Table of contents for March / April 2013 in Orion

OUR WANT of full development for our children. This line, from William Giraldi’s “Splendid Visions” (on page 18 in this issue of Orion), rings true for so many of us, parents and nonparents alike. We want to give our children the best, and our culture is full of the evidence of the lengths — sometimes outlandish — to which people will go to help, inspire, and entertain their children. It is ironic, then, that the American education system comes up so short in acting in our children’s best interests. The statistics tell the story: Internationally, U.S. students rank forty-eighth on science tests. Canadian fifteen-year-olds test a full year ahead of their American counterparts in math. Only a third of eighth graders test as “proficient” in math, science, and reading. High…

OVER THE YEARS, bees, butterflies, birds, and bears have all appeared on the cover of Orion. There have also been images of a cowboy saloon, a mountain being blown up with dynamite, sea gulls eating French fries, and B83 nuclear gravity bombs. Vote for your favorite by participating in our first-ever Best Orion Cover poll at www.orionmagazine.org/covers. Five participants will win a free set of Orion postcards. The 2013 Orion Book Award selection committee is currently reading their way through a stack of great books in order to pick this year’s winner. The committee is comprised of Erik Reece, Ursula Le Guin, Luis Alberto Urrea, Jessa Crispin, and Orion’s associate editor, Hannah Fries. Throughout the month of March, the third annual Berkshire Festival of Women Writers takes place in Orion’s…

OCTOBER 2012 was the 323rd consecutive month for which the global temperature was above average. The odds of this happening randomly are literally astronomical: one in ten to the hundredth power. For comparison, there are ten to the eightieth power atoms in the known universe. So if all the atoms in the universe were white, except one was green, your odds of reaching blindly into a bag of all the atoms in the universe and picking out the green one would be greater than that of having 323 consecutive months of above-average temperatures were global warming not happening. A sane person might think that in the face of this, and with life on earth at stake, the debate over whether global warming is happening would have ended. A sane person…

IF YOU ARE AMONG THESE PAGES today, you are rich with words. Rich with teachers. You are one of the ardent-hearted, a philosopher, a student. Though you may not always see it, especially with your nose in a book or a magazine, you’re in a massive city that includes ocean parks, apartment buildings, factories, sand hills, forests, bridges, distant bands of stars… You don’t know how far the limits of the city extend, but it doesn’t matter, because you will never reach them, not in this lifetime, not as yourself. You don’t really get it — why this city, why you in it — but after a couple decades among its people, trees, schools, and buildings, you come to the conclusion that your job is to map it. It is…

Tonight, our spoonful of upliftis red-crowned cranes, wings up,legs down, floating into the DMZon the feel-good spot of the news. It’s almost a sanctuary, the reporter says,this open, empty land that runs alongthe 38th parallel between Northand South Korea for 160 miles. It’s true, the cranes have found refuge here,the land, people-less, littered with minesand surrounded by troops, left behindto the birds for the time being. It’s almost comical how the news reportthinks it needs to shuffle betweenan opportunistic nature rushing into fill an emptiness, and the vague sense of some power larger than usfixing once again what we’ve broken.I’m no better. I’m dragging up Camus,who wondered how we could ever be miserable, so much beauty in the world,but, also, how we could ever be happy,so much shit in the…

University of Nebraska Press, 2012. $26.95, 344 pages. IN THE DARK of the Antarctic night, a dream recurs: carbohydrates, those crunchy reminders of civilization, tantalize Robert Falcon Scott’s starving northern party and Ernest Shackleton’s men marooned on Elephant Island. Even as Sir Ranulf Fiennes, the modern English adventurer who hauled a heavy sledge across the empty icescape, attempts to conjure up fantasies about sex, he only imagines the mountains of calories he will savor to the last lick. For nearly a decade, Jason C. Anthony, a lanky, observant crew member with the U.S. Antarctic Program, yo-yos back and forth to the ice. His book recounts these trips and more than a century’s worth of meals — meals that have powered generations of dreamers and explorers southward. Anthony arrives in Antarctica…

