Orion Winter 2018

HERE’S A MEMORY from childhood: My parents had friends over for drinks. I, being all of the age of seven or eight, was assigned the job of watching over my little sister and ensuring that cocktail hour and its attending adult conversation was unhindered. I can’t remember how well I succeeded in my task. What I do remember is listening in on the conversation that was happening in the living room. My parents, classic reform Democrats in the Kennedy mold, believed deeply in progressive politics. Their friends who were visiting that night—let’s call them the Smiths—were not. They were, in fact, supporters of Barry Goldwater. Many Orion readers will know about Goldwater. For those who don’t, he was a U.S. senator from Arizona who ran for president in 1964. Here…

Kelli Russell Agodon’s most recent book, Hourglass Museum, was a finalist for the Washington State Book Awards. Kelli is the cofounder of Two Sylvias Press. Wendell Berry lives and works with his wife, Tanya Berry, on their farm in Port Royal, Kentucky. An essayist, novelist, and poet, he is the author of more than forty books. Zoë Brigley, a native of Wales, is visiting assistant professor at Ohio State University. She has two poetry collections, The Secret and Conquest, and her third, Hand and Skull, will be published in 2019. Terry Evans has photographed the prairies and plains of North America for forty years. Her photography delves into the complex relationships between land and people, and she is an advocate for both. Brandi George is the author of Gog and…

IN “SACRIFICIAL LAND” (Autumn 2018), Krista Schlyer’s photography stole my breath away. I just returned from a trip along Arizona’s borderlands: driving among the cones and caution tape of the government shutdown; watching lights blink on across a section of border wall that already stood; rolling through checkpoints; watching planes drop bomb after bomb over a military proving ground. Away from the roads, though, I caught glimpses of Schlyer’s world: ravens winging out of canyons, paw prints pressed in mud from a recent rain. It takes patience to do the sort of witnessing she has done, looking for the hidden lives in this “throwaway” landscape. Where words alone might fail, her photos illuminate what’s alive, what stands to disappear. Visuals like hers tell stories: javelinas bristling beside the shine of…

Cure for Pain JANINE DEBAISE I SIT CROSS-LEGGED among the weeds and rubble of an abandoned industrial site, my raincoat bunched up to protect my bare legs from bits of jagged metal. A light rain falls on the polluted Flint River, which runs past concrete barriers sprayed with graffiti, as I watch an artist with a shovel poke at a hill of debris. I’ve come to Flint, Michigan, to figure out how art can help save a damaged planet. The Crying Post Project is a global art installation intended as a “memorial to the earth’s pain.” Dennis Summers, a soft-spoken Buddhist artist who grew up in the suburbs of Detroit, travels the world to visit sites of environmental disasters and install what he calls Crying Posts: tall wooden markers that…

In 2018, Helena Norberg-Hodge sat down with Wendell Berry for a far-reaching discussion. The two are giants of the localeconomy movement. Berry is a poet and activist, an author of over forty books — including The Unsettling of America and Home Economics—and a lifelong advocate for ecological health, the beauty of rural life, and small-scale farming. He is a recipient of the National Humanities Medal. Norberg-Hodge founded Local Futures, which works to renew ecological, social, and spiritual well-being by promoting a systemic shift toward economic localization. She also produced the film The Economics of Happiness and wrote the book Ancient Futures: Learning from Ladakh. She was honored with the Right Livelihood Award (or “Alternative Nobel Prize”) for her groundbreaking work in Ladakh. Berry and Norberg-Hodge touch on human nature, technology,…

Today’s sea seems tired of stealingacres of sand from the beach.What I call erosion, the waves call:I wish the wind would stop rushing us,I wish we could just take it slow. In the beauty of whitecaps, I sometimessee sadness, sometimes how lucky we areto watch the sunrise one more time. There’s so much we’re carrying these days—the seabirds drop another clam shell on shore,a killdeer runs across the dunestrying to distract everyone from its nest. Danger, even when it’s not, is everywhere.Sometimes I pretend to have a broken wingas I look out my window. But then a cloudscapein a world of buffleheads, of saltwater roses, and I forget fear. It’s 7 a.m. on a Thursdayand an otter is pretending none of my concernsmatter. The otter, a sort of mad hatter,is…