Orion Spring 2022

THIS YEAR MARKS Orion’s fortieth year in print, no small feat for an ad-free non-profit publication. As we reflect on this occasion, our minds turn to the figures who have guided us over the years, and specifically to Barry Lopez and Jane Goodall, whose work in many ways embodies the exploratory mishmash of nature, science, and storytelling that characterizes our editorial vision. To honor them both, we’re pleased to announce two new awards in their names. The Orion Barry Lopez Award for Achievements in Letters and Environments will celebrate authors whose work reveals a complex and compassionate relationship with the natural world. The Orion Jane Goodall Award for Inspiring Courage in Action will celebrate acitivists and educators whose voices provoke environmental stewardship. The inaugural awards will be presented at our…

WHEN FINALLY it was time for our daughter to be born and I headed out on the Green Line from Copley Square to the Brigham, I had only the one book I’d brought with me to work that morning in my backpack, Ishiguro’s An Artist of the Floating World. I’d picked it out the previous night, a short and maybe not so demanding story that I’d thought I might finish in the few days before all the hospital stuff was meant to get under way. My bookmark was still on page 27, which speaks of a place known as the Bridge of Hesitation, where telegraph poles rise into the air, disconnected and unable to carry messages to anyone but the birds at rest on their heads. It was my first…

SHE SITS ACROSS from us, the middle-aged Black woman in the orange vinyl-upholstered chair, her eyes red and swollen, gripping a tissue that has been disintegrating for the last two hours into bits of dust that dot her pants and the floor beneath her. A Palestinian family—I hear the word Ramallah—huddles in the corner; the women, keening with worry, pull their seats into a tight circle while two men pace around. Near the window overlooking the East River, three black-hatted Jewish men stand and sway, tiny leather Talmuds in hand, while the only woman among them, young and massively pregnant, sips from a Styrofoam cup. An older Asian woman is asleep on a small couch on the other side of the room, where she’s been since my wife and I…

RUNNING SOUTH of the turquoise eye of Mono Lake just east of the Sierra’s steep escarpment are hills that once hissed and groaned, gushed fountains of pumice and ash and sticky masses of incandescent lava. Today, wandering among the range of stubby volcanic hills leads you across piles of pumice that grind and crunch underfoot. Daliesque spires of black, lichen-spotted obsidian tilt like disfigured statues at strange angles into the sky. This land is a land of glass, fashioned during recent millennia from obsidian and pumice with the same chemical composition as granite. But there the similarities with granite end. The granitic rocks of the Sierra Nevada formed on the order of a hundred million years ago, whereas the obsidian craters just east of the mountain range erupted in the…

WINTER RAIN in Taiwan’s mountains seems to hang in the air, getting into every seam of my clothes. The weather was warm when I left the city, but two thousand meters up, in the cloud forests near Alishan, I am shaking with cold. I was told the trail would be fairly easy. A worthwhile distraction from my grief over my grandfather’s death. I’d spent the autumn tracing his past in Taiwan, restlessly trying to close the gap left by my family’s migration to Canada and my own moves throughout Europe. In hiking, I found a way of connecting not just with my family’s culture but also with the land they loved. The trail rises gently for the first few hours. A narrow track traces a ridge past a disused logging…

“YOU WANT TO OPT OUT?” asked the TSA agent without looking up. “Yes, I want to opt out,” I replied, quickly adopting her language. I liked the way she put it. “Okaay,” she said absently but loudly, “please remove your items, place them on the floor there, and sit in that chair.” I was going through security at San Diego International Airport and had asked the agent if I had to enter the big X-ray bubble thing. You step inside, a sliding portal seals you in, and you are forced to stand like Leonardo Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man, arms and legs out, to be scanned by some unseen electromagnetic magic. I sat as directed on a lone stainless steel chair and waited as my fellow passengers shuffled past me and…