Table of contents for September / October 2010 in Orion

THE PROMISE OF technology has largely been delivered upon. What inventions have we not welcomed, from the telephone and the television to the airplane and the automobile? These things have, in one way or another, made it easier to live what we call a modern lifestyle. And technologies have continued to modernize at an exponential rate. Nowadays we can, with no wires or connectors of any kind, use a device the size of a pocket calculator to send mail, buy books, pay bills — even watch a live video feed of an oil well a mile under the surface of the sea gushing crude. For some, the sight of all that oil spilling into the Gulf of Mexico, where it continues to destroy fish, fisheries, saltwater marshes, the animals that…

Barry Lopez visited Orion’s offices for two days in May, taking the time to have lunch with the staff and join a roundtable discussion about writing, publishing, and the state of the world. A few days later we learned that his 350-word short story “The Trail,” from our January/February 2010 issue, had been selected for inclusion in Dave Eggers’s anthology Best American Nonrequired Reading. This is the first Orion piece to make it into that anthology. Our multimedia offerings at orionmagazine.org are popular! Between April 2009 and April 2010, downloads of our audio pieces grew to almost twelve thousand a month. Our multimedia work is gaining notice elsewhere, too. The Orion original short documentary “Stone River,” about contributor Jon Piasecki, premiered as a film in May at the thirty-second annual…

I DON’T KNOW about you, but whenever I attend some “green” conference, I know I’m supposed to leave feeling inspired and energized, but instead I feel heartbroken, discouraged, defeated, and lied to. It’s not the inevitable talk about farmers (re)discovering organic farming; about plastic forks made from cornstarch; about solar photovoltaics; about relocalizing; about the joys of simple living; about grieving the murder of the planet; about “changing our stories”; and most especially about maintaining a positive attitude that gets me down. It’s that no one, and I mean no one, ever mentions psychopathology. Why is this important? Because those in power destroy sustainable communities — and not just sustainable indigenous communities. If people develop new ways to live on their land more sustainably, and those in power decide that…

“SHOP AND COMPARE,” Finisia said. It was consumer advice from a woman in frilly skirts and a buckskin war shirt. Finisia, Lauren, Jon, and I lined the ridge of an ancient lava flow, looking down at a hundred-acre crater filled with desert, surrounded by more craters filled with more deserts. Shop and compare. Her point was that they were not the same: the desert to the south bloomed yellow and full; north was a wall of sagebrush. The yellow was food: breadroots, sego lilies, bitterroot, onions, dosep. The sage-covered side was what National Park Service calls Craters of the Moon National Monument. A monument to dead volcanoes and molten hills. To the fact that all the food was gone. Look for patches of yellow umbels — clusters of flowers in…

COMMON MODES of conveying information, such as science and journalism, fail to represent the complex reality of the New River, which flows north from Mexico into California — its use by illegal immigrants as a crossing point, its toxic state, the way it marks the boundary between public and private space. I was especially moved to undertake this project when I learned that the river, containing DDT, PCBs, and other dangerous chemicals, runs through California’s Imperial Valley, adjacent to crops grown and eaten every day by Americans nationwide. Illegal immigrants have direct contact with this chemical stew, and Border Patrol agents, as a matter of policy, don’t enter the water. I produced the image component of this project at different access points to the river, collecting water samples along the…

BY MARY ROACH W. W. Norton, 2010.$25.95, 336 pages. LIKE HER PREVIOUS BOOKS exploring cadavers, coitus, and the afterlife, Mary Roach’s Packing for Mars offers lots of taboo-busting fun, this time on the subject of space travel. The book answers the questions the world’s four-year-olds have about space flight — what do astronauts eat? how do astronauts pee? — and some that they probably haven’t thought of yet: Can you get it on in zero gravity? How exactly do you die if your spacecraft breaks up at thirty-four hundred miles an hour? Does orbit make a man’s penis look bigger? What’s it like to view your own anus through a closed-circuit toilet-cam? (Actually, they may have thought of that last one, but unlike NASA, they don’t have the technology to…

BY REBECCA SOLNIT AND MONA CARON Heyday Books, 2010. $12.95, 64 pages. HOW IM POVERISHED is a mind unhaunted by hedgehogs. Medieval bestiaries presented, for haunting purposes, hedgehogs and barnacles and coots and tragelaphuses. The fancy-free beasts were illustrated, and described, and then there was a small sermon on the meaning of each creature — “So it is with you, O man”—and then the animals entered your imagination, haunting your dreams and enriching your thoughts about this variously meaningful world. As they preceded the modern mania for veracity, these compendiums were rummy and reckless with the facts: antelopes sawed down trees with their antlers, panther breath was so sweet it enticed all the other animals to come close, except for dragons who hate sweet breath, and hyenas had a special…

