The sky is ice blue; behind me, the road slopes down to the bay, whose green water moves with the quality of mercury, slow and heavy. It is early February in the west of Ireland, and there is the faintest warmth on the sea breeze coming over the bogs. But this is only a lull: winter storms will soon come back with fury. I turn down the bóithrín (country lane) and hop an old drystone wall into scrubby hazel trees. Like most trees out here, they are stunted and windswept. But the muddy ground slopes down from the road, and as I head west, soon there are…

FOR MANY YEARS, my morning began with a short walk. I’d cut a path across the kitchen and click on the teakettle. As the water boiled, I often looked out my back window at the street below. It wasn’t an exciting street. There were a few florists, a sushi bar, and above that, a karate studio. I liked it, my view. For fifteen years it was my weather channel (are people carrying umbrellas?), my newspaper (do people look sad?), my art gallery (the tiling of buildings some days looked cubist), and my clock. If people were hustling east in lines, it meant I was late to my desk. When I could hear the hup, hup, hup from the karate studio at the end of day, I knew it was time…

Like a farmer's plow piercing through the top layer of soil, the artist’s hand creates miniature furrows in the outer coats of seeds in this art project. The miniature illustrations, hand-engraved into individual seeds, are based on the histories of specific plants and their caretakers. Here, an interpretation of the Hudson Valley Seed Company’s mission is incised on an heirloom squash seed, while the three sisters (corn, squash, and beans) motif honors the seed rematriation project with the Mohawk Nation at Akwesasne. A portrait on a rare lima bean pays tribute to From Farms to Incubators founder Amy Wu, while a corn kernel that traveled half the world carries the poetry of an organic farmer from Mountain Dell Farm. Learn more about this project at www.seedengraving.com…

MOST PEOPLE who find themselves in the Saiyon River Valley in Primorye, Russia, are not there for long. This is a quiet, often lonely place: a carpet of damp sedge grasses and loose collections of spindly larch, with water-loving poplars and elms that follow the river’s course like bashful toddlers clinging to a parent’s leg. In winter, the wind billows unimpeded from the nearby Sea of Japan, masking the nervous barks of roe deer and obscuring the snowy tracks of an occasional Amur tiger. Loggers or fishermen or hunters drive impatiently through this thinly forested swamp to reach better prospects. For Blakiston’s fish owls, however, the river is perfect. Throughout most of its course, the Saiyon River alternates between shallow pools and shallower riffles, with clean water moving over smooth,…