Orion Spring 2020

Though inspired by a 1969 California oil spill that resulted in the deaths of thousands of sea animals, the first Earth Day was largely a comfortable and congenial a=air, later described (in an EPA report) as a celebration that brought millions of Americans “out into the spring sunshine for peaceful demonstrations in favor of environmental reform.” Not surprising, then, that the enduring images of the day are of schoolchildren cleaning out streambeds and of President Nixon and his wife planting a tree on the White House lawn. Fifty years—two generations of humans—have passed since then. As much as ever, people need to protect animals and, yes, plant more trees. But our understanding of how damaged the planet really is, and how far we are from genuine reform, has never been…

David Baker’s latest book is Swift: New and Selected Poems. He teaches at Denison University and is poetry editor of The Kenyon Review. Nils Bubandt is the author of The Empty Seashell, editor-in-chief of the journal Ethnos, and a professor of anthropology at Aarhus University, Denmark. Deborah Cramer is the author of the award-winning The Narrow Edge: A Tiny Bird, An Ancient Crab, and an Epic Journey, translated into Spanish and Chinese. Allen Crawford’s work includes Whitman Illuminated, an illustrated and hand-lettered edition of “Song of Myself.” Louise Erdrich is the author of sixteen novels, volumes of poetry, children’s books, and a memoir of early motherhood. She is a member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa. Janet Essley is creator of The Cultural Cartography of Red Knots, an exploration…

FROM OUR READERS MEERA SUBRAMANIAN’s article “United in Change” (Winter 2019) is novel, bold, and inspiring. In response to the 2016 election and an ever-widening partisan divide on climate change crisis, she journeys across “really red” country to hear conservative voices. I applaud her aim to listen, not lecture, and to set aside her inclination to gather facts and go “searching for stories instead.” I was curious to see whether she would find a crack in conservative views. Farmers are practical people. When their crops wither, their livestock starve, when pastures and forests are razed by the worst fires on record (as is happening in my country of Australia as I write), surely somewhere farmers harbor a question: This isn’t normal; what’s going on here? But Subramanian’s article left me…

Dispatch from the Alley CECILY PARKS TODAY I’m the self-appointed inspector of the alley behind our house. A mop rests end-up on my neighbor’s chainlink fence, its teardrop loops of purple string drying in the heat. Wisteria, I think, because it’s spring, and I have flowers on the brain. Next, a bank of widows’ tears, long-stemmed purple two-petaled flowers buoyed by the long grasses and alley-side bracken. I’m surprised to find stores of purple in the mop and the weeds: purple for the luxury we lace into the mundane, and purple for grief. I pass a wooden fence, some arched rebar, a cedar, a palm, and a hackberry. Then here comes a breeze, and someone’s wind chimes release a fragment of song that promises neither beginning nor crescendo nor resolution.…

I n the summer of 2019, the climate activist Tim DeChristopher sat down with Wendell Berry. Berry is a poet and activist, author of over forty books, a recipient of the National Humanities Medal, a 2013 Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a celebrated advocate for localism, ecological health, and small-scale farming. DeChristopher, as Bidder 70, disrupted a Bureau of Land Management oil and gas auction in 2008 by outbidding oil companies for parcels around Arches and Canyonlands National Parks in Utah. Imprisoned for twenty-one months for his actions, he has used his platform to spread the urgency of the climate crisis and the need for bold, confrontational action to create a just and healthy world. TD: OK, now we’re recording. WB: Have we got a…

Pulling my first from its place in the forest floorfelt like slipping a key from its partnered, well-oiled lock.Broken so cleanly at the stem it appeared scalpel-sliced. You assured me this was a good find, a Boletus from its reddened bruiseand lack of gills. But chanterelles proved easiest to forage;their penny-bright caps glinted between dead leaves, ripe for the taking. Spiders were the largest animals we saw that day: orb weaversbigger than a man’s fist, sharp-legged seamstresses whose webslike neural networks transgressed each clearing. Without hair they weren’t so frightening, as if each spider had disrobed herselfto display a less menacing skeleton. Still, we kept our distance.And suddenly what I had never paid attention to was flourishing: oysters in bursts around a rotting stump, Amanitas with their whiteburial shroud, indigo…