Tabla de contenidos para May / June 2015 en Orion

7 SURVIVAL TIPS FOR THE HARDY EXTRATERREST RIAL 1. Embrace the cold. Here on Earth, life requires liquid water for its essential operations. But on the surface of Mars, where temperatures seldom get higher than -70°C, water is perpetually frozen. This means that any microbes burrowed into the Martian permafrost may have the ability to quench their thirst with a liquid that has a lower freezing point. No life has yet been found on the Red Planet, but recently, a team of scientists suggested that an organism capable of combining hydrogen peroxide with a small amount of water might survive such cold, dry conditions. 2. Live in a cloud. One layer of Jupiter’s vast atmosphere is a haze of ammonia, ammonia hydrosulfide, and water — all smeared by the planet’s…

IF THE ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE COMES I’m heading to Burlington, Vermont. The state’s largest city sits on a huge freshwater lake, half a day’s drive from Boston, the nearest metropolis. It has urban farms, coffee roasters, breweries, and a chocolate factory — things that help take the sting out of total societal breakdown. But it also has something few places will have when zombies are roaming the interstates: its own local power. “The fact that we have physical generators within the city, as well as nearby, does give us the ability to disconnect from the rest of Vermont and bring the load back up,” Ken Nolan told me. Nolan is manager of power resources for the Burlington Electric Department, a municipally owned utility. We were sitting in the conference room, which…

for Jonathan Pelham who devised the key Dorsal iridescent hue of cyanic overlay?A thicket of specifics,Extension of dorsal forewing marginal lineoften barely distinguishable,toward base along veins — absent, faint,that we attempt to parseor prominent? Caterpillars buckwheatand interpret as each creatureor lupine feeders? Early generation or late?goes on, not oblivious exactlyLowland or high-ridge citizens?but preoccupied with the avid,melded, quick acts and judgments of survival.…

Something in the water smells like a dead zone. Somethingin the mud creeps across my heel. You can drift out here. The silt, the silt. Every dust bowl longsto be soup. I mean the sky is totally Sanskrit,and flycatcher’s still working that little willow’s atmosphere like he owns the place, likeeven the cottonwoods have quit giving the wind some lip. I love near-island’s bluffsheer, that loaf of loess look.Go on, Mama Kaw, dredge me. Silver maple, show me some leg.T here’s an eagle now. Of course there’s a fucking eagle. I mean upwellings so perverseone longs to strike a match. And vultures, just upstream, steady at conjugating carp into kite frame. God,you old trotliner, I’m going to clean all your hooks and then make a necklace, lots of necklaces, from…

I CAN’T RECALL MY FIRST panic attack. I imagine it struck at about age fifteen, probably after another caffeinated night at a diner called Bino’s. It might seem unlikely that I wouldn’t remember. Surely that first-ever wave of raw fear, the sort you would feel if a cold hand grabbed at your ankles as you swam in deep water, would be memorable? I can only assume that by the time an actual panic attack came along it felt like nothing more than a natural extension of what my day-to-day self had become: quaky handed, clammy browed, expecting the worst. My genes had begun to express — I actually picture a manual coffee press here — the family trait that my father cheerfully referred to as “inner horror.” As a teenager,…

THOR HANSON Basic Books, 2015. $26.99, 304 pages. GIVEN humanity’s perpetual search for order in the world, it is not surprising that we all want to know where things begin. While generally a futile quest, humans can at least be satisfied in the investigation of botany. Conservation biologist Thor Hanson does just that in his inclusive look at the epic lives of tiny kernels, pits, spores, and stones. He catalogues the heroic efforts of seeds, ranging from how they sustain themselves and endure to how they defend themselves and are dispersed. Hanson delivers botanical information with wit and imagination. How seeds nurture themselves with starch, proteins, and oils may be a prosaic affair, but Hanson enlivens the explanation of their diverse nourishment strategies by examining the components of an Almond…

CYNTHIA BARNETT Crown, 2015. $25, 368 pages. IN HIS ESSAY “Rain and the Rhinoceros,” Thomas Merton celebrates the mystery of rain. “I listen,” he writes from his hermitage on a stormy night, “because it reminds me again and again that the whole world runs by rhythms I have not yet learned to recognize.” In Rain: A Natural and Cultural History, science writer Cynthia Barnett approaches her subject with full recognition of that mystery, bringing to it a cogent understanding of rain’s complex part in the hydrologic cycle. Barnett, who in previous books has written extensively on the water crisis in contemporary America, excels at explaining the complexities of that cycle and the consequences of our modern compulsion to manipulate it. As she makes clear, the human attempt to control the…

