Table of contents for November / December 2015 in Orion

1. A good staff is handy in the mountains, as is a bottle of wine, as is the rising moon. 2. Dangling a fishhook off a flat rock in the middle of a river for all eternity may or may not be possible but it’s worth a try. 3. It’s better to be addicted to moss than wealth, sex, or fame. 4. Few joys rival walking an old path in new weather. 5. A cloud can eat ten thousand pines, an entire valley, the sky, and your name. 6. A cloud can also be worn as a jacket. 7. Even when clouds are metaphors they remain clouds. 8. Ditto for ringing bells. 9. Trust ferns. 10. On a calm lake at night one can row a small wooden boat across…

ON A SOGGY SEPTEMBER AFTERNOON in southeast British Columbia, Nancy Newhouse swung her truck through a bank of pearl-colored fog and bounced to a halt on the shoulder of Highway 3A. Newhouse, Tom Swann, and I emerged into the cold mist, stepping carefully around the puddled ruts carved in the pullout. A convoy of logging trucks, their beds heavy with timber, sprayed mud at our shins. Adjusting our raingear, we began trudging north along the highway; to our left, a screen of cedar, spruce, and Doug fir shielded the valley below. After a hundred yards, the curtain thinned, and Newhouse stopped. “There it is,” she said, the hood of her Nature Conservancy of Canada raincoat pulled low over her eyes. She pointed through the trees, toward the floor of the…

Sagging chainlink.Dirtyard studded with dogshit & weeds.That gutted two-cycle on the frontstep — you know what I’m talking about.Not a sound. Not even the wind. In the fencecorner nearest the cottonwood,the dogs hunch, long muscles ripplingbeneath scabbed hides. Just out of reachthe rotting, undone body of a deer sways. Winched up with a comealong, way up,so the dogs or whoevercan’t get at it. When I go there with you nowI’m twenty feet tall. I reach over, thumb the pawl—let the shame of that soft, black, fly-bitten carcassthunk down. Watch with a warm heartthe dogs feast. The screendoor to the housewas wide & windheld as an old man’s rotten mouth.The toolshed padlocked. I couldn’t find a ladder. The tree branchless for at least twenty feet,I tried scrabbling up anyway, somehow tore…

I HEARD ABOUT IT on public radio snippets: the North Carolina Zoo anticipated its second and third gorilla births in twenty-three years. Though they’d announced an earlier pregnancy with fanfare befitting a royal family, the zoo’s gorilla keepers were more circumspect this time. The first, highly publicized birth had ended sadly, with an infant the humans didn’t have time to name; something went wrong, and he died. His mother, Jamani, a gentle and regal-looking eleven-year-old, carried him for a day before relinquishing his body. Less than a year later, she was pregnant again, along with her enclosure-mate, Olympia, a bossy fifteen-year-old and newcomer to the group. Ultrasounds indicated healthy pregnancies, due within weeks of each other. “We held back,” said Aaron Jesue, who had by then cared for the zoo’s…

Ingo Arndt has traveled the globe for twenty-five years, photographing animals and their habitats. His work has been published in GEO, National Geographic, BBC Wildlife, and other magazines. Belle Boggs is the author of Mattaponi Queen, a collection of short stories. Her essay in this issue of Orion is adapted from her new book, The Art of Waiting: On Fertility, Medicine, and Motherhood, which will be published next year by Graywolf Press. Ann E. Coulter’s drawings and paintings are inspired by the prairie landscape of the midwestern United States. She holds degrees in fine art from Illinois State University, San Diego State University, and Bradley University. Ben Goldfarb’s journalism has appeared in High Country News, Earth Island Journal, The Guardian, and other publications. He received a master’s degree in Environmental…

THE TALK of my neighborhood here in tiny Hancock, New Hampshire, has been the whereabouts of the Flock of Eight. They’re a flock of wild turkeys who, until around Thanksgiving last year (a perilous time for turkeys), roosted each evening in the tall pines behind our house. We loved to see them pick up the fallen fruit beneath the ancient apple trees in our field, walking with stately grace. At dusk, we looked forward to the unlikely and joyous sight of these huge birds, weighing up to twenty pounds and standing up to four feet tall, heave their dark bulk one by one up into the sky. We neighbors would compare notes every day or so to keep tabs on the flock. Rick Simpson saw them hopping over the stone…

