Table of contents for November / December 2010 in Orion

THE HUMAN CAPACITY for denial runs deep. It may have evolved as a protective measure during the relatively short history of our species, giving us the courage to carry on under tough circumstances — when the rains failed to come, or when they came in torrents that flooded our fields. If we could stay focused not on the predicament but on getting out of it, we might live to see another season. But in the first decade of the twenty-first century, as we stood wrapped in our robe of technologies, denial morphed into an almost all-out rejection that a predicament even exists. The majority of us in this country carry on, day by day, without the weight of anything amiss on our shoulders or our consciences. What we choose not…

We were pleased to learn that Lia Purpura’s essay “On Coming Back as a Buzzard” (September/October 2009) has been awarded a 2011 Pushcart Prize. In the wake of the National Magazine Award in April, the American Society of Magazine Editors is putting together an anthology of award winners and finalists; Orion finalist Joe wilkins, nominated in the essay category for “Out West” (September/October 2009), was selected to be included. Our multimedia work continues to gain recognition. The Orion original short documentary “Stone River,” about contributor Jon Piasecki, was just accepted to the Port Townsend Film Festival in Port Townsend, Washington, and has been requested by the Wild & Scenic Environmental Film Festival in Nevada City, California. In August, Editor-in-Chief Chip Blake served on the faculty at the Squaw Valley Writers…

IN BENJAMIN PERCY’S menacing debut novel, central Oregon becomes a proving ground for men tested to their limits. Scheming businessmen in Bend, Oregon, have earmarked nearby Echo Canyon in the Ochocos Mountains for development, planning to raise vacationland from pristine wilderness. But before the paving and clearcutting begins, Justin Caves and his curious, “[d]elicate” son, Graham, agree to accompany the family’s ornery patriarch, Paul, on one final hunting and camping trip. “This little guy could use some roughness about him,” Paul says of Graham, hoping a visit to Echo Canyon will toughen up his grandson, a boy who “prefers books to BB guns.” Paul is a grumpy codger, with a voice “like a distant shout of thunder,” and self-absorbed to the point of recklessness. Paul believes Justin has gone soft…

ORION FOR THE HOLIDA YS Forgive us for boasting, but Orion makes a wonderful gift. Share the magazine with friends, family, and colleagues this year by purchasing gift subscriptions at orionmagazine.org under “Subscribe,” and we’ll send a card on your behalf. THE PLACE WHERE YOU LIVE Many readers have already shared their writing, photographs, and artwork in the online component of the newly revived Orion department, The Place Where You Live. See your fellow readers’ thoughts about the meaning of place — and add your own — at the Orion website under “Connect.” RESULTS OF THE READER SUR VEY Thanks to everyone who responded to the reader survey in August and September. We’ll be making the information available on our website late in the year. Stay tuned for details. CONNECT…

Brian Adams is a freelance photographer based in Brooklyn and Anchorage. His work has been featured in the New York Times, Newsweek, the Guardian, the Observer, and Time. Ellen Bass is author of The Human Line from Copper Canyon Press and Mules of Love from BOA Editions. She lives in Santa Cruz, California, and teaches at Pacific University. Mark Dowie is an investigative historian and contributing editor of Orion. He lives in Willow Point, California. His story was supported by the Christensen Fund. J Henry Fair is a photographer based in New York City. His work has appeared in National Geographic, Time, and Harper’s. His first book, The Day After Tomorrow: Images of Our Earth in Crisis, is forth-coming from powerHouse Books. Dana Fritz teaches at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln.…

WHEN I RETURNED to the United States after living for a year in the Netherlands, I returned to a gloriously foreign country in Lawrence, Kansas. The slant of light felt exceptionally sharp and clear; I was acutely aware of not needing to wear Gore-Tex every time I left the house. Even the breadth of the grocery store’s aisles seemed miraculous. Tony Hiss, author of The Experience of Place, is interested in these shifts in perception we experience when we suspend our assumptions and encounter the new, a quality of attention he calls “deep travel.” In his new book In Motion: The Experience of Travel, he explores why deep travel might be useful, how people may have first gained the capacity, and how we can teach ourselves to have more deep…

GRETEL EHRLICH’ S newest work, In the Empire of Ice: Encounters in a Changing Landscape, is about two things: genocide — abuse of the indigenous peoples of the Arctic; and terricide — abuse of the planet for progress and profit. Climate change is melting the world out from under the ice-adapted people who have lived with genius and elegance at the top of the world for ten thousand years without over-depleting a single resource. This isn’t Ehrlich’s first encounter with ice. This Cold Heaven chronicles seven seasons spent with subsistence hunters in Greenland, and The Future of Ice charts a six-month journey following winter from Tierra Del Fuego to the top of the Spitsbergen archipelago, and back to her one-room cabin in Wyoming. In the Empire of Ice takes her…

