Table of contents for January / February 2014 in Orion

First of all, a thank-you to the many readers who supported Orion during 2013 with donations, renewals, and gift subscriptions. You’re the reason this magazine exists, and we don’t just mean financially. Readers’ connections to Orion and the stories you share are our inspiration five days a week (and sometimes six or seven). And it’s always a great time to make a gift; please visit www.orionmagazine.org/donate to support Orion’s mission to publish writing and art that deepens our connection with the natural world. Congratulations to Jill Sisson Quinn (“Metamorphic,” May/June 2013), who has won a 2013 Rona Jaffe Writers’ Award. And congratulations also to Karen Russell on being awarded a MacArthur “genius grant.” Her book Swamplandia! was a finalist for the 2012 Orion Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize in…

Bloomsbury Press, 2013. $28, 416 pages. ENVIRONMENTALISTS used to see cities as The Problem: overpopulated stinkholes of vice and pollution. But aside from food sustainability issues, people in cities actually use fewer resources per capita than folks in stretched-out suburbs or distant small towns. They burn far less fuel in transportation (because of public transit and short city distances) and in heat ing (homes are smaller and might be stacked in efficient ways). And city life is often healthier: it gets your fat bottom out of the car for a nice brisk walk, multiple times a day. Leo Hollis’s new book, Cities Are Good for You: The Genius of the Metropolis, offers a ringing, globe-rambling affirmation of the premise that cities are actually a big part of The Solution. The…

Melville House, 2013. $23.95, 272 pages. WHAT MAKES for a good lunch? Curtis White wants to know. A writer of both fiction and essays that engage in cultural criticism, White offers us his newest book, The Science Delusion: Asking the Big Questions in a Culture of Easy Answers. In a pivotal scene, White recounts a now-notorious luncheon meeting between James Watson, codiscoverer of the structure of the DNA molecule, and Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion. During the lunch, Dawkins mentioned to Watson that some people think science is about how things work, and that religion is about what things are for. Watson objected. He didn’t think humans were for anything but were simply products of evolution; Watson conceded that this might be a rather bleak thought, so, by…

Nico Alvarado is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. His recent poetry and prose can be found in Gigantic and Gulf Coast. Emily Blincoe is a freelance photographer from Austin, Texas. She specializes in portrait, landscape, and concept photography and enjoys working with color and natural light. Peter Brewitt is a PhD student at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he’s researching the ways people restore and remake their environments. His online column, Concrete Progress, is a part of Orion’s two-year Reimagining Infra structure project. Craig Childs has written several acclaimed books on nature, science, and wilderness travel. His most recent book, Apocalyptic Planet: Field Guide to the Everending Earth, won the 2013 Orion Book Award. He lives in western Colorado. Andrea Cohen’s fourth poetry collection, Furs Not…

1. The Floating Trumpet Imagine Louis Armstrong with lungs the size of a Volkswagen and a trumpet the size of a hollow cedar tree. Now imagine Louis pouring every hour of practice, every smoky-hall performance, every ounce of his huge soul into a single pure note set free over a mirror-calm sea. That’s the sound that occasionally lifts from the nose of a humpback whale on a late summer evening. Hear it once and it will long echo against the walls of memory. 2. The Wave of Whispers Barnacles, those crusted critters clustered on intertidal rocks, are, at first listen, not the most vocal of species. But pass the shadow of your body over a low-tide boulder on a still morning and you’ll hear a wave of whispers, all those…

THE BOY in the barbershop mirror wanted a haircut for summer sleep-away camp. He was nervous and talked a lot. The clippers buzzed. The blond hair fell. In the next mirror, a man just out of stroke rehab wanted a shave with his haircut. The barber couldn’t understand him. Partially paralyzed and mostly mute, he let his wife do the talking. That would be me: The woman occupying a chair opposite the mirrors. The lone female in a room filled with men who were reading, yes, the sports page in, yes, actual newspapers because in this particular small-town barbershop — that would be the small town in upstate New York where I live — the use of cell phones is prohibited. I studied the wood paneling and the various jokey…

ON THE EVENING OF May 4, 2007, Greensburg, Kansas, was utterly demolished by a category EF5 tornado. Roaring up from the Texas panhandle, the 1.7-mile-wide monster tore through the town, flattening houses and flinging car parts onto the roof of the grain elevator. Residents had twenty-six minutes’ warning, allowing many of them to scramble for shelter. Nonetheless, the tornado destroyed 95 percent of the town and killed eleven people. Greensburg was determined to rebuild. The simple way to do it would have been to re-create essentially the same town as before. But despite being physically, emotionally, and economically shattered, residents managed to see the opportunity that followed in the twister’s path. They chose to rebuild not the simplest way, but the best way. Regional activist Daniel Wallach and mayor Lonnie…

Springer, 2013. $34.99, 200 pages. MY GOOD FRIEND Bret studies the nuanced vocalizations of neotropical singing mice. While visiting Austin last fall, I had the chance to tour his University of Texas basement lab, meet some operatic rodents, and spend a little time in a unique anechoic chamber, or, as I like to call it, “the magic no-sound room.” These unique rooms allow for precise sound measurements because everything about them is designed to absorb, insulate, and eliminate outside sound. When we spoke it felt like the walls were robbing our very breath. My ears tried to compensate for this total lack of sound with their own buzzing, and I imagined this was what floating in space must be like. No bearings, no sense of place, no peace, even. After…

