Table of contents for November / December 2014 in Orion

TODAY, as we go to press with this issue of Orion, we’re in the gap between yesterday’s People’s Climate March and the United Nations Climate Summit, which begins tomorrow. No one knows yet whether or how the march will influence the summit’s deliberations, which in turn will set the stage for the discussions that will take place at the international climate treaty talks in Paris next year. But we do know what happened at the People’s Climate March. The march, which took place in New York City on September 21, was a spectacularly powerful statement made by hundreds of thousands of people who have grown tired of waiting for the world’s leaders to address climate change in a meaningful way. Organized by over a thousand participating organizations, including 350.org and…

Orion staff and readers joined over 300,000 others at the People’s Climate March in New York in September; see our photos at www.orionmagazine.org/news. Orion has lost two good friends, Ann Haymond Zwinger and Charles Bowden, who both died on August 30. Ann (mentioned in the Preamble of the previous issue of Orion) was the author of a number of stunning books of nature writing, served on Orion’s inaugural board of directors, and received Orion’s John Hay Award in 1996. Chuck’s book Inferno was a finalist for the Orion Book Award in 2007, and his book Some of the Dead Are Still Breathing won the Orion Book Award in 2010. We are grateful to have known both Chuck and Ann, and we will miss them. From the Department of Corrections: We…

I PULL INTO Black Oaks, weaving my car through the stands of shaggy oaks, and park just past a greenhouse. There, I make my way to a group of people chatting and milling about in the main courtyard, all of whom are involved in food sovereignty advocacy. They are touring farms in the U.S. and have stopped here at Black Oaks, a sustainable living center in Illinois focused on preparing and teaching others to plan for energy descent, a time when energy usage begins to decline rather than increase. Part of that preparation is learning to produce and distribute healthy food with fewer fossil fuels. Dr. Jifunza Wright Carter, one of the founders of Black Oaks, is leading a tour, beginning with the front yard garden still flush with arugula,…

A cellar collection of electric meters,hook-ups to power with so many wiresin makeshift highjack, it’s hard to tell what’s unraveled, what’s attachedamong the crisscrossed and slung, powertapped, leeched, jumped, and supporting that white tiled floor the well-heeledonce flew over from Florida to gambleand dance on. The door’s aqua is still sea-gleam bright, while the wrought ironstaircase spirals up from its fallen-out bottomas if down here is where power starts, where the grid gets given out — or grabbed,energy infusing the tenement-dense world.Someone saw how things can work, how current could be shared, wires sprouting so wildlythere’s no telling which belongs to whom.Reviewers claim this is about decay, but who are they to say that a peopleliving by jury-rig won’t keep going,knowing one light dims, another kicks in.…

Bluebell at the waysidenodding your assentto summer, and summer’s end;nodding, on your slender stem your undemurring yesto the small role lifeoffers you — a few weeksseasoning the hill-foot grasses with shakes of blue…You accept, and acquiescethereby, to any wind,though the winds tease: ‘Flower,’ they ask—’d’you want to be noticed?’Yes, yes, noticed!‘Or rather left alone?’ Yes, left perfectly alone! ‘Flower,’they whisper, ’d’you lovethe breeze that wantonsthe whole earth round breathing its sweet proposals,but does not love you?’— then laugh when your bluehead nods: I do. I do.…

HE LIVES IN A LAND too dry for trees. So in the evenings he goes outside to play his violin, which is made of ebony and maple and spruce, for he imagines the vibrating wood will give the rocks a hint of the sounds that wind and rain make in a forest. He does not play well, at least not well enough to please a human audience. But he imagines the desert doesn’t mind his scratchy notes, accustomed as it is to the skitter of lizards under sagebrush or scorpions over sand. He remembers from childhood the ruckus of leaves stroked by wind or pelted by rain, for as a boy he lived far to the north, in a region wetter and colder, among great trees. Here in the desert,…

My Daughter: “I hope there’s an animalSomewhere that nobody has ever seen.And I hope nobody ever sees it.” Being, whose flesh dissolvesat our glance, knowerof the secret sums and measures,you are always here,dwelling in the oldest sycamores,visiting the faithful springswhen they are dark and the foxeshave crept to their edges.I have come upon poolsin streams, places overgrownwith the woods’ shadow,where I knew you had rested,watching the little fishhang still in the flow;as I approached they seemedparticles of your clear minddisappearing among the rocks.I have waked deep in the woodsin the early morning, surethat while I sleptyour gaze passed over me.That we do not know youis your perfectionand our hope. The darknesskeeps us near you.…

