Table of contents for November / December 2013 in Orion

A READING REPOSE You’ve heard of slow food and slow money; how about slow reading? In today’s manic media landscape, it’s more important than ever to ensure that thoughtful writing will always have a place to call home. Support writing that matters by making a year-end donation to Orion at www.orionmagazine.org/donate. Thank you. ORION AT WILD & SCENIC Orion is proud to sponsor the Wild & Scenic Film Festival in Nevada City, California, January 10–12, 2014. Find out about this year’s programming, appearances by Orion editors and guests, and the festival’s goal of using film to inspire activism at www.orionmagazine.org/film. ANIMALS & PEOPLE With an introduction by Jane Goodall and essays from Mary Oliver, Brian Doyle, Sy Montgomery, and many others, this new book from Orion explores the relationship between…

I loved Cynthia Barnett’s “Water Works” in the July/August 2013 issue. I’m going to feature it on the reading list for the Art, Water, and Ecology course I teach at the University of Florida, which includes the work of artist Buster Simpson, who is a part of the Growing Vine Street project. As far as I know, it’s rare for an article that focuses primarily on water infrastructure to feature a community-based, public, eco-art project. Highlighting the fact that infrastructure can be innovative and economically efficient as well as beautiful and environmentally sound increases the visibility and legitimacy of these projects for other communities. Thanks for the wonderful examples of art working with science and community to create tangible value. LESLEY GAMBLE Gainesville, Florida Cynthia Barnett’s July/August feature demonstrates how,…

Instigation in the wind,urging winter along:wood smoke, woodpecker, song.One times ten is ten, and there is one of you,and ten things I could say.Let’s try to try it my way—I’ll tell you what is true: movement of sun in leaves,the breath of fall in everything, even things we nevernotice—aftermaths, sheaves. You are something likea flame, something clear,an ocean’s water nearthe shore, the open strike of thunder in the air,November stars, snow.The smoke of days, the lowfires of night are there inside your quiet hands.Hold me too. I’ll be quiet,or quieter, like nightmustered at morning’s command.…

Given up the crownthe gift remains a sundering, a foldof robes and richesturned inward like a blade a geode’scut light. If you could fathom risingthrough the steam of an ox throatcut in winter you might know the heat and arc of fury,then stillness pursuinglike the glacier hearts of herons. But you do not know for the mind cannot follow this,where the body has gone. Having been touched,you may not return the formonce carried. Though from time to timeyou can bury your hands in the earthand empty yourselflike a star, burning.…

Times Books, 2013. $26, 255 pages. BEES ARE ORGANIZERS. Bees are politicians. Bees are models of consensus decision-making, of social movements, of sustainable economics. Bees are necessary. Bees are radical. These are the curious creatures that thread their way through Bill McKibben’s newest book, Oil and Honey: The Education of an Unlikely Activist, which traces the author’s transformation from mild-mannered writer to full-on activist and figurehead in the global climate movement. It is both a memoir and a narrative of the burgeoning “fossil fuel resistance” he’s helped build: a resistance marked by a surge of creative protest that may be our last hope for a liveable future. It is also the story of McKibben’s friendship with his Vermont neighbor Kirk Webster, a beekeeper whose quiet life provides ample material for…

The Penguin Press, 2013. $27.95, 480 pages. MICHAEL POLLAN writes books that, to borrow from his latest work, are “good to eat” and “good to think.” He is a questing, questioning food writer, as likely to plunge into the science of browning meat as he is the social fallout of the decline of home cooking — by 50 percent since the mid-1960s. His books make you want to put them down, make a meal of equal parts time, love, and flavor, then share that food with your neighbors while debating the modern condition. Pollan’s latest, Cooked, contains all the pleasures of his signature style as he explores the manifold meanings of cookery. He tries making, from scratch, foods that most of us would consider as approachable as learning the piccolo:…