Thank goodness for the blackness of 5:30 a.m.in November, trees coming into their limbsthen their branches, like an oak deepeningin the darkroom’s wet photographand how the pot shows up under the stovelight: a silver idea hit upon by the day’sfirst hunger; each shape being re-recognized, rectangularwindow by crosshatched chain linkand the radio’s friendly voice from the stillunlit corner of the kitchen says tonightmight be snow and the good fortuneof my containment in this house, barelyhave I written to you about it who sleepsacross the country, darkness still tampingdown your blankets, when the autumn’syellow shows up, and a color we have determinedas neutral fills in between everything it allowsto show off, and then pink shows, likea tulle petticoat just below the hemof sky, and the curved handles of the ladderleading to…

AROUND THE WORLD, people in grassroots resistance movements are defending communities on the frontlines of climate change and industrial fossil fuel production — the extraction, transportation, and burning of oil, coal, and natural gas. The prints in this project, a collaboration between CultureStrike (a migrant-led arts and social justice organization) and the Justseeds Artists’ Cooperative (a network of environmentally minded, social justice artists), document and amplify the work of these communities, bringing new voices to bear on the environmental movement. Recognizing that the fossil fuel industry’s impact on people and the planet is dire, and that communities of color most often bear the brunt of it, CultureStrike and Justseeds paired migrant, indigenous, and environmental artists with organizations from threatened regions around the United States — from First Nations defending their…

ALMOST EVERY DAY during the fall that I turned forty, I walked to a park in Buenos Aires where a C-shaped pond cradled a large flower garden. A white, trellised Grecian bridge, looking like something that might be replicated in miniature on a wedding cake, spanned the water, leading pedestrians into the blooms. Paths of crushed brick meandered through the bushes and traced the pond’s inner shoreline. More than a thousand varieties of roses and carnations colored the garden. All was trimmed, labeled, composed. On weekdays I visited the park alone, but on Saturday mornings I brought my three-year-old daughter, Sofia. She liked my company because I carried stale bread to feed the coscoroba swans and white-winged coots. I liked her company because she didn’t mock me when I stared…

Beacon Press, 2015. $24.95, 256 pages. THE FRONT LINES of the fight to stop climate change are the front lines of the struggle for economic justice, racial equality, and livable communities. The people fighting the climate fight aren’t just trying to save future generations: they’re fighting to save us, and they’re fighting to save themselves. Or so Wen Stephenson writes in What We’re Fighting for Now Is Each Other: Dispatches from the Front Lines of Climate Justice, a book that is simultaneously a spiritual memoir, a call to join in on the action, and a treatise of what it means to be “radical” in the face of a crisis that is apocalyptic in scope. It’s a terrifying, despairing, and heart-wrenching read. But it’s also pragmatic, and most of all…

White Cloud Press, 2015. $13.95, 84 pages. “THIS IS THE WORLD, the kingdom we’ve been looking for,” Teddy Macker writes at the end of one of the several poems in this collection that shares its title. The phrase “this world” appears over and over in the book, as Macker intentionally returns to his core idea — praise for earthly experience — and to timeless rural images. This World combines Macker’s careful, subtly contemporary sounding translations of poems from Tang Dynasty China and Kazakhstan, and from Latin and Sanskrit, with poems written in easy, conversational diction about the California landscape. Earlier in the title poem, Macker, describing cormorants on a beach, writes, “The old pilings are propping maybe 40 of them up, / many with necks articulate, wings unfurled.” This description…

Scribner, 2015. $26, 342 pages. IT MAY SEEM unlikely that reading a world cultural history of the flower could feel like voyeurism into a fetishist’s naughty enchantments, but so it is with Stephen Buchmann’s The Reason for Flowers. In introducing a rare orchid’s allure, a particularly well-duped pollinator, or the transitory blooms of a Bornean carrion flower, the author recounts that his “heart was pounding with excitement.” Flowers do not appear to be Buchmann’s subject; he is theirs. While Buchmann’s explorations of the flowers’ reproductive functionality covered in Part I can be prosaic and mechanical in places, his enthusiasm proves rather viral in the sections after. He does admirable service to the flower, alighting with delight here in the earliest Assyrian gardens of the Fertile Crescent and there on the…

