Table of contents for March / April 2014 in Orion

Apply now to the Bread Loaf Orion Environmental Writers’ Conference, happening June 9–15, 2014, at the Bread Loaf campus of Middlebury College in Vermont. The 2014 faculty are Rick Bass, Jane Brox, Alison Hawthorne Deming, Camille Dungy, Maurice Manning, and Alan Weisman. Applications will be accepted on a rolling basis until April 1; to apply visit www.orionmagazine.org/breadloaf. Thank you for the great response to Lay of the Land, our new department featuring a variety of Orion contributors. On page 11, check out the latest reports from Sy Montgomery and others. In January, Orion sponsored the Wild & Scenic Film Festival in Nevada City, California. Managing Director Madeline Cantwell helped jury the film competition and moderated a talk with author Joe Donnelly about his Orion essay “Lone Wolf” (September / October…

IN THE ATCHAFALAYA BASIN, east of Lafayette, there is a road that cuts down through woods and cane — you’ll know the turnoff because it is guarded by a compound overrun with ruined machinery, dead trucks, laundry, and chickens. Once, an emu busted loose from this yard and ran beside our car all the way to the swamp. It was early in our Louisiana lives. Astonishing things still stopped me dead almost every day. Even the radio: Beau Jocque and the Zydeco Hi-Rollers pushed me off the road near the great salt mines when I first heard “Make It Stank.” Then I got out to look at the biggest spiders I’d ever seen — weird turquoise and yellow monsters with hairy knees. A security guard rolled up wanting to know…

THERE IS NO collective noun for potatoes, but there should be. A nub of potatoes? An ordinariness of potatoes? A prose of potatoes? A pod, perhaps. In a Potsdam park, I stumbled on a pod of potatoes scattered over a stone slab, and I fell straight into the past. It was the humblest of gravestones, with just three words carved into it: Friedrich der Grosse. Frederick the Great asked to be buried without pomp, in the place where eleven of his beloved greyhounds lay: his grave is as blunt as a spud. In Potsdam, Germany, and nearby Berlin, you tumble through the present to the past in an instant. I’ve never known a place so riddled by, haunted by, touched by, delighted by, and devastated by the past. In Berlin,…

In our basement, soaking mops, felt sops,fans, and a useless shop-vac. The sump pump’s conversation, all regurgitationand monologue. The old man down the streettries to clear the storm drain again: leaves, plastic flotsam, papery slops,a condom, and one rubbery flip-flop. Rain by gills, by gallons.A boorish rain. A brutal rain. 200 drowned nightcrawlers on a sidewalk slab.Prairie and Elm and Pine streets flooded. They’ll add more culverts, pipes, retention ponds.On a city map (hand-drawn, from the county archives) farms and fields, a crooked linebranching eastward, cutting through pasture: It shows a creek where John Street is now,cattails, scouring rush, bluejoint grass, and still, beside the creek, a great blue heron with rain-slick feathers and lifted beak, dour prophet, skewerof blind, unwary shadows.…

WE HAVE GATHERED together today, in a still-dark grove on the side of a hill, to hear a few words about hemlock. We are a small group and there are not many words. Nothing anyone can say can possibly sum up the long life of hemlock on the eastern seaboard of North America, which began about 30 million years ago and includes a long stretch of time that runs from the early Pleistocene era, as the glaciers came and went, up until the arrival from East Asia of a tiny sap-sucking bug, the hemlock woolly adelgid, which landed in the United States around the time Calvin Coolidge made it into office. Thanks to the woolly adelgid’s slow move north with warmer weather, the hemlock is dead or dying, half of…

Henry Holt, 2014. $28, 336 pages. OUR PLANETARY EMERGENCY entails massive change to the dynamic, interacting systems of our biosphere. Changing oceanic and atmospheric circulation, altered biogeochemical cycles, plunging declines in biodiversity, species extinction — these are the hallmarks of the Anthropocene, a new geological era characterized by human agenc y. And yet, while climate change has taken center stage in recent years, very little mention has been made of its most egregious long-term consequence — the sixth megaextinction. Elizabeth Kolbert’s brilliant new book, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, is poised to call attention to this extraordinary challenge. Just as Bill McKibben brought public attention to climate change in his now classic book The End of Nature, Kolbert’s book serves as a similar wake-up call. Although many fine books…

