Orion Autumn 2022

THIS ISSUE marks the beginning of our fifth decade, following the festive gathering of our fortieth anniversary celebration in June. Many thanks to Camille T. Dungy, John Freeman, Jane Goodall, Bill McKibben, Emily Raboteau, Rebecca Solnit, Jeff VanderMeer, and the dozens of other luminaries who appeared as if out of thin air; to Ecco, MCD X FSG, Hulu Originals, Institute at Brown for Environment and Society, Penguin Random House, and Yale Forum on Religion and Ecology for making the evening possible; and to the thousands of people who gave their time, tuned in, and helped us raise more than $200,000! And many congratulations to the recipients of our two inaugural lifetime achievement awards: Margaret Atwood, who received the Orion / Barry Lopez Award for Achievements in Letters and Environments for…

BACK WHEN I first became familiar with Tintin, the ageless boy reporter whose exploits with criminal masterminds and rapscallions would stay me through childhood, the books weren’t so available to own. From what I could tell, the only way to find one was to wait for my father to return from a trip abroad. I’d wait by the kitchen phone every evening, hoping that he’d wake up soon so I could tell him which one to look for. A week or two later, he’d open his suitcase on the living room floor and I’d hover ravenously nearby, looking for signs of primary colors beneath the earth-tone business wear. On the few occasions when the books appeared, it was only ever from the depths of sweets and camel-bone trinkets, rich with…

I LIVE WITHIN the largest college campus in the world: Berry College, on more than 27,000 acres. At Berry you get a year round southern liberal arts summer camp education with forests and a few sweeping mountains. You can hunt. You can walk, hike, bike, and Rollerblade for miles on asphalt and dirt trails like calligraphy from student dorms. On the way, you may get sprayed by a skunk, witness the phantom movements of a roving coyote, bask in the shadow of a bald eagle, or see a bear march down a mountain. You will most definitely see armies and armies of deer. They decamp beside the college chapel, night-maneuver across the library lawn. They have conquered the college grounds. You will not go a day without seeing at least…

WE ARE IN THE VILLAGES around Lake Urmia, once one of the largest saline waters in the world. Recently, it’s become dried out, forcing residents of these mostly agricultural villages to look for work elsewhere. Those few who’ve stayed behind are now finding their environment completely transformed. The weather is volatile, the foliage is withering, and even the air is different—filled with salt winds that are causing respiratory problems for those nearby. In one area close to Qushchi village, we meet a man determined to fight the air. To prevent the salt winds from reaching the villages, he and his team are planting architectural rows of Nitraria schoberi, a native shrub. It’s an idea taken from the desert areas of central Iran, where plants like Salsola dendroides are often the…

I'VE NEVER BEEN a gardener. Growing up on a reservation in the Pacific Northwest, I never had to be. My backyard was lush with old growth. Towering cedars, moss-covered nurse logs, and sword ferns took up the space where flower beds might have been. My Coast Salish ancestors were not gardeners either. They fished the rivers, picked wild huckleberries, and harvested cedar. Beautifying a space by planting flowers wasn’t something we practiced. To say growing up on the reservation was a privilege feels wrong, but the landscape of my childhood was remarkable. It may have been the reservation, a community founded on oppression and built by settler colonial trauma, but it was also a rainforest. My backyard, as complicated as it may have been, was a paradise. To uproot something…

I TOOK A MASTER naturalist class in Montana a few years ago in an effort to better know the place where I live. We kept field journals, and I tried to draw painted lady butterflies, foliose lichen, and northern flickers—one of the few birds I recognize. Our class traveled to a local wildlife refuge to search for raptors in the skies. We saw bald eagles and golden eagles and red-tailed hawks. We saw songbirds, too, but their names escaped me. An instructor asked us which birds we could identify and I said, “roadrunner.” He asked with surprise, “You’ve seen those in Montana?” I assured him I had not. I reached hard for these new names, for what to call the native plants and animals, the rivers and mountain ranges. I…