Table of contents for September / October 2013 in Orion

Leave No Child Inside, the latest anthology in the Orion Readers series, will be published in September. This collection of essays is a must-read for teachers, parents, and anyone concerned with building a connection between children and nature. Depending on who you ask, magazine advertising revenue is up… or down. But here at Orion, it’s the same as ever: zero. Instead, we rely on support from readers like you to fill these pages with articles, poetry, and art, instead of ads. Help us keep Orion ad-free by donating at www.orionmagazine.org/donate It’s not too early to start thinking about holiday gifts, especially since gift subscriptions to Orion are currently two for the price of one. Gift recipients receive an acknowledgment card sent on the giver’s behalf and six beautiful issues of…

PART ONE: THE DIAGNOSIS ON THE DAY of my first mammogram, I walked through the sliding glass doors of the gleaming new hospital and fought the urge to turn right back around. I couldn’t shake the feeling that there was something wrong about this rite of passage. Nevertheless, I navigated a series of carpet-lined hall-ways to the Women’s Imaging Center and gave my name to the receptionist behind the glass. With an air of indifference, she led me to a small, windowless room, directed me to change into a johnny, and told me to wait for the mammography tech, Gert, to come fetch me. On the table to my right, beside a lacy pink photo album containing snapshots of flowers, lay Be a Survivor: Your Guide to Breast Cancer Treatment.…

THE NIGHT IS DARK ON A NARROW slip of canyon floor alongside the North Fork Feather River. The mountains are big and close, their steep, tree-covered slopes tall enough to block out the moon and stars. Flashlight in hand, I follow the sound of roiling water toward the river, though my chances of finding what I’m looking for are slim. My objective is a moving target, one that’s highly elusive by nature and even more so under the cover of a black night. It is hard to tell at this point whether my path to California’s remote Plumas County has been one of fortune or folly. Online, the “lodge” where I’m staying in Belden, population twenty-two, is an appealing, rustic western Sierra getaway. In real life, it’s a trailer park…

(Adenostoma fasiculatum) There is no wind. The chaparral has goneto decadence. And the sun, at such a height,leaves the sky desiccated, bleached ash-white.A concentrated brightness, an indrawn gathering of the light, as if the wholeworld were enclosed within a cameraobscura, an inverted replicauniverse cynosured through a pinhole. Even the soil is aching from the heat;a cracking bed of serpentine where fewspecies contrive to grow, and those that dosustain themselves on nothing but complete famine and drought. More than sustain: they floutthe whole system, responding to the meanconditions with a kind of libertineexcess, oiling themselves elaborately, without a care for consequence. Inviting fire.Anointing their dry leaves with aromaticresins just to inspire a dramaticresponse. Spontaneous combustion. Dire consequences, but they’ve thought of thattoo, developing at once two kinds of seed:one sprouts in…

IN A GLASS CASE stands a female figure just fourteen centimeters tall. Her head is bowed and her shoulders slim, but her breasts, stomach, and buttocks are huge. She may or may not be pregnant. She was made, with careful intent, at a time when ice still covered much of northern Europe and human beings were relative newcomers. Mammoths still lived; the figure is carved of mammoth ivory. The little statue is a foremother to us all, and gatekeeper to an astonishing assembly of Paleolithic artworks on display in the British Museum’s exhibition titled Ice Age Art. If we think of Paleolithic art in Europe, we think mostly of the great cave paintings of Lascaux or Chauvet. But the figurative works in Ice Age Art are small and portable. They…

BY DAVID ROTHENBERG St. Martin’s Press, 2013. $26.99, 288 pages. LAST SPRING, the population of cicadas known as Brood II emerged according to their famously precise seventeen-year timetable. For writer, musician, and philosopher David Rothen-berg, the event was of special significance. His birth coincided with one of their earlier emergences, and when the brood returned seventeen years later, their calls accompanied his growing interest in music. This, for Rothenberg, is the cicada as spiritual metronome: “I am trying my best to conceive it as a vast natural rhythm, whose downbeat I can barely remember.” In his earlier works, Rothenberg explored the music-making of birds and whales. In Bug Music: How Insects Gave Us Rhythm and Noise, he turns his searching ear to what he calls the “entomological aesthetic.” It is…

BY AKIKO BUSCH Yale University Press, 2013. $25, 256 pages. WE HAVE ENTERED a new era of citizen involvement in scientific research, one in which people with various levels of scientific experience can play increasingly important roles in the documentation and stewardship of the changing landscape. From the choking effects of invasive water chestnut to the resurgence in American bald eagle populations, author Akiko Busch deftly weaves stories of ecological research efforts where volunteers play a role in data gathering and observation. Largely focused on New York’s Hudson River Valley The Incidental Steward: Reflections on Citizen Science looks at the diverse ways people can engage in research and learn about the plants and wildlife with which they coexist, and, in some cases, simultaneously contribute to the management of ecosystems in…