Viking, 2013. $28.95, 499 pages. ALMA WHITTAKER, the protagonist of Elizabeth Gilbert’s new novel, The Signature of All Things, is the daughter of Henry, a botanical importer of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, which at the time meant a pharmacological importer and, of course, a collector and millionaire adventurer. Gilbert gives us his life first, and quickly. Alma is the main character though, plain and tall and a little ungainly, her father’s daughter in all things, except perhaps heart, of which she’s got plenty and he very little. More than homeliness, it is her duty to care for him that dooms her to spinsterhood. That and a botanist’s love of plants — not exactly a model trait of Victorian femininity. It’s a long book, but a pleasant ride,…

Paula Bohince is the author of The Children and Incident at the Edge of Bayonet Woods. She lives in Pennsylvania. Allen Crawford designed and illustrated Whitman Illuminated: Song of Myself, a hand-drawn edition of Walt Whitman’s iconic American poem. It will be published by Tin House Books this spring. Michael Raudzis Dinkel’s recent work includes The Shortened History of Alaska, a mail-art discussion of mining near salmon streams. He lives in Anchorage. Cai Guo-Qiang is from Quanzhou City, Fujian Province, China, and trained in stage design at the Shanghai Theater Academy. His work, which includes drawings, installations, and performances, has been displayed around the world. Janice N. Harrington teaches creative writing at the University of Illinois. Her latest book of poetry is The Hands of Strangers: Poems from the Nursing…

1. Shovel early, shovel often. Early winter. So exciting! Before the powder turns to ice, before your brain settles into stale-air mush, head out to gawk at fresh small-mammal tracks and silent still-white limbs, and make your paths. Remember to lift with your legs and pace yourself. This is only the beginning. 2. Go for a run. Jog gingerly in the icy tire tracks of pickups or the unplowed skiff on the road shoulder while flakes pile on your ballcap brim and nineteen trumpeter swans glide across the nearby lake. Wave at the neighbors and schoolkids as you pass. You’re all in this together. 3. Schedule no-whining days. Make a pact with friends. Once a week, you’ll spend the day outdoors walking, skiing, swan-watching, hauling firewood — anything, anything at…

Driving the car, walking the dog…cresting the hill. When suddenlyyou catch sight of the day-moon, whydoes it come with what is almost a jolt of pain? You mean the pain inflicted by its beauty?No, I mean the paincaused by its having been up for hours,and though you’d noticed, you had not seen. Blaring at you from a skythe blue of a fast car of a bygone day—you have so far to go in your perceptual awakeningand the day-moon is the meter of your failings. And if you’d seen, would you still feelthat soft and slightly sick spot in your stomachwhenever you stoop to self-reflection: nowyou wouldn’t stoop, being perceptually awakened though not boastful, no never boastful. Meanwhile the day-moon circles the globe like Superman,hauling the seas on his white shouldersflying…

dear lord in this time of darknesshelp us see the darkness dear lord help us to not pretendno more pretending dear lord may our gaze be defenselessand unshardable teach us the piety of the open eye dear lord in this time of darknessmay we be unafraid to mourn and together and hugely may dignity lose its scaffoldingfaces crumble like bricks dear lord let grief come to grief and then o lord help us to see the bees yet in the lavenderthe spokes of sunlight down through the oaks and the sleep-opened face of the belovedand the afternoon all around herand her small freckled hands…

University of California Press, 2013. $29.95, 176 pages. “THERE ARE NO straight lines in nature,” observes contributor Richard Campanella in Unfathomable City; and “nowhere is this sinuous geometry more apparent” than in the beautifully broken fabric of New Orleans. The essays in Unfathomable City, the second in a series of cultural-geography collections edited by frequent Orion contributor Rebecca Solnit (this volume in partnership with filmmaker and Crescent City denizen Rebecca Snedeker), chart and evoke the city’s peculiar landscape with bittersweet affection. Like its predecessor, Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas, the present volume sets out to rethink the atlas, pairing essays by Solnit, Snedeker, and a host of contributors with expressive maps that limn the city’s tenuous continuities: the landscape of dispossession across which the Houma and other native peoples…