Toward the end of her haunting, rich, and challenging piece on killing and eating her own food (“The Chicken Project,” July/August 2015), Gina Warren writes, “I want to eat intelligible food and feel satiated, not consume blindly and feel empty.” There are many kinds of blindness, just as there are many ways to consume. Her essay is not an instruction manual for moral perfection, but a window into the mind of someone navigating a moral quandary we all face. I find it brave. DOUGLASS ST. CHRISTIAN Stratford, Ontario Several years ago, I made a choice similar to Gina Warren’s. In order to eat meat, I felt I had to involve myself more tangibly in the food chain, which meant learning to kill a chicken. I thanked the chicken for what…

ON A RECENT Saturday morning in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, throngs of joggers, tourists, and gutter punks streamed through a thousand acres of trails, gardens, and picnic groves — but I was there for the weeds. As I hovered over a patch of lamb’s quarters by Lincoln and Fifth Avenue, I recalled tasting some a few weeks earlier at a farmers’ market, the plants’ dusty leaves covered in a powdery white film, with spiky clusters of tiny flowers and red-streaked stems. I was surprised by how delicious they were: a more flavorful, hearty, and textured spinach. Subsistence on a weed — an unwanted but abundant wild plant — appealed to me. I was determined to forage my own, but did not want to make a mistake and die by…

We stamp our feet, say good yearto those we see in woods besidethe silver-plated pond, each one of usmade almost holy by our longing. By afternoon the passing lightis smoke, and shadowscaves in which we hardly breathe.Chill-stung leaves shrill ascellophane. Ground — boot hard. Under a bright affinity of starsI wake to hear an owl who-whoingfrom the branches of a fir, its callbroadening in the silence thatenfolds us. The dead eavesdropfrom their distant drafty offices, stillcurious, still brave, with the humilityof lichen. Each one ablaze with lovethey cannot help but bear. The astonishingalready joined, no one left to fearin the steamy cloistered kitchensthey once danced in. Their gift to us?This glancing grief, as sharpand certain as December rain.…

Graywolf Press, 2015. $16, 384 pages. ON HIS DEATHBED in 1087, Guillaume le Bâtard, better known as William the Conqueror, recognized that he had “persecuted the natives of England beyond all reason.” After defeating King Harold in the Battle of Hastings, William and his invaders faced nearly a decade of rebellions, which they tackled ruthlessly by the violent confiscation of lands, the establishment of a military elite, and the assumption of all domains of power by Norman French. It was a cataclysmic event for the natives of England, weakening or otherwise obliterating the distinct culture of the Anglo-Saxon world. Paul Kingsnorth’s impressive first novel, The Wake, lands us in the midst of this tumultuous aftermath. The first-person narrative is delivered by a fierce, desperate rebel — the evocatively named Buccmaster…

W. W. Norton, 2015. $26.95, 336 pages. IF, LIKE ME, you consider pork a basic food group (right up there with dark chocolate); if a table mounded high with greasy baby backs, explosive soup dumplings, Moo Shu pork, Cuban Lechon Asado, and a cauldron of New Mexican posole is your idea of a beautifully balanced meal; if you once bought a bacon-flavored chocolate bar and put a BandAid designed to look like a bacon strip on the skinned knee of your child — why would you ever want to open Pig Tales: An Omnivore’s Quest for Sustainable Meat, Barry Estabrook’s wide-ranging exposé about pig farming in the USA? You know the news will be distressing, and that no matter how bad it is, you won’t quit eating what you love.…

FOR THE LOVE OF WORDS Each issue of Orion holds approximately thirty thousand words, and each word is carefully chosen for the ways in which it can contribute to the conversation about people and nature. Please help fill Orion’s pages by making a donation this year-end. Go to www.orionmagazine.org/donate. Thank you. GIVE THE GIFT OF GOOD READING As you plan to celebrate the holidays this winter, or if you simply look forward to the season of long evenings, consider giving your friends and family gift subscriptions to Orion. Visit www.orionmagazine.org gift to take advantage of special holiday gift subscription offers. ORION AT BREAD LOAF The third annual Bread Loaf Orion Environmental Writers’ conference will be held June 3 – 9, 2016, at the historic Bread Loaf Campus in Ripton, Vermont.…