THERE ARE FAR MORE neurons packed into the expansive confines of a human skull than there are human bodies jostling together on this swirling sphere we call Earth. How many neurons is that exactly? Dedicate a few billion of your own brain cells, if you will, to imagining the colorful millions of Calcutta; add to them the commuters careening through Bangkok, the campesinos picking coffee in Guatemala, the workers packing computer chips in China, the unemployed squinting through the smog of Mexico City. Fire up a few more neurons and pull the nomads off the wind-scoured Mongolian plains, tease the monks from their frigid Himalayan caves, and entice the CEOs from their high-back leather chairs. Add in the Inuit men dreaming, right now, of whale breath rising above the curved…

Bryant Austin’s photographs of whales have been exhibited around the world. Beautiful Whale, his first book of photographs, was published by Abrams in April 2013. Martha Cooper is the director of photography at City Lore in New York City. Her photographs of urban art and architecture have been exhibited in museums and galleries worldwide, and published in magazines from National Geographic to Vibe. Joe Donnelly is an award-winning writer and editor from Los Angeles. He recently launched Mission and State, a nonprofit experiment in digital news and narrative. Amy Glynn Greacen’s poetry and essays appear in Poetry Northwest, New England Review, The Best American Poetry anthologies, and elsewhere. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. Nick Hayes’s first graphic novel, The Rime of the Modern Mariner, reimagines Samuel Taylor…

1. IT’S LIKE COMPARING APPLES AND ORANGES. The difference between apples and oranges used to be so stark that to compare them would have been, well, fruitless. But thanks to the triumphs of agriculture and biotechnology, soon we’ll have apples that are oranges. No word yet on whether they’ll keep the doctor away. Update: It’s like comparing apples to genetically modified apples. 2. THE EARLY BIRD GETS THE WORM. Reaping rewards is sometimes just a matter of being one step ahead of your competition. Birds, with their punctual proclivities, have long known this. But warming climates are throwing off their migration schedules, leaving them out of sync with their food sources. Being early no longer guarantees a damn thing. Update: The early bird gets just as many worms as…

Along the roadside, someone has spilledpink Styrofoam peanuts. They add colorto the grassy green, but I still prefer flowers. Ninety-nine dashing dots crisscrossthe walk, red ants converging on a spot wheresomeone’s dropped a greasy bite of pepperoni. Intrepid, worldly, and sophisticated food criticlaments she’s found no wine pairs wellwith scorpions or tarantulas. Airline passenger detained was nofanatic hiding explosives, but a smugglerwith expensive lizards in his pants. Though they can’t help flaunting theirvulnerability, I imagine that creeping snailsare trusting me to spare their fragile shells. Yesterday we talked about your favoritepoem. Today you brought a giftof fully ripe persimmons in a paper bag.…

Who could not love the Shasta daisies, lining the walk,the difficult daisies,the first difficulty being that they smell like rotting meat?Okay, you can say the smell teaches that there’s more to summerthan girls in yellow bathing suits and new-mown grass—if you want the beauty you have to take a whiff of death.Okay, I know, I am not a baby:dear Mother Nature,deliver me the contract and I will sign.Okay, but the second difficulty is that they attract the beesto which someone like me is fatally allergic, thoughOkay, it titillates, checking the mailbox in August,a game of agility and speed,the goal being to outwit the feral mind.Okay, I admit I’ve thought of dousing myself with perfumeto tilt the game in their direction.I call this “going to the bees”—didn’t Robert Lowell say, if…

THE TERM INFRASTRUCTURE is rarely associated with objects of beauty or cutting-edge creativity. Rather, it suggests a certain bureaucratic blandness, abstractly removed from that which we care about or relate to. Infrastructure can inspire—the Brooklyn and Golden Gate bridges come to mind—but more often than not, it is associated with aging freeway overpasses built to federal specifications and power lines tearing long, unnaturally straight swaths across the land. It comprises the sorts of things we give little or no thought to — such as underground pipes that deliver water or whisk it away—because it’s essentially invisible. In recent years, a new cohort of creative minds has begun to actively address what may well be our nation’s next generation of infrastructure—an infrastructure that demands in-novative, local solutions, but also engages an…

BY MELISSA KWASNY Lynx House Press, 2013. $19.95, 144 pages. IN Six Memos for the Next Millennium, his seminal collection of lectures devoted to the literary values he wished to pass on to future generations, Italo Calvino cited what he called “visibility” as seminal to imaginative survival in the age to come. If I have included visibility in my list of values to be saved, it is to give warning of the danger we run in losing a basic human faculty: the power of bringing visions into focus with our eyes shut, of bringing forth forms and colors from the lines of black letters on a white page, and in fact thinking in terms of images. Poet Melissa Kwasny’s new collection of essays, Earth Recitals: Essays on Image and Vision,…