Rowan Jacobsen’s report from Vermont’s Mad River Food Hub, “From Farm to Table” (November/December 2013), did an excellent job of describing the opportunities and constraints facing local food systems. One overarching challenge, it seems, is that many of these systems suffer a bit of a split personality: on the one hand, they want to provide sustainably produced food for consumers; on the other hand, they start down the slippery slope of scaling up and adding middlemen in an effort to give consumers convenience. Trying to find a balance is a challenge for any farmer or local food enthusiast. TODD ULIZIO Whitefish, Montana Lately, there has been a lot of talk in the environmental sustainability movement about community resilience, but the Mad River Food Hub’s products are pretty costly — some…

A NOVEMBER MORNING is a good time to take in the Hudson River. While a glaze of autumn light lingers, the landscape seems distilled to essentials — the spine of mountains to the south, the woodlands of skeletal trees, the shining gray concourse of water below. Such is the view from the Walkway Over the Hudson, built as the Poughkeepsie-Highland Railroad Bridge in 1887 and reinvented as a pedestrian walkway in 2009. Two hundred and twelve feet above the river and 6,767 feet in length, it now has the distinction of being the country’s longest footbridge. Along with many other visitors, I find myself coming here regularly, and not just for the wide vista and bracing walk. Concepts of time, of passage, of our place in nature — there is…

TWENTY YEARS BEFORE Hurricane Sandy slammed into the slim spit of land that is New York City’s Rockaways, local artist Richard George was out planting trees. He was in his forties then, and had shifted his home a few years earlier from Corona, Queens, to a 1920s bungalow colony in the Far Rockaways, abutting the Atlantic Ocean. He didn’t know anything about trees, had never given a thought to dune ecology or sea surges, but he’d joined the board of the local Beachside Bungalow Preservation Association, and a friend gave them fifteen thousand dollars. The directive was to plant trees, so that’s what he did. “He planted the money in my hand,” George recalls when I meet him at his cottage, a bright white bungalow with turquoise trim that matches…

When one dives, separate from her mate,death is mere illusion.She peers through water, assuring this.When the crippled reeds rehabilitate, begintheir constant arc toward spring,pain seems impossible. So distance. So changeof-heart. From above or beneath, howa body will twist, intuiting fearand replacing it with here-ness, exhibit offaithfulness. Wordlessly saying, Be not afraid,Beloved, for the present exalts us!…

William Morrow, 2013. $27.99, 304 pages. HOLISTIC, small-scale, organic, biodynamic, or family farming — all of these practices have their advocates. Today an ever-increasing number of farmers who think like Aldo Leopold’s proverbial mountain — in terms of interconnectedness — supply farmers’ markets, CSAs, and farmto-table restaurants across the country. Yet how many of us have encountered a health-care provider who thinks like a medical ecologist? In her latest book, Farmacology: What Innovative Family Farming Can Teach Us About Health and Healing, Daphne Miller takes readers to seven different farms across the country in order to find the connections between sustainable farms and human bodies. Miller’s credentials are well established: she’s a graduate of Harvard Medi Medical School, a practicing family physician, and a professor of family medicine at the…

SPRING CLEANUP Are you ditching your car for a bicycle? Switching out your old truck for a hybrid? Becoming a one-car family? Donate your old jalopy (or your Rolls Royce, if that’s what you happen to drive) to Orion. You’ll get a tax credit, and we’ll turn your car into content. Go to www.orionmagazine.org/cars. ORION AT BREAD LOAF Applications for the Bread Loaf Orion Environmental Writers’ Conference are being accepted on a rolling basis through April 1. If you are a writer who wants to hone your skill in writing about the natural world, find out more and submit your application at www.orionmagazine.org/breadloaf. JUSTICE AND JOY In January, Orion announced its revised mission statement: Orion magazine invites readers into a community of caring for the planet. Through writing and art…