Orion

MILESTONE BIRTHDAYS invite reflection. What have we put into the world in all this time? Are we what we imagined we’d be? A publication like Orion does not survive without continually reconciling the need to stay true to one’s founding principles with the need to grow. If all goes well, we’ll be remembered for both. This year marks our fortieth anniversary, and in the months leading up to the occasion, we gave in to nostalgia and revisited some old photo albums. And though sifting through four decades of Orion covers did bring up some adolescent moments we’d rather forget, it mostly revealed a consistent thrumming of joys and anxieties. Not surprisingly, the word that appears most frequently on our covers is nature. Justice first shows up in 1996, and global warming…

How can we stop the world from burning? For many years, I responded to that question as an environmental advocate. In our fight against climate change, my colleagues and I employ hard-edged tools such as legislation, policy, and litigation—all informed by science and real-world impacts on people and nature. But as the Anthropocene accelerates and our time runs out to set the world on a more sustainable and equitable course, I have come to recognize that these tools alone cannot change the world fast enough to save it. Today, I believe that advocates like me must join forces with artists, writers, and musicians whose work reaches millions of people, touches hearts, changes perspectives, and shapes our culture. I say this because we are in an unusual predicament: The scientific case on climate change is now…

Soon, or before long, or at some point, we will know with the sureness of age what this all was about. That is what we were told. Soon we will know, for instance, who we are. How we once were one thing and now we are not. How we were young just moments ago, with our thumbs and our farms and our analog ways. At some point in the near future, at a time that feels irreversibly soon, we will leave our mark on the time scale. We will invent an epoch: the Anthropocene, a period provoked by us and named after ourselves. We will find ourselves in the earth and write ourselves into the story of time. We will know, soon, what we talk about when we talk about the Anthropocene.…

YUCCA FlLAT, Nevada, of the early 1950s is a diorama of modern America. Beneath desert stars a faux suburbia has been constructed, with ranch-style homes, utility poles, and pantries filled with canned food. Mannequins in floral dresses and mid-century suits tuck their plastic children into bed or sit before the silent televisions. Nearby, living soldiers crouch in a six-foot trench. Reporters assemble on pine benches dangerously close. An hour away, a woman in a revealing mushroom cloud costume is crowned Miss A-Bomb and an unknown musician named Elvis Presley, hoping for publicity, will soon perform as “the Nation’s only Atomic Powered Singer.” Guests carouse in glass lounges, drinking gin Atomic Cocktails. They’ll party until the bomb lights up the sky, and then they’ll kiss and dance and sing, drunk in…

The last time I visited earth I wore a skin of human flesh, vulnerable skin covering that body on its way to letting go, bones broken like the left-behind umbrella in a branch storm, all having been such fragile holy ones. As a human, there was little left to hold solid, but this tree I have become is strong and bending, ring inside ring telling the truth of years of rain, times of drought, those of tribal burns. As a human I could not help my failures, my lacking, my broken heart. But aren’t we all some part of a star torn loose from dark space? Now I will not be this tree forever telling you this, just long enough if left in peace. How once I was human. Now I’m ascended to become…

Loop, WHORL, ARCH. Friction ridges that are yours and yours alone. Grasp, touch, feel, cling. And push away, using this most sensitive part of your body to cleave yourself from all around you. It is the Age of Fingerprints, a time when traces of Homo sapiens are impressed upon every crevice of the planet, this wondrous wreck of a crime scene. No place is untouched by the imprints of human industry. Not the bottom of the Mponeng gold mine in South Africa, four kilometers down. Not the Fresh Kills Landfill on Staten Island, just eleven meters shy of being the highest elevation point on the Eastern Seaboard. Microplastics make up 4 percent of the air circulating over remote wilderness areas. They are in our apples and lettuce. They float in the placentas…