Algonquin Books, 2014. $24.95, 240 pages. MICHELE RAFFIN — a former venture capital consultant and a suburban, stay-at-home mom with two dogs, three cats, and some chickens—was already a lifelong animal lover when she helped rescue an injured dove by the side of a highway. That led her to adopt 6 more doves … eventually leading to 350 birds in 63 aviaries. Raffin has since become one of the most successful breeders of endangered bird species on the planet. She fell in love with the unwanted, handicapped, old, and sick birds that people brought to her, and in the process, she writes, “I discovered that once-common birds were going extinct in the wild.… And without my realizing it, my backyard had become an ark.” The subtitle of Raffin’s book, Life…

Nation Books, 2014. $25.99, 320 pages. AS A SPEECHWRITER in the U.S. Congress during the early 1970s, Judith Nies realized that the development of the American West would depend upon the water and mineral resources that lay beneath Indian lands. She began to investigate the intertwined, largely invisible connections among native peoples, western politicians, and the global energy corporations that built the dams, mines, and pipelines that have transformed the arid West. In 1998, Orion published Nies’s exposé of the environmental injustices perpetrated at Black Mesa, in northern Arizona. There, Navajo and Hopi land was ravaged by strip mining to extract the coal to provide energy and pump Colorado River water to the booming sunbelt cities of Phoenix, Tucson, Las Vegas, and Los Angeles. Now, more than four decades after…

University of New Mexico Press, 2014. $50, 128 pages. Beginning in 2007, photographer Debra bloomfield spent five years taking planes, ferries, and skiffs to remote wilderness areas in Alaska. The images she captured — many of which are taken from a distance or through a window — express something essential to the idea of wilderness as it was first articulated in the 1964 Wilderness Act: a landscape that is untrammeled, self-willed, and self-possessed. The places in her photographs appear to be in possession of some inner life, apart from but not altogether alien to humans. The book contains an essay from Orion contributing editor Terry Tempest Williams, along with a CD allowing readers to hear raven calls, the crunch of snow underfoot, and other sounds from bloomfield’s journey.…

EXPLORE … DISCOVER … SUSTAIN Through writing and art, Orion leads you to new ideas, new ways of thinking, and new visions for a just and joyful future. Support the joy of discovery — for yourself and for the community of Orion readers — by making a tax-deductible donation this year-end. Go to www.orionmagazine.org/donate. Thank you. THE GIFT OF READING, AGAIN AND AGAIN What could be better than a gift that continues to mail itself to your gift recipient every other month, all year long? Visit www.orionmagazine.org/gift to order a gift subscription (and take advantage of special holiday pricing), and we’ll handle the rest. ORION GOES WILD & SCENIC Orion is proud to once again sponsor the Wild & Scenic Film Festival in Nevada City, California, in 2015. Join us…

Stephanie Anderson has illustrated three books for children, all published by Simon & Schuster. She received the 2010 Jane Addams Peace Honor, and is working on a fourth book. Wendell Berry is the author of more than fifty books of poetry, fiction, and essays. Tom Pohrt is a self-taught artist living in Ann Arbor, Michigan. “To the Unseeable Animal” is excerpted from their book Terrapin, forthcoming from Counter point Press. Allen Braden is the author of the poetry collection’s A Wreath of Down and Drops of Blood and Elegy in the Passive Voice. Ian van Coller’s photographs are included in the collections of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, and the South African National Gallery. Rowan Jacobsen is the author of Fruitless Fall, American Terroir,…

1.Mount Erebus, Antarctica It’s the world’s southernmost active volcano, a hulking ice monster with a beating magmatic heart. Need I say more? Okay, I’ll say more. I was working for the United States Antarctic Program at the time, and my superiors — who were many — told me again and again that I was at The Bottom Of The World to shovel snow, not go on adventures. They explained that should I wander from the station, drawn heavenward by the promise of soul-purifying solitude or “whatever it is dudes like you [me] get o= on,” my contract would be terminated, and I would be sent home. On top of that, they said, I would die. The volcano seemed to confirm this last part. 2.La Plata Peak, Colorado My friend Chris…

PAULUS BERENSOHN stands in his doorway wearing a purple shirt, black cotton pants, and flip-flops. His white hair is combed back from his formidable forehead and gathered in a small ponytail. The chunky necklace he’s wearing, made from pink and orange plastic beads, gives him the appearance of an elegant, elderly first grader—and in some ways he is exactly that. For the past eighty-one years he has concerned himself with primary skills: movement (he’s a practitioner of modern dance); manual arts (he’s a sculptor, mainly in clay); and the naming and investigation of sixty-one human senses. Paulus is the author of the ceramicist’s bible, Finding One’s Way with Clay, and a handmade book in which he’s written a voluminous list of senses: sense of temperature and temperature change (#7); sense…

