Orion July / August 2010

A GALLUP POLL released on April 22, 2010 — the fortieth anniversary of Earth Day — found “historically low levels of public worry about environmental problems.” The poll results indicated that, compared to a decade ago, 10 percent fewer people today describe themselves as either “active participants” in the environmental movement or “sympathetic” to the goals of the movement. This is disconcerting, but not as disconcerting as the next data set: more than a third of Gallup’s respondents think the environmental movement “has done more harm than good.” Meanwhile, the headlines are filled with more bad news about the environment than we have seen for a long time — everything from failed international environmental accords to oceanic dead zones to earthquakes to extreme weather to an unprecedented oil spill. Many…

Lisa Couturier is the author of a collection of literary essays, The Hopes of Snakes and Other Tales from the Urban Landscape. She lives on an agricultural reserve in Maryland with her family and is writing a memoir about her and her grandfather’s Thoroughbred racehorses. Jessica Greenbaum’s first poetry collection, Inventing Difficulty, was the winner of the 1998 Gerald Cable Book Award. She is the poetry editor for upstreet, and lives in New York City. Michael Hettich’s new book of poems, Like Happiness, is forthcoming from Anhinga Press. He teaches at Miami Dade College. Amy Leach lives in Chicago. She is writing a book about animals, plants, and stars. Barry Lopez is the author of six works of fiction, most recently Resistance, a collection of short stories. BK Loren’s work…

The Second Life world described in “Get a (Second) Life” (Mac McClelland, March/April 2010) seems to be the logical extension of many social trends — toward global interconnections, instantaneous gratifications, rampant multitasking, encroaching technological absorption, obsession with novelty, and a pervasive adolescent attitude that anything we wish can and must be possible. As the real world gets hotter, dirtier, and more dangerous, as ecosystems and communities are sacrificed piece by piece for economic profit, as ever-increasing demands on our time limit our ability to engage in solving real problems, as politics become progressively more toxic, as we lose the fitness needed to do real physical work, the seductions of virtual worlds will only grow stronger. Are there benefits? Sure, just like there are “benefits” to television. Virtual worlds can be…

In the spring season of awards and presentations, Orion staff were especially busy. The magazine won the award for General Excellence at the twenty-first annual Utne Independent Press Awards. This is the second time Orion has earned this prize (we also won in 2004); Editor-in-Chief Chip Blake traveled to Washington DC to accept the award on April 25. That trip came hard on the heels of the National Magazine Awards, which were announced at Lincoln Center on April 22. Orion had a firstever nomination in the Essay category; Chip and Executive Editor Hal Clifford attended the ceremony. Chip, Editor Jennifer Sahn, and Assistant Editor Hannah Fries all traveled to Denver in April for the annual conference of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs. Orion presented two panels that were…

Jeromy Emerling South Side, Billings, Montana THE FULL SCENT of stewing sugar beets being pulverized, mulched, and bleached into white powder permeates the air. Sugar—whose smoky, silted byproduct descends on the neighborhood like incense at mass. The “Triangle” is an island imprisoned by industry: the sugar beet factory, the oil refinery, and the rail yard define and erode our shores. Our neighborhood is known on the outside as a place of garbage, want, and failure. We, my neighbors and I, know our place as one of familiarity, life, and reality. Here, as in all places, extremes often present themselves simultaneously: the pain of childbirth and the joy of the newborn, the agony of death and the peace of being finished. In this place crime, addiction, and ugliness are married to…

I DON’T THINK OF myself as especially hard working. I started my career at The New Yorker as a young staff writer — and in those days in New York publishing circles, the day began at ten a.m. That’s when the receptionist arrived, the switchboard opened. As a result, twenty-five years later, if I’m sitting at my computer by nine-thirty I still think to myself, “I’m early!” (Not only that, but twenty-five years later every place else I’ve ever lived still seems cheap by comparison.) Still, even with that laggardly start, I’ve managed to get done most of what I set out to do, and I’ve never spent a lot of time whining about how hard it all is. If Americans are supposed to be good at anything, it’s hard…