Table of contents for July / August 2011 in Orion

A WALK DOWN Main Street in Great Barrington will never be quite the same after taking one with James Howard Kunstler. Kunstler, a critic of urban design and the author of The Geography of Nowhere, recently visited our office and had lunch with the Orion staff. Afterward, he and a few of us headed out for a short tour to see how his ideas about architecture and community design played out in our hometown. We stopped in the center of town, and Kunstler looked around. “As far as Main Streets in this part of the world go,” he announced after a moment, “this is about as good as it gets.” It was unclear how this was supposed to make us feel. He pointed out a number of things that work:…

Orion has been nominated for the 2011 Utne Independent Press Award in the General Excellence and Environmental Coverage categories. The twenty-fourth annual Wildbranch Writing Workshop was held this June at Sterling College in Vermont. Alison Deming, Sandra Steingraber, and Craig Childs were on this year’s faculty. In May, Orion was a media sponsor of Mountainfilm in Telluride, Colorado. The festival included a screening of the Orion original short film, eel*water*rock*man, made in collaboration with Orion contributor James Prosek. Picture Editor Jason Houston was a featured gallery artist at the festival and exhibited his documentary photography project People of the Forest. Staff members Chip Blake, Madeline Cantwell, and former Executive Editor Hal Clifford also attended. Editor Jennifer Sahn was a panelist at the National Conference for Media Reform in Boston in…

When we take off from Reykjavik, the ground is parchment and inkwash. Black veinsof rivers, black lakes, the ridged vacant green-brown-gold of a relief map. In school our crackling pull-down maps were so outdated there were still expansesof white on them. White which meant deepest darkest. Terra Incognita. Which means: what the map disguises, what we don’t recognize yet. Those troubled me as a child,blanks and the beyonds of edges, the sprawl of Mercator, the globe flattened into parabolas of Earth. We like the world contained, defined by its names, even as wewant boundaries to push against. Icy Greenland, green Iceland. I trace the flight route in the airline magazine and look out at the dark Atlantic. Whatever its provenance,the Vinland map feels true. The nervous notched teeth of its…

Yale University Press, 2011. $25, 192 pages. HERE’S AN EQUATION for knowing where you are: Cosmology + Bioregionalism = Sense of Place. The deepest mysteries of the place where you live are linked to the origins of life on Earth and, then, the origins of the universe. Mary Evelyn Tucker and Brian Thomas Swimme propose that cosmology is necessarily the basis of our planetary condition. Such awareness is a daunting perceptual challenge, rarely taught in school and unlikely to be the subject of your daily conversations. Yet, ultimately, one cannot grasp the profound dilemmas of species extinction and climate change without a cosmological orientation. What’s most striking about Swimme and Tucker’s work is a simple but beautiful assumption: a cosmological orientation opens the human mind to wonder, gratitude, humility, and…

Harvard University Press, 2011. $22.95, 254 pages. IT IS SURPRISING how few books there are on the songs of insects, since people have been listening to them for thousands of years. “Last night the chilly cricket did not cease its song,” wrote Yueh Fei in 1130 AD. “It woke me from dreams a thousand miles away.” So many ancient cricket poems of the East are full of sadness and ennui, the fearful realization that human life creaks onward toward death, while the strange music of the suborder Ensifera lasts as long as life goes on. This orthopteran soundtrack has little to do with human life, but we always notice it, grasping frequencies that even the bugs can’t hear. These songs might have depressed generations of Chinese poets, but not so…

Sherman Alexie is the author of the poetry collection Face and the poetry and story collection War Dances. He lives with his family in Seattle. Debra Allbery’s first poetry collection, Walking Distance, won the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize, and her book Fimbul-Winter was awarded the Grub Street National Book Prize in Poetry. W. S. Di Piero is the author of several books of poetry, essays, and translations, including the forthcoming poetry collection Nitro Nights. Gretel Ehrlich is the author, most recently, of In the Empire of Ice. Her essay in this issue will appear in a different form in the anthology West of 98, forthcoming from the University of Texas Press. Bear Guerra photographs humanitarian, environmental, and social issues in the United States and Latin America. His work has…