You could brave the cold, the crowds, and the traffic to find gifts for loved ones this holiday season — or you could check off your list from the comfort of home, hot cocoa in hand. Gift subscriptions to Orion are two-for-one, and recipients will receive an acknowledgement card on your behalf. Visit www.orionmagazine.org/gift today, and leave the rest to us. Happy holidays! Many readers’ favorite stories from Orion are about the connection between humans and animals — stories like Sy Montgomery’s “Deep Intellect,” Brian Doyle’s “Creature Beyond the Mountains,” and Mary Oliver’s “Waste Land.” If they’re beloved in your household, or if you’re looking for new reading material, check out Animals and People, the new collection of Orion essays that explores the complex relationship between people and animals. (And,…

Support Orion has no advertising, relying instead on contributions from readers. Whether you can give one dollar or thousands, your tax-deductible donation — by phone, mail, or Orion’s secure webpage — allows Orion to remain ad-free and protects Orion’s editorial independence. www.orionmagazine.org/donate Share A gift subscription to Orion not only honors the heart and mind of your loved one but empowers Orion as well. Money from gift subscriptions goes directly toward paying Orion’s writers and artists for their creative work, and toward bringing new ideas about people and nature to these pages. www.orionmagazine.org/gift Subscribe Like slow food and slow money, good writing takes time. When you subscribe to Orion or renew your subscription, you are helping ensure that deep questions and thoughtful writing about nature and environment continue to have…

ONE REASON it’s hard to alert people to the danger of climate change is because it’s so much bigger than anything else we’ve ever done. You’d think that colossal scale would make something easier to see, but not always: size can serve as excellent camouflage, making the bizarre seem normal, inevitable. Global warming is the air we breathe and the water we swim in, literally — it’s so enormous that it dwarfs all possible metaphors and analogies. For instance, someone wrote me recently to suggest that the fossil fuel industry had made a Superfund site out of our atmosphere. That is, like the chemical companies that had dumped their waste in places like Love Canal, the Exxons of the world had systematically poisoned the air with carbon dioxide, thereby raising…

IT ALL STARTS WITH the weather. Comes a day when summer finally gives in to the faintest freshet of chill and a slim new light and just like that, you’re gone. Wild in love with the autumn proviso. You can see that the standing trees are all busy lighting themselves up ember-orange around the hemline, starting their ritual drama of slow self-immolation — oh, well, you see it all. The honkling chain gang of boastful geese overhead that are fleeing warmward-ho, chuckling over their big escape. But not you. One more time, here for the duration, you will stick it out. Through the famously appley wood-smoked season that opens all hearts’ doors into kitchen industry and soup on the stove, the signs wink at you from everywhere: sticks of kindling…

I ILLUSTRATE THE CONVERSATION, and inherent tensions, between humans and nature. My work celebrates the intricacy and delicate beauty of natural forms while exploring the impact humanity has on our environment as we contort and shape it to our will. These paintings form a lens to illuminate and personalize the urgency of our current ecological state and the need for stewardship and preservation in our future.…

Pantheon, 2013. $24.95, 224 pages. IF THE LATE great southern writer Walker Percy had hailed from Indiana, he might have written something akin to Brian Kimberling’s Snapper. Reminiscent of Percy’s good-natured but lost young southern men, Snapper’s protagonist is a down-and-out Hoosier who stumbles into a job as a bird watcher. This lovely first novel, in its meandering chapters, comprises an ironic love song to Indiana that’s full of wistful humor and wise observation. It’s rare to the point of unheard of to find a novel that shies away from the usual Midwestern stereotypes of flat landscapes and butter cows, instead chronicling with wry appreciation the small towns, rivers, quarries, and woods of southern Indiana, but Kimberling does just that as we follow the misadventures of an “underpaid field worker”…

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013. $10, 115 pages. “ALL LITERATURE is visual arts,” says Icelandic author Sjón, and his three-book American debut — From The Mouth of the Whale, The Blue Fox, and The Whispering Muse — is lush seeing. Visual lavishness and metamorphosis pervade these novellas while the action unfolds in odd arabesques, as one story is permeated and overtaken by another. This set of books could be for American readers what Domus Aurea was for the early Renaissance: a liberating plunge into the surreal, a discovery of what is possible beyond American romanticism — a system that keeps nature fixed empirically as the “other” rather than the garden from which humanity grew. Sjón wants us to see the allegorical garden here. The epic of this set, From the…