ONE OF THE UGLIEST most beautiful things I ever saw in this life was a week-old sparrow chick that fell from its nest inside our ancient garage and hit the ancient concrete floor and died. I was eleven years old. My brother Tommy found it and came running for me. He was four years old. He was sobbing. We stared at the chick, or what used to be a chick, if you think that the spark inside the chick makes up a lot of what the chick is, or was. It was so ugly you could not begin to explain how ugly it was, although a good start would be the scraggle of stumpy feathers, and the head too big for the body, and the awful stubs of wings, and…

Wolf Ademeit is a photographer living in Moers, Germany. His acclaimed series Animals, from which a selection of images in this issue are drawn, took over five years to complete. Morgan Bulkeley paints and sculpts in his hometown of Mount Washington, Massachusetts. He is director of Green Berkshires, an environmental advocacy group. Rebecca Clark studied painting and drawing at the Maryland Institute College of Art and at the Corcoran College of Art + Design. She lives in Maryland. Brian Doyle is the editor of Portland Magazine at the University of Portland. His most recent book is Martin Marten. Jody Gladding’s poetry collections are Translations from Bark Beetle, Rooms and Their Airs, and Stone Crop. Jessica Greenbaum’s The Two Yvonnes was one of Library Journal’s Best Books in Poetry in 2012.…

FOR OVER A DECADE I have been collecting place-words: gleaned singly from conversations, correspondences, or books, and jotted down in journals or on slips of paper. Now and then I have hit buried treasure in the form of vernacular dictionaries or extraordinary people — troves that have held gleaming handfuls of coinages. One such trove turned up on the moors of the Outer Hebridean island of Lewis in 2007. There, I was shown a “Peat Glossary”: a word-list of the hundreds of Gaelic terms for the moorland that stretches over much of Lewis’s interior. Some of the language it recorded was still spoken — but much had fallen into disuse. The same year I first saw the Peat Glossary, a new edition of the Oxford Junior Dictionary was published. A…

The first animal you would find in the phonebook,from Afrikaans (the queen of double-a words)where aard means earth and vark means pig,and last survivor of primeval hoofed animals,with no relation to the pig, but a distant onewith elephants, the only living species of the order Tubulidentatafor the unique teeth, each a cluster of thin, hexagonal,upright parallel tubes, up to 1,500 tubes per toothwhich wear away and regrow continuously,though they don’t chew their ants and termites —as many as 50,000 a night, as scientists have painstakinglyrecorded — but swallow them whole and let their stomachmuscles do the grinding. They have a symbioticpact with the thirst quenching aardvark cucumber,the only fruit they eat, whose seeds grow fertilein their stomach, then, passed, spring up near the burrowlike a slow-motion water fountain. Burrows can…

LAST FALL I went out for a run and, after a couple hundred yards, realized that something was very wrong; I thought I was about to faint. I sat down for half an hour right there. When I got up and went to the doctor, he said I’d had a heart attack somewhere along the way. One of my arteries was almost completely blocked. One stent later I felt renewed, but I also had a sobering sense of the delicacy of life. The idea of disappearing from the earth unsettled me. Meanwhile, many birds once common in our woods had become rare — the eastern towhee, the flicker, the brown thrasher, the sparrow hawk. I’d hardly seen any of them for years. Across the United States, bird populations have been…

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2015. $26, 280 pages. JOHN VAILLANT THE CARIBOU AND WOLF, the fig and fig wasp, the monarch and milkweed — some species are so interdependent, they seem to constitute a single organism. John Vaillant’s debut novel, The Jaguar’s Children, opens with the hint of another interspecies relationship, that of Mexico’s indigenous Olmec people and the jaguar. An epigraph, from Ignacio Bernal’s Olmec World, prepares the reader: “Anyone attempting to classify Olmec figures will be borne imperceptibly into those of the jaguar. Gradually, human faces will acquire feline features, blending into one another before turning, finally, into jaguars. What is important is the intimate connection between the man and the animal.” In the novel’s earliest scenes, we meet Hector, who, along with his friend Cesar and thirteen other…

ANN PANCAKE Counterpoint, 2015. $24, 289 pages. A COLLEGE GI RL home for summer takes a job at a movie theater and in her spare time drinks with her mentally disabled Uncle Bobby. Retired strip miners who are clinging to their homes find themselves terrorized by a mysterious series of house burnings in a town already torn apart by mountaintop removal. A man tries to figure out who is stealing and killing his twenty-two dogs. These are some of the many characters who populate Ann Pancake’s Me and My Daddy Listen to Bob Marley, a collection of eleven short stories and novellas, and the follow-up to her 2007 novel, Strange as This Weather Has Been. Place matters in Pancake’s work. Her earlier novel depicts an Appalachian family dealing with the…