Bloomsbury, 2012. $26, 393 pages. WHEN ASTRONAUT Keith Corcoran returns from his long-awaited stint at the International Space Station, he reenters Earth’s atmosphere with the knowledge that his sixteen-year-old daughter has died in an accident, a harrowing bit of information he received after a space walk, which should have felt like his career’s crowning achievement. Corcoran returns to an eerily empty house in a haunting opening scene. Suddenly being thrust from the sublimity of space to the mundane order of suburban America would be, in itself, unsettling for anyone. But for Corcoran, it’s a particularly difficult re-entry. As it turns out, not only is his child dead, but his wife has also left him. Battered by grief, completely alone, and burdened by a brilliant but somehow emotionally blocked intellect, Corcoran…

THIS GREEN TIME OF YEAR, as I plant seeds and dig in compost and trim raspberry canes, I think of the original garden from which, according to one legend, our putative ancestors were expelled. I wonder many things about that garden. For one, when God enjoined Adam and Eve to “dress it and keep it,” did our ancestors consider their assignment work? It wasn’t work in the sense of standing outside the gates of Eden and starting the human race on the road to serfdom, slavery, day shifts, and leveraged buyouts. Rather, such dressing and keeping must have reflected a natural instinct to be engaged with what nurtured them. How it nurtured them is given relatively short shrift in this legend, particularly regarding what must have been the enormous beauty…

Robert Cording teaches at College of the Holy Cross in Massachusetts. He is the author of six collections of poems, including, most recently, Walking with Ruskin. Mark Dorf is a 2011 graduate of the Savannah College of Art and Design. His images in this issue are from a series titled Axiom & Simulation. Gary Gildner is a winner of the National Magazine Award in fiction. Cleaning a Rainbow is his latest collection of poems. William Giraldi is the author of the novel Busy Monsters and fiction editor of the journal AGNI. His work has appeared recently in GQ, Salmagundi, and The Oxford American. Bear Guerra was a finalist for a 2010 National Magazine Award in photojournalism. His story in this issue was funded in part by the Society of Environmental…

1. THE UNITED NATIONS MEDITATION STONE Conspiracy theorists, glimpsing the dark side of the New World Order, call it “Satan’s Altar.” But Dag Hammarskjold — Secretary-General from 1953 until that unresolved Congo plane crash eight years later — envisioned stillness in the eye of the storm, a space of peace to turn the mind inward. Enter via the Visitors’ Entrance, turn right at Information, step into the Meditation Room. There, lit by a single spotlight, stands a six-and-a-half-ton block of iron ore. “The iron ore has the weight and solidity of the everlasting,” said Hammarskjold. “How are we to use it?” 2. THE BLACK STONE One way to use stone can be glimpsed in the ritual of the hajj. There is the Kaaba, the immense granite cuboid, the first house…

AT SOME POINT between my sixth and seventh birthdays, the Greek god Pan started haunting our backyard. He dwelled behind the pear tree next to the garage and left his hoof prints in the dirt, his half-eaten pears in a shrub. I once spotted his horned silhouette near the ivy-strangled fence. With a fashioned spear I hunted him up and down the block, through neighbors’ yards, and into the woods by the river, my imagination animated, stirred by sylvan possibility. I’ve never forgotten that feeling, never been able to forget. An ecstatic and engaged individuality defined my childhood in suburban New Jersey. While my single father labored ten-hour days, my pals and I biked all across town, cussing and spitting, each of us a veritable Tom Sawyer or Huck Finn.…

Before there was light therewas wind and it rained on the newborn earth four millionyears. The cloud vapor was so thick no sunlight reached theearth. We were burning, even the rain could not cool us.On ourselves we rained, in one self we burned — our selfwas all one mass and all we are was present then, alreadyunderstood. There could be no thought yet of continents orocean, no forest, fern, bog, nothing living and nothing tolive upon. But everything existed. Molten rock, that greatcreation soup, simmered, bubbled — take and eat. It was mybody. There is a planet that is a diamond. It lies near to us inour own galaxy, this Milky Way, Path of Ghosts, the steppingstones that spirits follow through the spiral, out to the otheredge, the nothing before…