Stephanie Rose Adams is the author of The Sundering. Her work has appeared in the Boston Review and other publications. Tyler Bewley is an artist and teacher living in San Francisco. His work has been shown throughout California. Belle Boggs has worked in public schools across the U.S. Her new novel, The Ugly Bear List, is forthcoming. William Cronon is an environmental historian at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He is completing a book about the history of American environmental politics entitled Saving Nature in Time. Robert Dawson’s new book of photographs, Public Library, will be published in 2014 by Princeton Architectural Press. Brian Doyle is the author of many books, most recently The Thorny Grace of It, a collection of spiritual essays. Deborah Springstead Ford teaches photography at Prescott…

1. Be prepared to be confused with the other black birder. Yes, there are only two of you at the bird festival. Yes, you’re wearing a name tag and are six inches taller than he is. Yes, you will be called by his name at least half a dozen times by supposedly observant people who can distinguish gull molts in a blizzard. 2. Carry your binoculars — and three forms of identification — at all times. You’ll need the binoculars to pick that tufted duck out of the flock of scaup and ring-necks. You’ll need the photo ID to convince the cops, FBI, Homeland Security, and the flashlight-toting security guard that you’re not a terrorist or escaped convict. 3. Don’t bird in a hoodie. Ever. 4. Nocturnal birding is a…

I STEPPED INTO A DUSTY BARN in rural Vermont and shook hands with Peter Roscini Colman, who pulled up a trapdoor and led me down to the barn’s dark basement. I could just make out, hanging in a mesh cage attached to the wall, a handful of lumpy polygons covered in white (and not-so-white) molds. The air was thick with floral, funky, animal scents. Pete opened the cage and removed the hunks of raw meat that had been slowly desiccating in the fly-proof cage for months. We went back upstairs to a little apartment he had renovated in one corner of the barn, where he sliced paper-thin shavings off the blocks. There was prosciutto, coppa, guanciale, lonza, all exuding a vibe of porky seduction. Pete, whose father is Italian, had…

The dark didn’t scare her.It’s this way days have grown long, like distancesbetween them of an evening. It used to be they gatheredat the fire, had to draw near. Maybe her husband played music,but there was nothing more to do until dawn. Since he’s beenworking at the sawmill, and cut the stand of wild cherry, she can seetown glowing in the valley, hear the saws sing, but not him.He doesn’t come home until the coals are cold.She eats in the kitchen while she cooks, and reads the news, leaning intothe stove hood for its light. The boy wants to get to town too.Quick, eats what she hands him, standing under the porch bulb,while moths fly against it and drop singed around them.Then her son steps out into the night.…

The barnacles sip ballast waterfrom port to port, shedding larvae in cascadesof tiny, glass-like feathers. Starfish creep beneath the ice field’smelt; above their chilled forms,glaciers crumbleto the size of sugar cubes. Like the paper oceans of a squeaky globe, the wavessmooth out, concealing depthswithin a color field of Tiffany box green-blue,a century of pesticides glossedwithin a century of proposals. The seawater should rememberwhat it holds. But like me, its giftis forgetfulness. It loves with its whole mouthopen, full of sunlight and corpsesand glittering strings of eggs. Bright passengers! I think of the lightin whose belly you are standing —how the dead corals flare.…

W. W. Norton, 2013. $27.95, 304 pages. ENTHUSIASTS of healthy carbs and starches may now resume eating. Evolutionary biologist and University of Minnesota professor Marlene Zuk’s new book Paleofantasy: What Evolution Really Tells Us about Sex, Diet, and How We Live expertly maps one of the many realms in popular culture where storytelling stands in as science: the “paleo” diet. An estimated 1 million people in the U.S. alone are said to be following this primal menu, purported to emulate the way our Stone Age ancestors ate. The only problem, according to Zuk? There has never been any single such diet. Paleo proponents contend that since agriculture represents only a brief span of Homo sapiens’ 200,000 years on earth, the human genome is thus ill-equipped for the relatively newfangled diet…