I LOVE THOSE cities-of-the-future illustrations from the old pop-culture bin. In “yesterday’s tomorrow,” they always get things so wonderfully wrong. One of my favorites, from the August 1925 issue of Popular Science Monthly, depicts a heroic cross section of New York’s Park Avenue looking to the south from around 47th Street in the far-off sci-fi future of 1950. “Airport landing fields” are denoted on the roof of a building that has replaced the familiar Grand Central Station tower at the end of the vista. A zeppelin hovers over a row of quaint little “aeroplanes” stashed up there. Park Avenue itself has become a pedestrian mall, not a honking Checker Cab in sight. They’re all down in a three-level underground tunnel system: one level for slow motor traffic, one for fast,…

ANYONE who pays attention to the state of the planet realizes that all natural systems on which human life depends are deteriorating, and they are doing so largely because of human actions. By natural systems I mean the topsoil, forests, grasslands, wetlands, rivers, lakes, oceans, atmosphere, the host of other species, and the cycles that bind them together into a living whole. By human life I mean not merely the survival of our species, but the quality of our existence, the prospects for adequate food, shelter, work, education, health care, conviviality, intellectual endeavor, and spiritual growth for our kind far into the future. So the crucial question is, why? Why are those of us in the richest countries acting in such a way as to undermine the conditions on which…

Viking, 2011. $27.95, 416 pages. THE CONVER GENCE ZONES of the world’s oceans (or world ocean, since they are all one) are vast areas at the middle of the great oceanic circulatory patterns known as gyres. In these regions, large plastic objects — vinyl buoys, polystyrene coolers, oil drums, two-liter Coke bottles, half-liter water bottles, polypropylene rope, nylon gill nets, and broken-off monofilament longlines — litter the surface for millions of square miles. More insidious are the microplastics that float unseen on the surface, breaking into ever-smaller pieces but never fully biodegrading, to be consumed by pelagic seabirds and fish or simply resting on the surface in greater quantities than the plankton. By now, legions of scientists, travelers, sailors, and environmentalists have written about the accumulation of plastics in the…

Tupelo Press, 2011. $16.95, 88 pages. EDITORS like dark poems better than joyful ones, I have heard. Or, some writers may believe, cynicism is hipper than sincerity. I have been warned against writing too many “happy” poems, as if happiness has the power to turn a poem into a Hallmark card. Poet Aimee Nezhukumatathil blows such speculations out of the water with her third book, Lucky Fish. You could say that this charming and buoyant book is “about” a lot of things — finding a home, love — but really, these poems point towardthe importance of attentiveness as a path to joy, however fragile. And while the poems are lucid enough that even the most inexperienced poetry reader would find pleasure in them, they are, like joy itself, anything but…

Bess Press, 2009. $29.95, 88 pages. Sometimes you just want beautiful images that speak for themselves. And sometimes it’s even better when they speak in an unfamiliar language, allowing you to focus more on rhythm, texture, and form than on what they mean. From the obtuse title (the Hawaiian name for bigeye scad) to the unexpected use of black-and-white photography underwater, Wayne Levin’s Akule surprises us. He takes an oft-photographed world, usually just below the water’s surface, a few feet from the environment we live in day-to-day, and shows us something so utterly foreign, we feel like we’re worlds away.…

YOUR SUPPORT SUSTAINS ORION Thanks to everyone who donated to Orion’s Spring Challenge Campaign between Earth Day and Memorial Day. You can support Orion at any time of year by making a donation at orionmagazine.org/donate or by sending a check to Orion at 187 Main Street, Great Barrington, MA 01230. Thank you! CATCH UP ON YOUR SUMMER READING Looking for summer reading? Back issues of Orion, all the way back to the first issue in 1982, are available for purchase at the Orion website, and they’re 25% off through the end of August. Also check out the Orion anthologies, Finding Home and The Future of Nature, and other Orion books at orionmagazine.org/shop. ORION IN CREATIVE WRITING CLASSROOMS Orion offers discounted subscriptions to creative writing classes through the Council of Literary…