THE UNIVERSE BECKONS TO US with many voices and gestures. We look and listen, mull over what we have taken in, and then respond with creations of our own — songs and stories, dances and paintings, religions and sciences — that beckon to us in turn. Peter’s chief art is photography; Scott’s is writing. Longtime friends, they are collaborating on a project that celebrates the humble and abundant blessings that surround us. The photographs come first, a bit of the universe refracted through Peter’s eye and mind. After Scott has lived with the images for a while, he begins hearing sentences, which gradually coalesce into stories, like the ones offered here.…

YOU PEER INTO OUR GREEN, luxuriant depths, which you call jungle, and your gaze settles on a single leaf. You admire the sheen of its surface, the feathery pattern of its veins, the way it rises up and demands your attention. Ah, you think, it is like the god of leaves, bold and brash, yet so frail, so ephemeral, less like a deity that endures than like a flame that flickers out. But consider for a moment, two-legged one. If you plow a field or cut down a forest, then turn away for a spell, what do you find on your return? A thicket of green shoots, unfolding their leaves to the sun. Far from ephemeral, we are immortal, or as nearly so as anything earthly. We arrived on land…

WHEN MY OLDER BROTHER, Tom, and I awoke to a fine morning, which was more often than not in the long days of the long summers of our Colorado suburban childhood, our first thought was for a clean getaway. If we had our regular jobs more or less under control it was fairly easy to make a break for it on weekdays, when Mom was in charge. Weekends were trickier, with Dad home and armed with a list of jobs for us around the house or the yard. Even so, the common condition was for us to split, together or with friends or on our own, for parts unknown — or, rather, well known. Our usual haunt was the High Line Canal, an old irrigation ditch a mile away, the…

Viking, 2014. $26.95, 275 pages. THOSE OF US who are descendants of today’s remaining farm families often face a complicated moral dilemma. On one hand, our parents’ ability to produce yearly yields is what allowed us to grow up where we did and, thus, to form deep connections with the land. On the other, we know that those connections were established on borrowed time, since many of today’s advanced farming practices—from chemical saturation to tearing up the prairie for corn—are destroying the very places that we love. In Julene Bair’s new memoir, The Ogallala Road, the alarming depletion of the Ogallala Aquifer — a vast source of groundwater that runs under South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Wyoming, and a portion of Texas — due to farmland irrigation is the central moral…

Graywolf Press, 2014. $15, 88 pages. YEARS AGO, when Mark Wunderlich was visiting his family’s home in southwestern Wisconsin, he came across a small nineteenth-century German prayer book, meant to be carried in a pocket. He was surprised by the utility of the prayers, and moved by their tone: they suggested a desire “for language to bind up the world and shield the reader from harm.” What would it mean, he wondered, to bring those bygone prayers into his own contemporary experience? The Earth Avails evokes a prayerful way of living that is nearly forgotten, but its poems — written either in free verse or unrhymed couplets — are immediate and urgent. Many of the poems reinvent the specific type of prayer Wunderlich discovered in the prayer book years before:…

Great examples of the co-operative business model offered by Gar Alperovitz (“The Cooperative Economy,” May/June – July/August 2014) are located nearly everywhere. Most communities have one or more credit unions or co-op banks, and it’s not unusual for one’s home energy to come from an electric co-op. More than 42 million Americans get their electricity from over 800 community-owned cooperatives in 47 states. Need a hammer or lawnmower? Either can be bought at local ACE or True Value hardware stores — they’re both co-ops, comprised of many small business owners working together to compete against big-box stores. Almost every grocery store in the country sells products from farmer coops like Organic Valley, Ocean Spray, Welch’s, Florida’s Natural, and Blue Diamond. Moreover, the grocery store itself might be consumer owned. There…

SPRING IS THE TIME OF YEAR when Deena Miller, owner and operator of Sweet Roots Farm in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, thinks of quitting. Her body hurts, money is tight, and just enough of her organic, love-sown seeds have sprouted from the ground that she can see her failures: wimpy leaves, frost-stunted sprouts, roots chewed through by beetles. It’s the fourth season that thirty-year-old Miller and her husband, Robbie Martin, have farmed three and a half acres on a slight slope in the fertile Penn Valley, north of Sacramento. And yet despite the challenges, each year has proven better than the last as they learn the particulars of the region’s microclimates and their farm’s soil — what grows best where, just how long to wait to plant the…

I AM SQUATTING on a sandy riverbank, watching a pack of western red-bellied tiger beetles eat a dead frog. Although the insects are only two feet away and about a third of an inch long, through close-focusing binoculars they fill my vision, an entirely new and surprising world. Tiger beetles have disproportionately large, sickle-shaped mouthparts, which they use now to stab into the white belly of the frog, slicing and scything and scissoring their mandibles like a chef sharpening his knives. Sometimes the beetles stand completely still, each brown wing cover patterned with seven creamy, irregular dots, the abdomen orange, the head and thorax iridescent in the sun. The beetles flash red and green and blue and gold. Suddenly they are gone. Suddenly they return. Suddenly they stare straight at…

