Table of contents for September / October 2014 in Orion

AT A GATHERING of writers hosted by Orion in the late 1990s, I was seated next to Ann Zwinger, author of a number of unforgettable books of nature writing, including Beyond the Aspen Grove and Run, River, Run. In a conversation that broke out among the attendees, writer after writer implored each other to find ways to do more in their books and essays than just glorify nature, and to devote more of their writing toward nature’s defense. Ann sat quietly and listened, and at some point she leaned over to me and whispered, “I worry that if we stop glorifying nature we’ll soon forget what we’re defending.” It’s a straw-man argument, because obviously we can glorify nature and work to protect it at the same time. But I think…

In June, the inaugural Bread Loaf Orion Writers’ Conference took place in the hills near Middlebury, Vermont. Sixty students attended to work on fiction, nonfiction, and poetry projects. One attendee wrote this on her blog following the conference: “I feel like a much better writer, but also a better friend, thinker, human being, and inhabitant of the planet.” The application period for the 2015 conference opens November 1. Many thanks to all of you who donated to the Summer Reading campaign. Reading is not, in fact, just for summertime, and any time of year you can find all the books Orion has published at www.orionmagazine.org/books. We’re rebuilding the Orion website, and we’re excited to share it with you. Go to www.orionmagazine.org around the first of October and tell us what…

THE DEEPER YOU FLY into Alaska, the smaller the planes get. Our flight into the Arctic said NANOOKS on the prop-engine cowling. A Yupik family had checked coolers full of meat at the gate instead of luggage. The meat was over the allowed weight limit, but the dad of the group wasn’t about to pay a sixty-dollar fee. He said, “It’s okay. I called the government.” The woman at the ticket desk asked if he had paperwork. “Call the government,” he said. “They know all about my meat.” A woman in his party who was maybe five feet tall wore a hoodie that said: ONE TOUGH ALASKA CHICK. She weighed 176 pounds. I knew this because it was the kind of flight where they check your weight and nobody lies,…

IF THE INTERNET were a landscape, what kind of landscape would it be? Tim O’Reilly, a thought leader in the technology industry, thinks of the internet as an ocean because “the sea is a sustaining medium, most of which is invisible to us and which, like our atmosphere, we largely take for granted. But elements of it occasionally swim within our range of vision.” Virtual reality pioneer Brenda Laurel would no doubt agree. A keen scuba diver, she imagines the landscape of cyberspace to be as fluid and indeterminate as the Pacific kelp forests she regularly explores. As for me, I like to imagine the internet as a giant estuary between the physicality of the shore and the wide expanse of the virtual, a constantly refreshing habitat of varying depths…

Ah! And red; and they have peach fuzz, ah!They are full of juice and the skin is soft.They are full of the color of my villageAnd of fair weather, summer dew, peace. Slid out of me like stones,like peonies and roses,pricked like a holly bush,lulled me with the hymns of weevils.Loud like the lion that kills.Flew out of me like cheetahs,took hold of me like lice, like love.Ripped me open like a cougar.Rose up at me like a cream-bellied cobra.Ah! and red; and they have peach fuzz, ah! Clattering and weeping. Diaperingand digging. Exuberant singing,firecats leaping. Peaches, morepeaches! Crates of velvety freestones.In a basket, at breakfast, with a wasp.Hail, pale stranger, come downfrom the Kunlun Shan Mountains.Beware of leaf curl, brown rot, bewarethe speckled emperor, the catapult moth.They are full…

LIKE MANY A WORLD TRAVELER, the apple has thrived in foreign lands through a knack for creative self-invention. From its roots in the mountains of Kazakhstan, it has ingratiated itself to people at each stop on its journey by constantly trying out new identities until it became indispensible to each place. Its success in this regard is due to one simple trick of biology: the apple does not come true from seed. Take a Granny Smith apple, plant its seed, and the tree that grows will not produce Granny Smiths. It will produce a variety of apple the world has never seen, because every apple seed is a genetically unique individual. (If, on the other hand, you want more Granny Smiths, you need to take a cutting from the Granny…

Counterpoint, 2014. $30, 288 pages. WHEN SHOULD YOU FIGHT and when should you be still? What is the correct balance between action and contemplation, between the local and global, between a righteous rage and a morning of work in the fields? In April 1978, Wendell Berry asked these questions of Gary Snyder in a letter, one of a series they had been writing to each other since the early 1970s. “I see with considerable sorrow,” Berry wrote, “that I am not going to get done fighting and live at peace in anything like the simple way I once thought I would. So how to keep from becoming evil? Maybe the answer is to fight always for what you particularly love, not for abstractions and not against anything: don’t fight against…