T. Coraghessan Boyle is the author of twelve novels, most recently the New York Times bestseller The Women. “Scorpion Ranch” is adapted from When the Killing’s Done, forthcoming from Viking. Trish Carney is a photographer living in San Rafael, California. Her coyote images are part of her Living with Wildlife series. Benjamin Drummond is currently working in the Pacific Northwest on Facing Climate Change, a long-term documentary project that tells the story of global change through local people. Christopher Ketcham writes for Vanity Fair, Harper’s, and GQ. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, and Moab, Utah, and is currently writing a book about secession movements in the Northeast. Amanda Keller Konya is a Southern California native who received an MFA from Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles.…

I HAVE COME TO believe that extracting natural gas from shale using the newish technique called hydrofracking is the environmental issue of our time. And I think you should, too. Saying so represents two points of departure for me. One: I primarily study toxic chemicals, not energy issues. I have, heretofore, ceded that topic to others, such as Bill McKibben, with whom I share this column space in Orion. Two: I’m on record averring that I never tell people what to do. If you are a mother who wants to lead the charge against vinyl shower curtains, then you should. If the most important thing to you is organic golf courses, then they are. So said I. But high-volume slick water hydrofracturing of shale gas — fracking — is way…

They say Nero fiddled while Rome burned, thoughof course there were no fiddles, and the violinwas still curled like a secret inside the trees, waiting to becesareaned by Amati, carved from ebony, maple, and spruce,the most famous and oldest among them, the mostpristine, being “Le Messie” or the “Salabue”made by Antonio Stradivari in 1716, and never used,hung like a cadaver in the Ashmolean Museum. It was April 20th, 2010, when the oil began pumpinginto the Gulf of Mexico. We watched the newson our flat screens and iPads. We watchedripe beds of kelp wash up on the beige sand,the gloved hands scrubbing the blackened beaksof pelicans, that collapsible bird that’s been aroundfor thirty thousand years. We watched the lastgreat buckets of gray shrimp poured and weighed like grain, and the faces…

To get a pure pumpkin,one with sweet, smooth flesh, you had topollinate by hand and tape the blossomclosed. Otherwise, the plants would cross,get fertilized by any squash around. Black horses wouldn’t stop rollingin the dust, in pleasure,legs up and out from under every load,until their intestines tangled.Or, at least that’s what was said in warning, like they said Hellbenders,two foot long, slime covered salamandersthat filled the river, were evil.Hellbenders breathed through loose skins,filtering that water for decades, and I swam in it, I went in deep.…

WILD COYOTES HAVE SETTLED in or around every major city in the United States, thriving as never before, and in New York they have taken to golf. I’m told the New Yorker coyotes spend a good deal of time near the tenth hole on the Van Cortlandt Park Golf Course in the Bronx. They apparently like to watch the players tee off among the Canada geese. They hunt squirrels and rabbits and wild turkeys along the edge of the forest surrounding the course, where there are big old hardwoods and ivy that looks like it could strangle a man — good habitat in which to den, skulk, plan. Sometimes in summer the coyotes emerge from the steam of the woods to chew golf balls and spit them onto the grass…

BY JEFF GOODELL Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010. $26, 262 pages. Hack the Planet BY ELI KINTISCH John Wiley and Sons, 2010. $25.95, 279 pages. YOU’VE HEARD plenty of bad news on the climate lately. And there’s more to come. Might geoengineering be good news? Geoengineering is the term for the deliberate intervention into climate processes in order to lower the planet’s temperature. If you haven’t heard of it, you will. Geoengineering ideas range from the relatively benign, such as reflecting more sunlight back to space by painting roofs white, to the truly monumental, such as fertilizing the ocean with iron to increase the growth of carbon-dioxide-sucking plankton. These ideas are not being promulgated by the insane, and geoengineering is, in the view of many, myself included, the endeavor that will…

BY JANE BROX Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010. $25, 368 pages. EVER SINCE PROMETHEUS robbed the gods to give humans fire, light has been linked to culture. In English, enlightenment, illumination, and vision all imply both sight and knowledge. In her new book, Brilliant: The Evolution of Artificial Light, Jane Brox explores this connection. The flame, she writes, is “much more than simply a utilitarian tool, for it holds the power to fix our gaze and free our thoughts, and it lies at the heart of our making, thinking, and dreaming.” But this odd, enchanting history goes even further, arguing that the kind of light creates the kind of culture. Originally, light was personal: a fire pit, a candle, a whale-oil lamp. The lit area was specific, edged by dark. Maintaining…