YOU MAY THINK WE DREAM of toothy wolves or sharp shears, but we only dream of grass. It is delicious, especially on spring mornings, when dew clings to each curving blade and juice glazes our tongues. We taught the cows and horses and goats to graze, and look how they fatten. Nothing tastes finer than succulent grass except the milk of our dams, but we must give that up when we cease being lambs. You may scorn our diet, as you scorn much else about us. But we find all our sustenance growing free in the fields, while you must work tedious jobs to buy groceries and restaurant grub. Instead of shopping for clothing, we grow it. We grow much of yours, as well, for what keeps you warmer than…

WHILE NURSING, the newborn presses one hand against his mother’s breast, wraps the other around her thumb. The mother counts the baby’s fingers, each one perfect, each one tipped by a pink translucent nail like the scale of a fish. His palms, hidden for the moment against her skin, are creased with lines she cannot read, and the backs of his hands are as puffy and smooth as risen dough. He frowns, eyes closed, intent on sucking. She wonders how such a marvel could have been woven inside her, wonders how he will fare now that he is outside in the chancy world. Eighty years later the infant has become an old man, his mother a frayed memory. He sits at a table in the house he built in a…

If you are a whale, your mouthshould be in your forehead,not to mention your blowholegasping exclamations nearby.If not, then you may need gillsfolded like taffy and oxygenated.Besotted, Pliny the Elderdeclared a dolphin’s tonguebetter than those of most humansof his acquaintance. You should beso lucky. Your eyes may migrate,fleeing the symmetry of your faceor you may never sleep again.Say goodbye to opposable thumbs.On the other hand (so to speak),you get to spawn thousands.Practice lurking, breaching,crushing ship hulls like cellophane.Who else finds their way by singing?…

ON A RAINY winter evening, seventy people jammed into a Seattle recording studio to listen to poetry by Irma Pineda, who had traveled from her hometown of Juchitán, Oaxaca, in southern Mexico. She writes in Isthmus Zapotec, the mother tongue of several people in the audience that night — immigrants from Mexico’s Isthmus of Tehuantepec who were anxious to hear the sounds of home. Most others in the audience had never heard Zapotec before, much less listened to its literature. Pineda’s traditional, formal dress had filled most of her suitcase: a cropped black-velvet tunic embroidered with fuchsias, calla lilies, and purple irises, and a matching floor-length skirt. The embroidery and her gold-filigree jewelry glowed against the gray curtains covering the studio walls. The program began with Isthmus dancers winding their…

University of New Mexico Press, 2014. $19.95, 168 pages. THE TITlE of Yelizaveta P. Renfro’s latest book, Xylotheque, does not roll easily off the tongue. Meaning, “a collection of wood,” Xylotheque is indeed a collection of essays rich with images of trees, from living redwoods and petrified wood to oaks in suburbia and the “lush tangled growth” of the Kuybyshev countryside that Renfro visits as a teen. Like a root system of a wooded hillside, Renfro’s essays are elegantly woven meditations on cultural identity, natural history, coming of age, and death. Though the tree theme implied by the title sometimes seems tacked on to otherwise fluid essays, each one offers unique insights on subjects rarely addressed in nature writing. Renfro, who was born in the U.S. to an American father…

Penguin Press, 2014. $26.95, 306 pages. MOST RECENT WRITING on the state of our oceans suggests that we’re eating too much seafood, that overfishing strains fish populations and contributes to their impending collapse. But in his superb new book, American Catch: The Fight for Our Local Seafood, Paul Greenberg offers a novel idea: we, or at least we Americans, are eating too little seafood, and our fish-averse ways are contributing to ecological degradation—not just in the oceans but also on land, particularly in population-dense regions like New York City and the Gulf Coast. Greenberg’s argument is powerful and elegant. By spurning native seafood — we eat just fifteen pounds of seafood per capita annually, 91 percent of which is imported — we have little incentive to maintain our coastal ecosystems.…

A GROUP OF US had gathered on the porch for a drink at the end of the day — late August, Vermont, sun bright-but-downshifting, leaves green-but-red-tinging — when a moose wandered into the meadow behind the house. She stood chest deep in tall grasses, so dark she shone like a black, still lake. Our friends said they’d never seen a moose in that spot, or so close. Just an hour earlier, I was walking the mowed edge of the meadow, woods on one side, milkweed on the other. With my arms outstretched I could almost touch both. I was, as I walked — and there isn’t a why to be had in this story — conjuring moose. Entering moose-space. Considering it a moose-like day, and why wouldn’t a moose want…