THE IMAGE FUND From the caves of Lascaux to Banksy’s graffiti, the visual arts aren’t a means to an end, but rather a fundamental way in which human beings comprehend the world, combining perception and inner experience. For information about how you can support the arts in Orion go to www.orionmagazine.org/image. Thank you. A CELEBRATION OF BOOKS The Orion Book Award, now in its ninth year, recognizes books that deepen our connection to the natural world, present new ideas about the relationship between people and nature, and achieve excellence in writing. Find out about this year’s award and check out previous winners at www.orionmagazine.org/oba. ORION IN YOUR LIBRARY The Orion Readers anthologies are now available in three- and six-book sets. From nature literacy to animal hijinks, and from social justice…

The poems, prose, and visual art from prisoners compiled in the January/February 2015 issue of Orion are compelling and breathtaking (“How Long Has It Been Since You Smelled a Flower?”). As a poet, I receive and read literary journals from around the country, and the work produced by these prisoners is in many cases better than what I read in those journals, much of which amounts to little more than clever intellectual exercises. But here, the reader can begin to understand what these men feel — which is exactly what good art should do. RAPHAEL KOSEKHopewell Junction, New York My sincerest thanks for the selections of writing by prison inmates, and especially for the undeniably compelling introduction to them by Richard Shelton, whose dedication to humanity and the written word…

IN THE PALE GLOW of a half-dozen smartphone screens a shadowy figure stands half-buried in monstrous foliage. He has a blunt instrument in his hand and is stabbing it, skewering it, into something hidden in a pool of water. Behind him, through the warping glasshouse panes, there is the brooding presence of a forest from the Triassic … I’m rather surprised that there are no classic Victorian whodunits set in botanic gardens at night. The Cambridge University tropical houses have an atmosphere of pure gothic mystery after dark. Shapeshifting alien forms, optical illusions, an aura of impending drama. I was there late last year, with a special out-of-hours pass, to witness the night blooming of the giant Amazonian water lily, the plant whose exceptional size — its pad can grow…

THERE’S NO avoiding the sun here — or the persistent nipping of bloodsucking gnats. Stretched out on a rocky outcrop, covered up as best I can manage, I try to ignore the heat as I concentrate on the work at hand: uncovering a dinosaur. I’m in Allosaurus territory, eastern Utah’s rolling deserts, painted purple and tan by the slow brush of geologic time. I’d have been nothing more than a between-meal snack for an adult Allosaurus. Yet I can’t help but daydream what the beasts were like in the flesh. From their bones, we know that the Allosaurus — immediately recognizable by two little horns over the eyes — reached lengths upward of thirty feet, and used powerful neck muscles to drive its open mouth at prey like a toothy…

THE WORLD HAS ARRIVED at a pivot point in history. You could drive a nail through this decade, and the future of the planet would swing in the balance. What can be done to tip the scales toward a resilient, and flourishing, future? Three things, we’re told, all of them essential. First, stop damaging the planet’s life-supporting systems. Second, imagine new and better ways to live on Earth. Third, and most important, change the story about who we are, we humans — not the lords of all creation, but lives woven into the complex interdependencies of a beautiful, unfolding planetary system. Many people are pursuing the first two goals. But Mary Evelyn Tucker has taken up the third, making it her life’s work. MARY EVELYN’s journey with these ideas began…

HELEN MACDONALD Grove Press, 2015. $25, 300 pages. WHEN I WAS taking falconry lessons, I was surprised by my instructor’s advice on how to call a hawk to the glove: I should start standing with my back turned to the bird, then extend my left arm and look over my shoulder as it flies. Why? “That’s in case you ever fly a goshawk,” she told me. “A goshawk may go for your eyes — and standing with your back turned might give you time to protect your face.” Unlike the relatively sociable Harris’s hawk who flew to my fist during those lessons, the goshawk is known for attacking the falconer — even one the bird knows well. It is the most voracious and unpredictable raptor known to falconry. A buzzard-sized…

CHRIS MAYNARD AVIVA PUBLISHING, 2014. $40, 96 PAGES. Feathers provide warmth and protection, and, of course, aid in the ability to fly — that special talent that allows birds to soar through the sky as well as the human imagination. The link between bird and mind is what animates this new book by Chris Maynard, an artist who’s developed a technique for sculpting fallen feathers into images in conversation with the behavior of their owners. With a scalpel and a fine hand, Maynard transforms his delicate materials into depictions of waddling pheasants, diving ospreys, and zipping macaws, a feat of artistry that makes the feathers appear as if they’ve held such scenes within them all along.…