Basia Irland has sculpted and launched ice books in rivers and streams across the United States and abroad. To create these watershed restoration sculptures, Irland works with ecologists, botanists, and river restoration biologists to ascertain the best native seeds for the specific riparian zone in which the books will be released. The books are hand-carved out of frozen river water, and the seeds are embedded within them, as text. Finally, members of the local community gather to launch the books into the river or stream. Along the Nisqually River in Washington State, for example, Nisqually tribal members, salmon restoration specialists, musicians, fifth graders attending Wa He Lut Indian School, students and professors from Evergreen State College, and Mount Rainier forest rangers all took part. Participants in New Mexico on the…

“I'M A FROG PERSON,” Brandon Ballengee says, standing in a dark room hung with large digital scans he has made of frog specimens. With their flesh chemically cleared and their bones and cartilage stained, the frogs are dramatically outlined — and they are all deformed. Some have three legs. Some have six legs, five legs, eight legs. They are horrifying and hauntingly beautiful. We are in the esteemed Ronald Feldman Fine Arts gallery in Soho, New York, where Ballengee’s new art exhibit, Collapse: The Cry of Silent Forms, is installed. In the middle of the room, the actual specimens occupy petri dishes lined up in a long, glowing light box. They look like jewels in a museum display. A popular publicity photograph of Brandon Ballengee shows him up to his…

University of New Hampshire Press, 2012. $27.95, 278 pages. THE NATION’S CEREAL BOWLS, latte mugs, and sippy cups runneth over with milk — and it turns out to be mostly insipid stuff. Pushed to the hilt for maximum production, factory-farmed cows are generally unhealthy beasts. Sick cows excrete high levels of white blood cells — essentially pus — into their milk. The more of these “somatic cells” that end up in a batch of the white stuff, the less essential fatty acids it delivers to consumers. Such milk also spoils quickly, forcing the industry to resort to “ultra-high temperature pasteurization” — that is, they have to cook the hell out of it. The result is a “product of gutted nutritional value” and inferior flavor, Kirk Kardashian shows in his Milk…

Patagonia Books, 2012. $29.95, 230 pages. NOW WHEN you’re shopping online at Patagonia.com, you can buy some books to go with your new jacket. That’s right — Patagonia is in the publishing biz, and Dylan Tomine’s book, Closer to the Ground: An Outdoor Family’s Year on the Water, in the Woods and at the Table, is as comfortable and sensible as one of their fleeces. Imagine a more a=able Thoreau with a wife and two children living in a house they didn’t build themselves, but had built for them thoughtfully and as sustainably as their budget would allow. They aren’t at Walden Pond but on an island in Puget Sound, a short ferry ride from Seattle. Now imagine their yard at the end of a long gravel drive as a…

ORION IS ADVERTISING FREE Orion is entirely reader supported. Subscriptions and sales cover just one-third of the cost of publishing the magazine. But unlike most magazines, Orion doesn’t make up the difference with advertising. Help keep it this way by making a monthly donation, and we’ll automatically renew your subscription. Go to www.orionmagazine.org/sustainingpartners. Thank you. A CONVERSATION ABOUT ART AND ECOLOGY Join Orion for a discussion about making art that restores the landscape with Basia Irland (page 52 of this issue) and other artists whose work heals watersheds and wetlands. This live web event will take place on March 19 at 7 p.m. (EST); it’s free, but registration is required. Find out more at www.orionmagazine.org/discuss. VOTE FOR YOUR FAVORITE ORION COVER Since 1982, the cover of Orion has featured birds,…