(Required by 39 U.S.C. 3685) 1. Title of publication: Orion (pub. no. 694-910) 2. Filing date: september/October 2013 3. Full names and mailing addresses of publisher, editor, and managing editor. publisher & Editor-in-chief: H. Emerson Blake; Editor: Jennifer Sahn. Address for all: 187 Main street, Great Barrington, MA 01230. 4. Owner: The Orion Society, 187 Main Street, Great Barrington, MA 01230. 5. Known bondholders, mortgagees, and other security holders owning or holding one percent or more of total amount of bonds, mortgages or other securities: none. I certify that all information furnished by me on this form is correct and complete.…

ORION AT BREAD LOAF We’re proud to announce the first annual Bread Loaf Orion Environmental Writers’ Conference. A collaboration between Bread Loaf, Orion, and the Middlebury College Environmental Studies Program, it will be held June 9 – 15 in Ripton, Vermont. More information and application materials are at www.orionmagazine.org/breadloaf. WILD & SCENIC, NATIONWIDE In 2014 Orion is proud to sponsor both the home festival and the national tour of the Wild & Scenic Film Festival. Wild & Scenic uses film to inspire people and unite communities to heal the earth. The tour will make stops in over one hundred communities in 2014; go to www.wildandscenicfilmfestival.org to find a tour stop near you. INSPIRING THE NEW YEAR The holiday dust may be settling, but there’s still time to help someone ring…

I’ve been a registered nurse for thirtythree years, and Jennifer Lunden’s September/October 2013 article, “Exposed,” confirms my already stalwart belief that if we don’t get big business out of health care, we will continue to make little headway in our quest to reduce human suffering. Health-care profiteering and appropriate medical management are morally and practically opposed to one another. Prevention takes away from the bottom line, as do non-invasive treatments or a “wait and see” approach — and when doctors are forced to see twenty or more patients a day, there is no time to discuss the meaningful diet and lifestyle changes that are the only lasting cures for many of our modern illnesses. Of course, even if there were time for this, and insurance companies were willing to reimburse…

GUIDED by my ongoing obsession with the novel Moby-Dick, I embark upon a pilgrimage to the New Bedford Whaling Museum. It’s a fascinating, well-funded repository of dramatic nineteenth-century maritime artwork, scrimshaw, harpoons, and various whaling implements, as well as a half-scale re-creation of a successful whaling ship named the Lagoda. The museum makes concrete much of what I’ve gleaned about the historic whaling industry from reading and rereading Moby-Dick. What most intrigues me — but is given somewhat short shrift by the museum — is the industry’s gross unsustainability. In two or three hundred years, U.S. whaling corporations fished out entire oceans and severely depleted the global whale population, cutting a critical lifeline for many indigenous peoples who had sustainably harvested whales for two thousand years or more. Whereas native…

RICHARD WAGNER’S Ring of the Nibelungs, known as the Ring Cycle, starts with a low, low E-flat, a half step lower than available on a standard electric bass and, more to the point, on the four double basses the great, flawed composer scored to play it (these must be tuned down); it is accompanied by four more basses playing an octave higher. And this rumble of a chord, adding notes and voices and volume, develops over more than four minutes into a droning, poignant surge very like the sound I heard late at night in bed as a kid and thought was the turning of the world. And actually still think: there’s a rumble, a thrum, deep in the basement of the night. The house goes quiet, and quieter yet.…

Little, Brown and Company, 2013. $27, 336 pages. LAVISHLY ILLUSTRATED bestiaries packed with animal lore and natural history were popular in medieval times. They provided readers with facts and fantasies as well as moral lessons about the earth’s creatures, each animal a symbol of import in Christian thought. In her engaging new book, The Urban Bestiary: Encountering the Everyday Wild, Lyanda Lynn Haupt plays with this concept as she surveys the animals that most American humans encounter regularly in their backyard gardens or city parks. While we no longer think of the squirrel as a symbol of heavenly meditation, the fact remains that we do, at least, think about them. However, because of their ubiquity, we tend to regard them as slightly poorer versions of their truly “wild” relatives—the squirrels…

Penguin, 2013. $20, 112 pages. PLEASURES ABOUND in Pattiann Rogers’s twelfth book of poems, Holy Heathen Rhapsody, an impassioned, carefully conceived collection that reaffirms Rogers’s long-standing devotion to poetry about the natural world. With nearly tactile mouthfuls of words (“Some of them are taproots, some / are spreading roots. With the quackgrass, / a sturdy rootstock”), explorations of nature’s “straining contrivances” and its “angelic, obscene” ways are intertwined with human knowledge and experience. The book is arranged in triptychs — groupings of three poems in eleven sections. The three poems in each section contrast, reaffirm, and interrogate one another, offering interrelated ways of exploring an idea. Rogers’s inventive structure breaks down divisions between “human” and “natural,” and evokes the overlapping experiences of different species. In one triptych, Rogers moves from…