Tabla de contenidos para Spring 2020 en Orion

Though inspired by a 1969 California oil spill that resulted in the deaths of thousands of sea animals, the first Earth Day was largely a comfortable and congenial a=air, later described (in an EPA report) as a celebration that brought millions of Americans “out into the spring sunshine for peaceful demonstrations in favor of environmental reform.” Not surprising, then, that the enduring images of the day are of schoolchildren cleaning out streambeds and of President Nixon and his wife planting a tree on the White House lawn. Fifty years—two generations of humans—have passed since then. As much as ever, people need to protect animals and, yes, plant more trees. But our understanding of how damaged the planet really is, and how far we are from genuine reform, has never been…

It is hope that enables us to hue, only hope. Everyone will instantly accept that universal truth. But didn’t the Spanish poet Federico García Lorca say the same thing, with equal cogency, about mystery? This second truth is also everywhere recognizable. Without mystery, life shrinks to mere existence, and the future is a void. Both of the statements are true for a reason basic to human nature: hope springs from mystery. The cognitive sciences explain why this connection exists. The brain is a time machine built to create narratives. It churns out scenarios of the past, present, and future, real and imagined, with equal facility. At a furious pace, the brain summons memories to make sense out of the chaos. During the story-building process, the past is remembered, reworked, and…

In a 2011 issue of the Japanese literary magazine father and son, who overexcitedly prod and pull at the Gunzo, the popular author Kawakami Hiromi rewrote one of her short stories to reflect the newly unleashed threat of a radioactive landscape. The basic outline of the original story, first published in 1994, is simple: A woman is invited to go on a walk with her neighbor, who happens to be a bear. On the way there, they pass rice fields. They reach a river, where they encounter a human bear’s fur. The bear dives into the river, catches a fish, and salts it for the woman. The bear and woman leisurely eat lunch together, then take naps by the shore. When they return home, the bear shyly asks for a…

EARLY ON in the winter of 1969–70, I was driving the great environmental prophet Barry Commoner from a small airport to my small college, where he was to speak to our student body, and I was first alerted to the possibility of a nationwide event in defense of Mother Earth. Barry asked if I had heard about something called Earth Day, a series of “environmental teach-ins” that would be occurring at campuses across the country in a few months. I had no idea what he was talking about, and admitted as much. Barry laughed. “You’re not alone,” he said. “I’m not even sure what they’re talking about, and I’ve been doing this for decades.” Before long, I’d signed on to work as an unpaid intern at the headquarters of Environmental…

MAYBE IT’S JUST ME. Perhaps I’m just twisted —seeing birds in everything. Every. Thing. A break from the monotonous must-do necessaries (Why do today what can be worried over tomorrow?), and forgotten summer-hoarded shells fallen out of an old bag were just the entropic entangle needed to inspire a fantasy ramble. Without much thought and minimal rearranging, a thicket-dwelling gray-winged wish-welker (welker being the Old Afro-Dutch for thrush) flew out! I’m not sure where one might find the species on a field guide page. Everyone from Johnny Jim Audubon to Kenn Kaufman seems to have forgotten it. From what I recall, the old folks called ’em “farther muckers,” owing to their legendary long-distance intergalactic peregrinations. It didn’t utter a single identifying call and I’m not so sure it even sings.…

ONE SATURDAY in early September, I joined some friends at a recently opened Szechuan restaurant down on Wickenden Street. As we plowed through course after course of smoked tofu, dan dan noodles, and mouth-watering chicken, the conversation covered a range of topics: local composting programs, the new piece the composer would soon hear the Boston Symphony Orchestra perform, and the process of purchasing a home in Providence, the town that we’d adopted because our jobs deposited us here. Toward the end of the night, one woman (let’s call her Lillian) spoke about her newfound environmental awareness and how lonely and depressed it made her feel. I’m ashamed to admit that when the words first exited Lillian’s mouth, I felt frustrated. “You think caring about parts per million and food waste…