Bill McKibben makes an excellent point in “Duty Dodgers” (July/August 2010). Perhaps our lawmakers are not like us in that they cannot envision working “really, really hard” more than once a year or so. It is hard to face the sort of opposition your garden-variety environmentalist does — though few Congresspeople might be characterized as such. And it is really hard for an elected official to roll up his sleeves continuously because of all the dry cleaning it ultimately involves. As a result, we’ll have to do the heavy lifting McKibben describes. We’ll have to bring our spades and our shovels and our cooperative spirits; we’ll have to hammer in solar panels; and we’ll have to crawl around in the dirt hoping for the best from a world that rarely…

I LIVE IN A TEMPERATE redwood rainforest. I see dozens if not hundreds of redwood trees each day. The same used to be true of tadpoles. I’ve seen rivulets so full of tadpoles, they were pushing each other out of the water. All spring I used to see hundreds of tiny egg masses from Pacific tree frogs and dozens of larger masses from northern red-legged frogs. No longer. I was just talking to a herpetologist at U.S. Fish and Wildlife who knows someone who thirty years ago used to see thousands of rough-skinned newts at a time, and who now sees only a couple per year. At one point it would not have been a big deal to see a passenger pigeon either; after all, there were something like six…

Nights, when I can’t sleep, I listen to the sea lionsbarking from the rocks off the lighthouse.I look out the black window into the black nightand think about the fish stirring the ocean.Muscular tuna, their lunge and thrashchurning the water to froth,whipping up a squall, storm of hunger.Herring cruising, river of silver in the sea,wide as a lit city. And all the small breaths:pulse of frilled jellyfish, thrust of squid,frenzy of krill, transparent skin glowinggreen with the glass shells of diatoms.Billions swarming up the water column each night,gliding down at dawn. They’re the greased motorthat powers the world, whirringMixmaster folding the planet’s batter.Shipping heat to the Arctic, hauling coldto the tropics, currents unspooling around the globe.My room is so still, the bureau lifeless,and on it, inert, the paraphernalia of humans:keys,…

ROBERT MICHAEL PYLE’S expansive knowledge of the natural history of North America shines through in his new book Mariposa Road: The First Butterfly Big Year, the story of his yearlong journey in search of as many of the continent’s eight hundred species of butterfly as he can find. He makes not one journey, but a series of journeys, from his home in Gray’s River, Washington, which emanate out like the “ray petals of a daisy,” as he tells it. He calls himself “a fool with a butterfly dream,” a dream inspired by similar journeys made by others in search of birds, namely James Fisher and the legendary Roger Tory Peterson, who together wrote Wild America, and Kenn Kaufman who told his tale in Kingbird Highway. So Pyle is not alone,…

IN THE SUMMER OF 2008, I spent more than an hour trying to coax something resembling anger or indignation from Dr. Nguyen Viet Nhan, Chief of the Department of Medical Genetics at the Hue College of Medicine and Pharmacy and one of the world’s leading experts on the effects of Agent Orange. My cajoling was an utter failure. “It is not the mistake of the Americans,” said Dr. Nhan. “It is the mistake of history…. It is time to see the future.” No doubt, Dr. Nhan’s forward thinking is admirable and important, but let us not forget the sage words of George Orwell: “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.” And in the present, the one voice conspicuously absent from a recently reinvigorated…

EACH DAY I READ the e-mailed Poem-ADay from the Academy of American Poets. Most of the featured poems are approachable and short, and my reading is enjoyable but quick. Recently, though, the daily poem was Maureen N. McLane’s “Passage I,” a poem in nine sections. I read the first stanzas and immediately read them again. Then again. And one more time: “little moth / I do not think you’ll escape / this night // I do not think / you’ll escape this night / little moth.” What strikes me still is how this language — simple, direct, and playful — is immediately undercut by the dark repetition and syntactic reversal in the second tercet: despite the language, despite the relatively ho-hum nature of the moment, the speaker insists on demise.…

THE JOURNEY FROM ignorance to seeing is made by borrowing others’ eyes. A friend points out the litter of disassembled fir cones under a tree in one place, and I become a person able to see them in others. Able also to see what is not, in that moment, there: the squirrel working the cone apart with fast, industrious teeth and dexterous paws, freeing its nourishing seeds. As this spring’s writer in residence in the Andrews Experimental Forest, in Oregon’s Western Cascades, I’ve been given a paper to read on the “invisible present.” It points out that we perceive acutely changes that are relatively quick, but are blind to the gradual. A one-year vanishing of salmon is a recognizable crisis. If each decade a wildflower blooms a day or two…