Table of contents for May / June & July / August 2014 in Orion

This spring, several Orion pieces garnered notable accolades: Belle Boggs’s essay “The Science of Citizenship” (November/December 2013) won a 2014 Impact Award from The Media Consortium; Amy Glynn Greacen’s poem “Chamise” (September/October 2013) won a Spur Award for Best Western Poem; and Robin Wall Kimmerer won the John Burroughs Nature Essay Award for “Council of the Pecans” (September/October 2013). Congratulations to all. Thank you, readers, for your thoughtful feedback on Orion’s new mission statement earlier this year. To read or add to the discussion, please visit www.orionmagazine.org/mission. Orion’s first annual Poetry Exchange was a huge hit with readers who signed up to create their versions of “Letters from Two Gardens” (January/February 2014). See some of the collaborations at www.orionmagazine.org/poetryexchange, and start sharpening your pencils for next year. From the Department…

THE FARMER LIVES and works in the meeting place of nature and the human economy. Farmers either fit their farming to their farms, conform to the laws of nature, and keep natural powers and services intact—or they do not. If they do not, they increase the ecological deficit that is being charged to the future. Good farmers, who take seriously their duties as stewards of Creation and of their land’s inheritors, contribute to the welfare of society in more ways than society usually acknowledges, or even knows. These farmers produce valuable goods, of course; but they also conserve soil, they conserve water, they conserve wildlife, they conserve open space, they conserve scenery. All that is what farmers ought to do. But since our present society’s first standard in all things…

ABOVE THE ROCK CANYON WALL, the sun winks into morning view, drowsy and golden. The light pours onto the mute Rio Grande, soon finding our tent just yards from the bank. The slanting rays gradually find the sleeping face of my son, Sasha. He’s fifteen years old. Not quite a man, but almost. We’ll be visiting colleges this time next year. He’s not a boy, either, although he looks consummately boyish in the innocence of slumber. I see the Little Leaguer in his face, and the kindergartener. In sleep we catch the last youthful poses of our children. And at this moment, I wonder yet again why I brought Sasha to this wilderness place. Part of the answer is simple. I’ve traveled the world—the Amazon, the Serengeti, the Alps —…

Glen of my body’s feeding: crested breast of loveliest wheat, glen of the thrusting long-horned cattle, firm among the trysting bees. Wild with cuckoo, thrush, and blackbird, and the frisky hind below the oak thick ridge. Green roof that covered a thousand foxes, glen of wild garlic and watercress, and scarlet-berried rowan. And badgers, delirious with sleep, heaped fat in dens next to their burrowed young. Glen sentried with blue-eyed hawks, greenwood laced with sloe, apple, blackberry, tight-crammed between the ridge and pointed peaks. My glen of the star-tangled yews, where hares would lope in the easy dew. To remember is a ringing pain of brightness.…

NONFICTION WINNER Sightlines A Conversation with the Natural World Kathleen Jamie (The Experiment) FINALISTS The Urban Bestiary Encountering the Everyday Wild Lyanda Lynn Haupt (Little, Brown and Company) Braiding Sweetgrass Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants (Milkweed Editions) Countdown Our Last, Best Hope for a Future on Earth? Alan Weisman (Little, Brown and Company) FICTION WINNER MaddAddam A Novel Margaret Atwood (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday) FINALISTS All the Land to Hold Us A Novel Rick Bass (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) The Last Animal Stories Abby Geni (Counterpoint Press) Archipelago A Novel Monique Roffey (Penguin Books) The Orion Book Award recognizes books that amplify Orion’s mission, represent excellence in writing, and will be eBnjoyed by Orion readers. New in 2014, the award now includes categories for fiction and nonfiction. Go…

Gar Alperovitz is the Lionel R. Bauman Professor of Political Economy at the University of Maryland and cofounder of the Democracy Collaborative. Stephanie Anderson is a painter and illustrator. Since graduating from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1999, she has illustrated three books for children, all published by Simon & Schuster. Wendell Berry’s most recent book is This Day: Collected and New Sabbath Poems 1979–2013. The text that appears in this issue of Orion is adapted from the essay “Conservationist and Agrarian,” from Citizenship Papers, published by Counterpoint Press and used by permission. Peter Brewitt is a PhD student at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he’s researching ways people restore and remake their environments. His online column, Concrete Progress, is part of Orion’s Reimagining Infrastructure project.…

1. While the lenders and realtors and brokers circulate their dreary forms, while your only claim to the house is wonder, get the seller to let you till and plant before the closing date. All those buds and shoots will spell welcome in the green language of the garden. 2. Get to know your neighbors. Learn their names, even if you have to look them up: the snowberry brushing against the backside of the outbuilding; a purple finch flitting its shadow across the creek where brook trout scatter; a bushy-tailed woodrat hunched in a corner of the garden shed; stink bugs crammed in every conceivable crevice around every door and window. 3. You won’t like some of your neighbors. That’s natural. Mutual, even. Learn all you can about them, then…