LOVE IN THE ANTHROPOCENE Orion’s newest anthology, Earthly Love, makes the perfect read for anyone who has ever fallen in (or out) of love. Purchase at www.orionmagazine.org/love or order by phone at 888/909-6568 for only eighteen dollars. CELEBRATE NATIONAL POETRY MONTH Poetry editor Aimee Nezhukumatathil will share her favorite nature poems and poets throughout April. Keep your eyes on Orion’s website and social media feeds to see if her favorites match your own. WRITING IN THE WOODS Orion’s popular summer writing workshop returns to the Omega Institute in Rhinebeck, New York, this June 21–26. Faculty includes Ellen Bass, Joe Wilkins, Bronwen Dickey, Garnette Cadogan, and others. To learn more, see www.orionmagazine.org/workshops. SUSTAINING ORION Support Orion with a monthly donation of ten dollars or more, and you’ll receive a complimentary subscription…

I n the summer of 2019, the climate activist Tim DeChristopher sat down with Wendell Berry. Berry is a poet and activist, author of over forty books, a recipient of the National Humanities Medal, a 2013 Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a celebrated advocate for localism, ecological health, and small-scale farming. DeChristopher, as Bidder 70, disrupted a Bureau of Land Management oil and gas auction in 2008 by outbidding oil companies for parcels around Arches and Canyonlands National Parks in Utah. Imprisoned for twenty-one months for his actions, he has used his platform to spread the urgency of the climate crisis and the need for bold, confrontational action to create a just and healthy world. TD: OK, now we’re recording. WB: Have we got a…

WITH A POCKETFUL of superglue, anything is possible. I am sitting with my partner, Mark, in the middle of the road outside Parliament, facing a line of police, the full moon shining over Westminster Abbey. For the amusement of rebels, someone tows a sound system in a trolley around Parliament Square. The police have just put in a request to the DJ to play “Thriller,” and there is a sinuous wave of dancing around a grandmother in a wheelchair, who is here because she is trying to get arrested. Superglue is good for bonding, superb for attachment. Mark and I have a bonding moment, courtesy of a few squirts from the tube, and we hold hands tightly, stuck fast. “We’re literally handfasted,” I laugh. For me, it is the second…

A MONTH AGO, my husband and I took six children, two our own, to the beach for a birthday party. The day was brilliant, the beach nearly empty because the wind was cold. There was a storm out at sea, and the waves were rougher than normal, but we saw no red flags. I am cautious around water: I was a lifeguard for many summers, and I know how swiftly things can go wrong. I forced the boys to take precautions: all had to have boogie boards, both parents had to be in the waves. We took breaks every hour, and we didn’t allow them to go in deeper than their waists. In the afternoon, we found a sandbar where the water came up to my knees; my husband and…

A WAKE IN THE DARK I am hidden, tiny as dust and calm. I am part of something tremendous, an ocean of rest, the unseen, fear, death, dreams, peace, dead, everything darkness becomes inside a human mind. I wake up with a worry and bring it to the dark. I step outside in the night, really most every night now. And each midnight I’m stunned to find that the dark remains here with us, just outside my door, a shelter, a blanket both general and inexplicably generous. The dark still accepts humans, even if I can’t understand why. There’s a small bench by my back door. The dark surrounds me, or rather includes me. I like winter. I like the darkness and its fiction of pause. I imagine that this…

FROM MY DESK, I watch clouds gather over Mount Greylock, which, at 3,491 feet, is the highest mountain in Massachusetts. Mount Greylock is very old—more than 450 million years old—and, although this may not be polite to say, it looks its age. Thousands of millennia of erosion have worn its peak almost flat and left its flanks smooth and rounded. I have been to the top of Mount Greylock many times, so I know that somewhere up there is a parking lot and a snack bar. I like to gaze out at Mount Greylock in the summer, when it’s blanketed in green, and in the fall, when it’s swathed in orange and red. In the winter, hoarfrost makes the bare trees glitter, and in spring, color returns to the lower…

Roger Mello’s flame oranges and reds, gray washes, ash white, and black foretell a serious story that reflects those hues—of a child who works in Brazil’s coal mines tending an oven that turns wood into charcoal. A poetic but focused wasp follows the young boy and narrates his story, which turns out to be the wasp’s story as well—seemingly insignificant beings on the periphery of more powerful thrusts. Mello has crafted a story that invites children (and their adult friends) to participate in the narration itself, by filling in gaps the wasp has left for them.…

