Orion 35 Anniversary Issue

OFTEN, in the editorial of a magazine’s anniversary issue, the editors feel compelled to make breezy statements about how the magazine has changed since it was founded, or how it has stayed the same, or how the world has changed, or stayed the same. They strive to tie a tidy bow on the past and point the way clearly toward the future. But for a magazine about the relationship between people and the natural world, there are no tidy bows, and the path forward isn’t at all certain. One thing that can be said with certainty is that at the time Orion was founded, thirty-five years ago, the environmental predicament that humanity faced was simpler, or at least seemed simpler. In those days, many people believed that damaged natural systems…

Fred Bahnson is the author of Soil and Sacrament. His essays have appeared in Harper’s, Oxford American, Image, Orion, The Sun, Washington Post, and Best American Spiritual Writing. He teaches at Wake Forest University School of Divinity. Nick Bowers is a photographer whose work focuses on light, space, movement, process, and environment. He lives in Sydney, Australia. Jesse Chehak is an American photographer, artist, and educator. His photographs are inquisitive encounters with places, communities, and circumstances. Todd Davis is the author of five books of poetry, most recently Winterkill and In the Kingdom of the Ditch. He teaches environmental studies at Pennsylvania State University’s Altoona College. Erica Dawson is the author of two collections of poetry: Big-Eyed Afraid and The Small Blades Hurt. She is the director of the University…

We applaud Anjali Vaidya’s bold and poetic essay “Native or Invasive” (March/April 2017), which suggests a parallel between native plant proponents’ rampant hostility toward “invasive” species and xenophobia regarding human immigrants. “Othering,” whether directed toward plants, animals, or humans, has never done much to advance either science or human rights. Fortunately, more and more researchers are now acknowledging that migration is a fundamental right of nature, and that in our assault on “invasive” species, we have hubristically done more ecological harm than good. Here in Northern California, a group of environmental activists have fought — successfully, so far — against a plan to clearcut hundreds of thousands of eucalyptuses, a stigmatized tree species. The shortsighted folly of such a plan — in an era of climate chaos, when every tree…

1 Ignore the small signs at first. An acorn in the laundry basket, a stray pumpkin seed on the basement stairs. 2 Find signs you can’t ignore. Droppings on the basement shelves where your mother’s seed packets are lined up awaiting spring planting. Look closer: the packets have been raided, the corners chewed off, seeds of sunflower and squash scattered like shrapnel. 3 Admit that your home is occupied territory. New droppings have appeared every morning: buried like land mines between stacks of papers on your desk, strewn across the keyboard where you are not writing your novel. Research extermination methods until your mother, a science teacher who keeps turtles and frogs in the classroom, calls you and insists on mercy for all creatures. 4 Choose defense instead of offense.…

THE SUN is just beginning its evening melt across the horizon. The sky turns lavender; the sorghum fields glow crimson. A maguey undulates its aquamarine leaves like a desert octopus. Somewhere along Chapman Ranch Road, not far from Bishop, Texas, my friend Greg pulls over. “I want to show you something,” he says. The land before us is overgrown with weeds as high as our knees. We wade toward a cinder-block house abandoned long ago. Spiderwebs mend the shot-out windows. Braids of vine slither up one wall; black and green mold creeps down another. Despite the house’s run-down condition, Greg grins and points out a paint-splattered pattern in the mold. Just like that, what was previously an eyesore becomes art. We circle around the house, marveling at the plant life…

“WHEN YOU LOOK UP, you’ve gotta keep your mouth closed,” Deidre Martin tells me soon after we meet. Jennifer Stern, her companion, agrees: “I only got poop on my face once, and that was enough.” We’re standing under a ficus tree on the corner of 14th and Jackson in downtown Oakland, home to some of the several hundred black-crowned night herons that roost on a few blocks in the city’s administrative district. Martin and Stern are volunteers with the local Audubon Society; once a week, on their lunch breaks, they patrol the rookery to look for wayward hatchlings. Herons are shorebirds, and at night the adults hunt for fish in nearby Lake Merritt, a tidal inlet of San Francisco Bay. To judge by the sidewalk under this tree, the birds…