The November/December 2012 issue of Orion should be required reading for every American. From Charles C. Mann’s “State of the Species” to Glenis Redmond’s “What Hangs on Trees,” Orion’s writers, artists, and editors have assembled a challenging and provocative text for this post-election/post-holiday period of hope-laced optimism and debt-induced doubt. So while I doubt all 300-odd million of us will read the November/December 2012 issue, it is still encouraging to know that we live among writers, thinkers, and artists who have the nerve to act as if we might. BILL DISKIN Charlotte, North Carolina Charles C. Mann’s “State of the Species” (November/December 2012) is one of the best assessments of human evolution I’ve ever read. And I agree with Lynn Margulis’s argument that the mere idea of balance is not…

Bears cougars rattlesnakes man alivepeople keep saying aren’t youafraid living way out there noclose neighbors real friendswhere do you shop on the spurjust go for a cuppa coffee lookwhat if you suffer an attack ofanything can happen my godat your age it’s crazy— Well the other day I said whoastepping back to gaze in wonderat how this sow pushed overmy compost box oh I understoodof course spring and all the surgestill I’d built that box myselfscraps of ancient planks squared offclean and straight at the cornersnailed tight with spikes a big oldboy I was sorry to see lying therebehind the barn all messed aparta long scar clawed across the blacksheet of plastic covering the topor not covering anything nowexcept a patch of gray snowbristling with pine and fir needleshow many…

I’m surprised the mild wind that brought me herecould turn so quickly spooky. Kicked-up, horse-like. Or, when standing still & I sense myself askew,at a slight angle to the universe, confused re: the who & what & how. How to openopenopen.How to harvest flax without degrading the hills. The violet and low-rolling hills.It would help to have a basic understanding of thermodynamics to better parse, for example,the ins and outs of heat exchange. As in, it’s a cold day in March, you put your hand in my pocket.Put your fine, cold hand in my flannel-lined pocket. It would help if you’d talk a little Brontë, a little Austento me while we stroll across the softening fields to the lambing shed where we’ll kneel downin our muddy boots and count the…

Counterpoint, 2012. $28, 356 pages. ONCE UPON A TIME, there was a hermit, who lived with her little dog on the moors in a remote part of southwest Scotland. And although she grew up in a wealthy family, once her own children had grown she gave up on the comforts of this world, finding her luxury in silence and writing. Then, one March day, she went with her son away from the moors and into the dark ancient woodlands, and they camped and talked about the trees, and about fairy stories, and the magic and fears of childhood. And she began to write a new book. From the Forest: A Search for the Hidden Roots of Our Fairytales is the story of twelve journeys into British forests, one for every…

Beacon Press, 2013. $26.95, 250 pages. EVA SAULITIS’S Into Great Silence: A Memoir of Discovery and Loss among Vanishing Orcas chronicles the changing lives of two “pods”: a group of “transient” killer whales in Alaska’s Prince William Sound and a revolving cast of “transient” scientists who follow, study, and document the orcas over almost three decades. Saulitis’s reverence for the Alaskan landscape is rendered in loving detail: “Among the rocks, in the gray winter light, was color: lavender, umber, moss green, burnt orange, rose, pearl. In Quillian Bay, we watched rafts of grooming sea otters, flocks of sea ducks. I learned to identify harlequins, pigeon guillemots, marbled murrelets…” Equally vivid are her renderings of the orcas, whom she learns to identify on sight. Saulitis calls killer whales emblems of “fidelity…

Heyday, 2012. $40, 176 pages. If Americans want to see where their food comes from, most would do well to travel to California, first in the nation in dairy production and grower of over half our fruits, nuts, and vegetables. Much of this food comes out of the Central Valley, a region widely perceived as a land of plenty. There is, however, a dark side to this bounty. In Valley of Shadows and Dreams, Ken and Melanie Light explore the grave injustices and exploitation that have degraded this region’s landscape, led to rampant development followed by rampant foreclosures, and forced the very people who grow our food into poverty, illness, and, yes, even hunger. The book combines Ken Light’s strikingly sensitive black-and-white photographs of people and the landscapes they inhabit…