SOMETIMES travel is mandated, sometimes it is endured, but often it is undertaken for the sheer pleasure of seeing new places or visiting old friends. Sometimes we travel on foot, sometimes by plane, sometimes all it takes is a book or a good imagination to carry us away. What does travel mean, and how does it shape us over the course of a day or a lifetime? Recognizing that each of us, by virtue of our humanness, is influenced to some degree by the steady tug of wanderlust, the editors of Orion set out in search of writing that breathes new meaning into the idea of the journey. In the stories that follow, you can visit several exotic and invigorating destinations without ever leaving home. No need to pack any…

PEOPLE HAVE TRIED to control traffic and speeding since the invention of the car—maybe since the domestication of the horse. And for good reason: research has shown that when America got a nationwide fifty-five-mile-per-hour speed limit in 1974, driving fatality rates plummeted, and when it was lifted in 1987, deaths increased. The good news is, in more and more places, art is coming to the rescue. Over the past decade, communities across the nation have taken to beautifying their roads and intersections with hand-painted murals, slowing drivers as they go. Murals like these come at minimal cost—just buy some street-grade paint, get whatever permits your city requires, and figure out how to reroute traffic for a few hours. As people motor through the neighborhood, murals catch the eye, situate the…

OH, THE PLACES YOU’VE BEEN This double issue of Orion includes Journeys, a special section featuring travel tales from far and near, as well as glimpses of the places in between. What was your most surprising journey? Tell us, and read stories of voyages undertaken by your fellow Orion readers, at www.orionmagazine.org/journeys. TO EAT WITH GRACE From apricots and acorn bread to foraging and farming, this new anthology brings together the best writing about food from the Orion archive. Contributors include Gary Paul Nabhan, Barbara Kingsolver, Maxine Kumin, and others. Find out more and order your copy at www.orionmagazine.org/books. PHYSICAL AND EPHEMERAL What could the phrases “Dog-ear,” “Concrete Progress,” and “The Aerial Classroom” possibly have in common? They’re all recurring categories on the Orion blog, which is our way of…

I’m still deep into reading the January/February 2014 issue of Orion, and I’m enjoying the new department, Lay of the Land. I read all the reports with care, but was especially moved by Sandra Steingraber’s “The Talk-Around.” Good grief, how skillfully she tells us of her husband’s serious strokes. I’ve always respected her writing and her ethics, and I know somehow she will cope. But my heart goes out to her and her husband. Please keep us informed. BARRIE RYANTucson, Arizona I enjoyed Anthony Doerr’s scientifically minded approach to demonstrating our oneness with nature (“The New You,” January/February 2014), and I would tend to agree that the boundary between the human and nonhuman is less clear than we believe. But, that said, I also think science would support the view…

I’m living in a warm place now, whereyou can purchase fresh blueberries allyear long. Labor free. From variouscountries in South America. They’reas sweet as any, and compared with theberries I used to pick in the fieldsoutside Provincetown, they’reenormous. But berries are berries. Theydon’t speak any language I can’tunderstand. Neither do I find ticks orsmall spiders crawling among them. So,generally speaking, I’m very satisfied. There are limits, however. What theydon’t have is the field. The field theybelonged to and through the years Ibegan to feel I belonged to. Well,there’s life, and then there’s later.Maybe it’s myself that I miss. Thefield, and the sparrow singing at theedge of the woods. And the doe that onemorning came upon me unaware, alltense and gorgeous. She stamped her hoofas you would to any intruder. Then…

WE ARE FOUR CITIZEN EMPLOYEES of the Chickasaw Nation driving from Oklahoma to the Wickliffe Mounds to be present at the return of our ancestral bones to the earth. This repatriation of Chickasaw bodies will take place in what has been called the “Vacant Quarter,” in the far west corner of Kentucky. In truth, this environment has never been one of absences. Since as far back as Mississippian times, many inhabitants have lived at this junction of rivers, but the people and the mounds they built have been largely unremembered in the constant tumble of history. Using the words of our elder writer Meridel LeSueur, we are here in this mound village region to “remember the dismembered,” to tend to the dismembered bones of our ancestors and the return of…

DOUGLAS HAYNES has been shuttling between Wisconsin and Nicaragua since 2008, writing a book about two families who moved from the countryside to Managua and helped reinvent one of the world’s most disaster-prone cities. He teaches writing at the University of Wisconsin at Oshkosh. ALASTAIR BONNETT is a professor of social geography at Newcastle University. His article in this issue of Orion is adapted from Unruly Places: Lost Spaces, Secret Cities, and Other Inscrutable Geographies, forthcoming from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in July and used by permission. BK LOREN is the author of the award-winning novel, Theft, and an essay collection, Animal, Mineral, Radical. She grew up in an era that felt weightless: the late ’60s and early ’70s. Though she’s never been in a hot air balloon, her story in…

Since the collapse of one of the last dynasties of the common era and the subsequent end of the era itself, historians have searched for descendants of the Mongerji family, as well as descendants of the scribes who, under their employ, collected samplings of flora and fauna from around the world. The only evidence discovered thus far are the letters that follow. They are from Mr. Mongerji, his wife, Kavita, and two of the three Mongerji children, all addressed to a Mr. Chappalwala, thought to have been the last of the Mongerjis’ scribes. Archivists continue to seek Mr. Chappalwala’s side of the correspondence. September 7, —18 Young Mr. Chappalwala, This once, I wish my family’s long correspondence with yours were more of a face-to-face transaction. Your letter telling of old…