GNARLED SWEET POTATOES, tips curling like the feet of witches. Hubbard squashes, big enough to sit on, warty, blue. Mushrooms flaring their gills. Back in July, the tomatoes and corn the farmers offered were cheery, Crayola-bright. October is scary: it holds out every child’s most despised vegetable in its wrinkled claw. Cold-weather vegetables are demanding. They require a little muscle behind the knife, and their hard shells can’t be sliced as much as hacked at. Inside, their flesh is richly colored and dense. They’re messy: eviscerate is the word that best describes how we scrape stringy flesh and seeds from a pumpkin to ready it for carving. We wrestle with them. They refuse the ease of the salad bowl and insist on a long roasting. They are either bitter (Brussels…

THE PLACE WHERE YOU LIVE Check out the online component of the newly revived Orion feature, The Place Where You Live. There’s an interactive map with other Orion readers’ writing and art about the places they live at the Orion website under “Featured Content.” READER SURVEY Tell us what you value most about Orion, and what kind of writing, art, and multimedia projects we should be considering for the Orion website and other new media. Go to orionmagazine.org/2010survey or call us at 888/909-6568 ext. 10 to request a paper copy. VISIT THE READER’S CORNER Join the expanding conversation about books and media at orionmagazine.org. You’ll find new content posted every few days about books the Orion staff are reading, related reviews and links, and the opportunity to share your thoughts…

Jay Griffiths’s piece, “The God Unbound” (May/June 2010), was excellent — and chilling. It fleshes out what is sick and frightening about American individualism and libertarianism, the dominant ideologies of our culture (which has always been latently fascist). Perhaps her most telling point is that true liberty is shared; it cannot belong to powerful individuals who declare their own freedom at the expense of others (including other species) and at the expense of the health of the Earth. This point in particular dovetails with Derrick Jensen’s understanding of our addiction to progress (“High On Progress,” May/June 2010). Underlying this addiction is the will to power and the attendant desire to apply technology to the end of unbounded mastery of our environment. Neither fascism nor American individualism can abide being bound…

I DON’T KNOW what it feels like, the thrill of hunting a human being. But I do know something of the fear of being hunted. I was in the Peruvian Amazon a few years back with indigenous Shipibo people who were protesting illegal gold mines on their lands. The previous time they had done so, the police from the nearest town had shot at them and set dogs on them. I can imagine, therefore, something of the terror that India’s indigenous people, the forest-dwelling Adivasis, must feel as Prime Minister Manmohan Singh oversees what is unoffcially known as “Operation Green Hunt.” It began in late 2009 and escalated this year. From West Bengal in the northeast, through Jharkhand, Orissa, Chhattisgarh, Andhra Pradesh, and Maharashtra, a ferociously well-armed state is attacking…

RITA WAS NEWLY SEPARATED from a man who’d hurt her in so many ways she’d lost track of just how and why she’d ever gone with him in the first place, her car was in the shop with some sort of systemic failure she couldn’t begin to fathom let alone pay for, her job was inadequate to her training and expectations, and she had a ten-year-old daughter to feed, clothe, and educate. It was May of 1979, and all the good feelings — the vibrations, the groove — of the shimmering bright era that had sustained her through every failure and disappointment had dwindled and winnowed and faded till she was angry all the time, angry at Toby for leaving her, angry at her daughter, at her boss, and the…

You pick the next-to-last apple off a branch;here’s to ripening, to the burr that catcheson your shoelace and makes you pause, consider, retrace your path. The cottonwoodshave burst into yellow flame; by the ditch,someone dumps a pile of butchered bones. When we saw white droppings on the brick porch,we turned and looked up to five screech owlsroosting on a dark beam, back-lit through wisteria leaves. By the metal gate,a bobcat bounds off with a rabbit in his mouth.You yearn to watch sunlight stream through the backs of Japanese maples;but see now, sheet lightning in the dark,it flows from your toes to fingertips to hair.…

BY ANTHONY DOERR Scribner, 2010. $24, 256 pages. CHARACTER BY CHARACTER and page by page, Memory Wall, Anthony Doerr’s collection of two novellas and five stories, inscribes an unstated but ever deepening connection: our interior memories are inextricably interwoven with the living places of our lives, and both are equally fragile and transmutable. In most of the stories a talismanic thing is being uncovered or buried, sinking beneath the surface or being slowly flooded — a 2-million-year-old fossil in South Africa, a presumed-extinct sturgeon in a Lithuanian River, a dead crane in the demilitarized zone between the Koreas, a small Chinese river town with ancient roots. And the characters who find, flee, float, bury, or uncover are all at the same time confronting the mystery of their memories, which flood…