BY DAVID TOOMEY W. W. Norton, 2013. $25.95, 268 pages. THERE ARE THE CHIMPANZEES and the zooplankton and the blue whales, the fungi found in Chernobyl’s nuclear reactor core, “fearlessly converting nuclear radiation into usable energy.” There are the salt-loving bacteria of the Dead Sea and the heat-loving bacteria of Yellowstone and the bacteria dwelling beside an underwater volcano off the coast of Samoa, two kilometers down, in water as acidic as battery acid. And all of these organisms, re-markable as they each may be, represent “life as we know it.” In Weird Life: The Search for Life That Is Very, Very Different from Our Own, David Toomey, an English professor at the University of Mas-sachusetts Amherst, picks up from there, exploring the realms of life we do not know…

BY RALPH STEADMAN COMMENTARY BY CERILEVY Bloomsbury, 2012. $50, 240 pages. When tasked with illustrating a book about extinct birds, Ralph Steadman, the legendary illustrator who teamed up with author Hunter S. Thompson to produce memorable caricatures of the “gonzo era” of journalism, did what he does best—get carried away. Rather than simply illustrate a sad and predictable parade of doomed Aves, Steadman has painted riotously colorful and delightfully interpretive renderings of these lost creatures, each splattered with his trademark ink splots. And given the bizarre real-life names of many of these extinct birds, such as the Viti Levu scrubfowl, the Mascarene coot, and the New Zealand little bittern (I’d be, too…), who could resist having a little fun by adding to the collection? Clearly not the mischievous Steadman, whose…

YOUR AD GOES HERE Just kidding. Orion is totally ad-free and we intend to keep it that way, but we need your help to do so. Please consider making a donation to Orion — it’s tax-deductible and helps ensure that our writers and artists are adequately fed, clothed, and sheltered. Go to www.orionmagazine.org/donate. Thank you. THE ART OF INFRASTRUCTURE The second feature in Orion’s new series, Reimagining Infrastructure, appears on page 60 of this issue and highlights five projects that explore the intersection of art, ecology, and engineering. You can find all the content from the series, including multimedia, at www.orionmagazine.org/infrastructure. ORION IN PRINT, DIGITAL, AND COTTON Do you have a child, grandchild, niece, nephew, or friend going back to school this year? Our back-to-school gift subscription special includes a…

Thank you, Orion, for having the courage to print David Treuer’s essay “Trapline” (May/June 2013). I want Orion’s contributors to challenge more of the dogmas of environmentalism — to make me think, even if it makes me uncomfortable. And one topic that seems to make many environmentalists uncomfortable is indigenous people who violate romantic notions of “primitive living.” Treuer’s piece draws on this tension well, and it includes detail about trapping that will make some readers squirm. But he also pulls our attention to the common fact that all people have the inclination and the right to seek out technology that improves their chances of survival. More subtly, but no less important, Treuer reminds readers that cultural identity is both fluid across time and defined by its members—not by the…

HEAT WAVES SHIMMER above the grasses, the air heavy and white and ringing with the buzz of cicadas. The boys have been shoeless all summer long, but even so the dry September stubble of 1895 pricks their feet as they trot across the sunburned prairie, lifting their heels like grass dancers. Just young willow whips in faded dungarees and nothing else, ribs showing beneath narrow brown chests as they run. They veer off toward the shady grove where the grass is soft and cool underfoot, flopping in the tall grass with loose-limbed abandon. They rest for a few moments in the shade and then spring to their feet, palming grasshoppers for bait. The fishing poles are right where they left them, leaning up against an old cottonwood. They hook the…

BY JON MO OALLEM Penguin Press, 2013. $27.95, 368 pages. “ALREADY it’s come to this on Planet Earth: men dressed like birds, teaching birds to fly.” That’s the bizarre reality with which Jon Mooallem closes Wild Ones: A Some times Dismaying, Weirdly Reassuring Story About Looking at People Looking at Animals in America. And the flight lessons aren’t the half of it: Each year, whooping cranes are bred in a government lab in Maryland and trucked to Wisconsin, where they’re raised by hooded humans in shapeless white costumes. They never see a human face or hear a human voice; instead, they bond with the crane puppets their handlers wear. Eventually, they learn to fly in formation behind an ultra-light plane and take off for Florida—a torturous, months-long journey of stopovers…

BY JENNIFER BOYDEN University of Wisconsin Press, 2013. $16.95, 112 pages. IN A WORLD somewhere between that of Terry Gilliam’s Brazil and those of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels live the inhabitants of Jennifer Boyden’s second collection of poetry, The Declarable Future. It’s a world where crystal doorknobs transmit voices, people rarely go outside beyond their porches, stone angels plummet from the sky, and amused gods decide “to fill each thing with itself” because when they “gave us all the holes/leading into our darkness, they planned/on our needing a mystery.” The citizens of her world suffer from a collective amnesia—they can’t remember their children’s names or exactly where their neighbors live—inspiring great anxiety about the unknown. Seeking answers, they trust blindly in the “person with the loupe” (a type of magnifying…