I’ll never forget the forest fire that roared down on my family home in California some years ago, reducing everything my parents and I owned to ash. As I was writing this piece — we’ve had to evacuate our rebuilt house nine times already — another fire struck up, in exactly the same area, at exactly the same hour, and before we knew it, the water pump in our driveway as well as the structure around it, not many feet from our front door, were burned to the ground. But this time, remarkably, heroic neighbors risked their lives to race over and stand up to the blaze, rescuing our home and immediate future as selfless firefighters came to the rescue, too. Experience, tragically, has taught us all to prepare for…

I THINK OF NATURE drawing as a spiritual connection to nature, and nature journaling as a written testament of miracles in the wild. Each day, I wake with curiosity over what is happening in my yard. Each day holds discoveries that I write down. The sounds that juvenile birds make when they are unsuccessful in finding food. The stretch mark patterns of bark on an oak tree. The glints of gold on the bay that I mistook to be a school of anchovies. The tangled fingers of beached bull kelp drying into sculpture. Each day I can do what I loved as a child: put pencil to paper to capture life, whether a detailed rendering with colored pencils or a lively sketch in the moment noting mysteries while sitting on…

Many Americans haven’t heard of, let alone seen, the bird of Janet Essley’s paintings — the red knot (Calidris canutus rufa), a small shorebird about the size of a robin. Its extraordinary migration, among the longest of Earth’s avian journeys, stretches almost from pole to pole. Known by many names — playero ártico (Arctic shorebird) in Chile, maçarico-de-papo-vermelho (reddish shorebird) in Brazil, bécasseau maubèche (knot sandpiper) in Quebec, no particular name (ᓯᔾᔭᕆᐊᖅ, sijjariaq, birds of the beach) in Nunavut — the red knot brings people together along the edge of two entire continents — people dedicated to giving safe passage to a bird whose journey transcends many countries, languages, and cultures. MID-ATLANTIC MIRRORING John James Audubon’s red knots, an adult in russet breeding plumage and a gray-and-white juvenile, Essley’s painting…

Dec. 5, 2019. My daughter and I are on the lam. She has just turned fourteen and is in the eighth grade and normally she would be studying — American history worksheets, math worksheets, PE worksheets. As if being American means to fill in the blanks. Her mom — we split our daughter’s time—doesn’t want us to be on the road. She has missed too much school, she said. Well, kid, what do you think, I asked. Do you want to go? I want to go, she said. Let’s do this. And so we’re doing it. We are heading for Utah. It’s dark and the highway is empty. Our phones are off. We don’t turn on the radio. As Vegas comes and goes, we talk. Nov. 1, 2019. My daughter…

LEARNING often takes circuitous, vortexlike routes. Certainly it did for us. We had set out to the Raja Ampat islands of West Papua to study sea cucumbers, which, since the 1990s, have been one of the most important elements to the local economy, boiled and dried and exported to China. Perhaps we should have been suspicious about this ostensibly straightforward task from the beginning. Perhaps we should not have been surprised when the sea cucumbers gave way to a larger story, one that would change our understanding of this time of heedless human influence on the earth’s environment. Our plan was to stop in every Indonesian city along the way to the islands and inquire of marine-product merchants about the sea cucumber trade, which we assumed would be buzzing, but…

THE OWLS had been waiting for our demise since 1662 —the year the dodo went extinct. Rid from the earth thanks to hungry sailors. Humans, at first, couldn’t believe the bird was truly gone. A prominent naturalist declared it would be impossible for Man to make a species disappear, for that would constitute a “dismemb’ring of the Universe.” How could Man, puny Man, unmake one of God’s creations? The naturalist wondered. Because there is no God, screeched the owl from its perch. Night after night, hoot after hoot, it was trying to tell us. To spook us. To remind us of our dangerous, clumsy power. The years ticked on and next went the passenger pigeon, the Tasmanian tiger, the great black rhino, and the owl cried, Who? Who’s next? Next…

A COUPLE OF YEARS AGO I started sometimes asking, at the end of my conversations: “What makes you despair, and where are you finding hope?” It turns out that answers to the two parts of that question are more often conjoined than oppositional. The puzzle of us, the contradictions alive in each one of us and in this moment we inhabit—these are the crucible of my hope. I should say that hope for me is distinct from idealism or optimism. It has nothing to do with wishful thinking. It is a muscle, a practice, a choice: to live open-eyed and wholehearted in the world as it is and not as we wish it to be. We are strange creatures. We mask fear with rage, and despair with violence. Growth is…