Sandra Steingraber’s “Mind Games” (March/April 2011) is a wonderfully researched article interwoven with experiential evidence and is deeply engaging for any parent or educator. I am struck by the significance of the precautionary principle and its applicability to all aspects of our culture. In the welter of onslaughts to our democracy — from corporate hegemony to government complicity with corrupt regimes — adhering to the precautionary principle could clarify many issues and make easier a concerted action for change. Jo HAYWARD-HAINES Ennismore, Ontario, Canada I thought Sandra Steingraber’s piece brought several important issues to light. But one thing the author does not elaborate on is that it is not just our children who are affected by these chemicals — we all are. We have all been affected for countless years,…

1. The river is empty. 2. Empty of salmon, I mean. 3. But if youwere talking to my grandmother, she would say the waterdoesn’t matter if the salmon are gone. 4. She never said that.I just did. But I’m giving her those words as a gesture of love.5. She’s been gone for thirty-one years. 6. The water doesn’tmatter if my grandmother is gone. 7. She swam wearing allof her clothes, even her shoes. 8. I don’t know if that was atribal thing to do, or if she was just eccentric. 9. Has anybodyever said that dam building is an act of war against Indians?10. And, yet, we need the electricity, too. 11. My mother saidthe reservation needs a new electrical grid because of all thebrown- and blackouts. 12. “Why so…

The foghorns this morningtest different tonesin the stuffy darkness.Or I’m hearing them thus.I’m not sure of anything.A hoarse baritone bellowlaid over aspiringreedy swells or high-tonedlaments, and even thinner,a whistled mortal bugling.And behind them a whisperof something not quite sound,but a respiration of the mistkeeping alive those soundsI want and need to thinkare whales of the deep,their hymns and carolingsthat break above the wavesonly when locals are asleep,because they know the sleepersmight think that in dreamsthey are hearing life recedefrom the world, beginningin the distance,in the unlit deep.Their song wakes me.…

Crown Publishers, 2011. $24, 304 pages. AT THE HEART of The Bird Sisters is the enduring bond between sisters in the midst of a world that has not lived up to its promise and a family that refuses to behave as one. This lovely and devastating debut novel, grounded vividly in its setting on a rural Wisconsin farm, confronts us with the question of how much we are called to sacrifice for our kin and how far such a sacrifice can sustain us. While the world has changed around them since the summer of 1947, spinster sisters Milly and Twiss are still living together on the ramshackle farm of their childhood in Spring Green, Wisconsin. The aging women have in some ways never fully grown up and cling to each…

Bloomsbury Press, 2011. $26, 352 pages. IN MARCH 2006, I had dinner with Dale Peterson. Dale was eager to tell me about his ideas for a new book about the moral lives of nonhuman animals (hereafter, “animals”). The result, The Moral Lives of Animals, is an original, wide-ranging, and ambitious book. It nicely summarizes the burgeoning knowledge about the many animals who make deliberate choices to cooperate with one another, to care for one another, and to put others before themselves. Dogs and many other animals play cooperatively and fairly by obeying agreed-upon rules of social conduct that do not permit cheating or harming their playmate, while elephants help others in need by guarding or feeding them, and rats and monkeys won’t eat if others are shocked when they do.…

I WENT DOWN to the creek and stumbled on a six-point buck, field dressed and butchered. The following week, I crept past a man sleeping in a nest of rags beneath a bridge. Foxes weave paths through trash. Addicts shout from the brush. Once I met a USGS employee in waders taking sediment samples; he spoke of two girls who drowned downstream. By winter I was putting in eight-hour days, bashing through thickets, crawling through tunnels, falling through the ice. Hobbies like playing piano and hanging out with friends were slowly displaced, as if the creek’s water were rising in me. By spring, I was flooded: I knew what scared me and what fascinated me and what filled my boots with muck. Someone called it creeking and that name sounded…