Orion March / April 2010

ONCE UPON A TIME there was a genre called nature writing. It was thoughtful and earnest, poetic and deep. It was built on a tradition — a transcendental, antisocial, largely pastoral tradition. It grew and flourished to the point where it even earned its own little section in the bookstore, where everyone who wanted to read it knew where to find it… and those who were looking more broadly for something good to read wouldn’t likely stumble over it again. There it sat, isolated from those works more generally known as literature. Writers began to fear being placed there. Over time, even those who originally embraced it would come to reconsider the value of the box. Orion has periodically suffered a similar fate, having been grouped with what are known…

Jason Anthony’s Antarctic essays have appeared in VQR and Best American Travel Writing 2007. He is currently writing a book on the history of Antarctic cuisine. David Paul Bayles is a landscape photographer living in Oregon. His book Urban Forest was selected by the Christian Science Monitor as one of the top seven photography books of 2003. Anthony Doerr lives in Boise, Idaho. He is the recipient of the Rome Prize, the Discover Prize, and three O. Henry Awards. His fourth book, a collection of stories titled Memory Wall, will be published by Scribner this July. Brian Doyle is editor of Portland Magazine at the University of Portland and author of, most recently, Thirsty for the Joy. Carolyn Drake is a documentary photographer based in Istanbul. She was recognized as…

Scott Russell Sanders’s essay “Mind in the Forest” (November/December 2009) turns on a weave of thinking and metaphor: Crowd of pebbles, fungi like balconies, a muscular current — these and other metaphors not only help us cross the bridge of Lookout Creek, they also reveal that thinking of this kind has its roots in our experience of the earth as a living, phenomenal being, a correlative of our symbolic under-standing, including language. I too, though rarely, have experienced in meditation contact with what I’d call a larger mind, if only by emptying my own smaller mind of clutter. Maybe meditation will one day make it possible to experience forms of intelligence other than our own. I’ve worked on lichens at times, though they’re stubborn and crusty and taste like moldy…

In December we learned that Orion will be awarded a $15,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts as part of the 2010 Access to Artistic Excellence program. The funding from the NEA will support the publication of work by writers who are not necessarily associated with environmental writing but who can bring a new layer of depth and imagination to the subject. Orion editors gathered in mid-November at the Blue Mountain Center in New York’s Adirondack Mountains with fifteen young writers. The conference was titled “Forget Nature Writing: Let’s Talk about What Comes Next.” Thanks to Blue Mountain Center for its generous support of the event. Picture editor Jason Houston and art consultant Taj Forer traveled to Lishui, China, in November, as curators for the 13th Lishui International…

Tracking Trash I hate throwing things away, but my downstairs neighbors clearly love it. Every week, they park a pile of detritus at the base of our streetlamp, an offering to New York’s Strongest: huge plastic toys, toilet seats, unfashionable lamps, plywood bookshelves. The garbagemen dutifully feed these once-desired, now unloved objects into the maw of their clanking machine, and my neighbors gleefully appear with new boxes from Bed Bath & Beyond. What would it take, one wonders, to jolt them from their unthinking cycle of consumption and waste? MIT’s SENSEable City Laboratory thinks technology might just do it. In particular, the deployment of mobile technologies: sensors and tags that can offer us more data about the world we inhabit. Trash/Track, the lab’s project premiering recently in Seattle and New…

The flyer read: “LOST, Ring Tailed Lehmur, Large Reward,” followed by a federal license number, and three phone numbers. Never mind the misspelling. In the photograph, the lemur sat upright like a child, a blue harness around its chest, its arms outstretched as if ready for a hug. It was the spring of 2005, and I had just moved to Lubbock, Texas. Later, I heard that the owner of Mattress Sale on 34th Street kept a pet black bear. When I called and spoke with an associate, he confided that no, they don’t own them, those five black bears. They just know the people who do. “Listen,” he said. “We use them mostly for advertising purposes. We use real horses. Real bears. And real Chihuahuas. Not those fake ones.” But…