The MIT Press, 2014. $27.95, 236 pages. “UNIVERSITY LEADERSHIP is our last best hope for addressing the global climate challenge, and campus sustainability initiatives are the foundation of that leadership,” writes Mitchell Thomashow in The Nine Elements of a Sustainable Campus. After serving as president of Maine’s Unity College, successfully transforming the campus and curriculum by implementing initiatives ranging from a net-zero energy president’s residence to campus “eco-finance,” Thomashow would know. His experiences at Unity and as a consultant to college presidents across North America since then are the basis for this excellent book. Thomashow’s goal here is to present a “philosophical and practical vision” for campus transformation in nine areas: energy, food, materials, governance, investment, wellness, curriculum, interpretation, and aesthetics. It is quite nearly a step-by-step manual for overhauling…

Perceval Press, 2013. $11.99, 35 pages. The paintings in Iranian artist Naeemeh Naeemaei’s new book, Dreams Before Extinction, blur the boundary between human and animal. Intimate and surreal, each portrait is devoted to an animal on the verge of extinction, and to the sense of grief and connectedness Naeemaei experiences in the face of its loss. The paintings reference scripture, ritual, folk tales, and children’s stories, placing them firmly in the context of Iranian culture. With bilingual, side-by-side text, including a preface by Kavous Seyed-Emami, director of the Persian Wildlife Heritage Foundation, this book shines a much-needed light on Muslim environmental activism and art, while making an earnest plea to pay attention to the plight of these animals.…

Clare Barboza is a documentary food photographer living in Seattle. Kirk Crippens’s portfolio Foreclosure, USA was recently collected by the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, and can be seen in its exhibition State of the Art: Discovering American Art Now from September 2014 through January 2015. Alison Hawthorne Deming’s essay in this issue will appear in her new book of nonfiction, Zoologies: On Animals and the Human Spirit, out this fall from Milkweed Editions. Brian Doyle edits Portland Magazine and is the author, most recently, of The Plover. Terry Falke’s book of contemporary landscapes, Observations in an Occupied Wilderness, was published in 2006. Rowan Jacobsen’s piece in this issue is excerpted from Apples of Uncommon Character: 123 Heirlooms, Modern Classics, and Little-Known Wonders, forthcoming from Bloomsbury USA. Jourdan Imani…

1.If you shake hands with an evergreen tree and the branch bites you, that’s a spruce. 2.Insects rule the world, but they don’t talk about it. 3. The reason the ocean is salty is because all the animals have been peeing right in it since before there was even any time. 4. One of our grandmothers is dead, and now she is growing flowers. 5. Dad says all beings are holy in the same proportions, except the Los Angeles Lakers, who are demonic. 6. The best way to eat a worm is to have another kid do it. 7.A shrew is like a mouse with a bad temper. 8. Dad says every time you go for a walk in the woods you ought to get credit for a full day…

DEXTER IS HAVING TROUBLE with his shoulder. He lies on a table, his belly placed on a clean white towel, while Claire McManus, a specialist working with Dexter’s primary care-giver, Dr. Charlie Innis, palpates his limbs, pressing her fingers gently along his skin to locate the bones and muscles underneath. The lights in the room are turned down to relax the patient, and McManus pulls a small needle, the width of a human hair, from its sterile package. Carefully, she taps one into Dexter. A dozen more will be placed into his head and limbs. “Unfortunately, we can’t get to his back,” McManus says. Dexter’s shell makes that impossible. Claire McManus is an acupuncturist, and today she is working at the New England Aquarium’s rescue and rehabilitation center, where Dr.…

the origin point of a meteor shower.Peaches redden: branchesare propped with juniper posts and a shovel; steam risesfrom a caldera; steppingthrough a lava tube, we emerge into a rain forest dottedwith wild ginger; desirebranches like mycelium. Carrying a bolete in a basket,we forage under spruce and firin cool alpine air; a plume rises where lava reachesthe ocean. Who said, out of nothing,nothing can come? We do not lie in a meadow to view the Perseidsbut discover, behind a motel,a vineyard, and gather wherever we go.…

ON A DARK AND MOONLESS night of storms, Hans Kruuk observed a pack of spotted hyenas engaging in a predatory orgy of killing. The Dutch biologist had spent three and a half years living with Serengeti hyenas, documenting their complex matriarchal clan structure and cooperative hunting strategies, and keeping a full-grown hyena named Solomon as a house pet. Hyenas make a living by scavenging and hunting. Their large jaw muscles and bone-crushing premolars give them chewing ability stronger than a brown bear’s. They eat and digest parts of dead animals other predators leave for waste, including bones. Their gut is so effcient that their feces are white and powdery. Hyenas rival primates in intelligence and skill at cooperative hunting. In captivity, pairs of hyenas, given the challenge to pull two…

Counterpoint, 2013. $24, 304 pages. THERE ARE TWO themes that pervade Abby Geni’s new story collection, The Last Animal — loss and how humans connect to the natural world. Nature is a mysterious force applying tension that in some stories is a backdrop, in other stories, a character. Geni’s characters often see nature as impenetrable. Delilah, the main character of the title story, “The Last Animal,” thinks, “Animals had never been her forte…. It had something to do with the unpredictability, the unfamiliarity. These creatures existed on another plane. Their movements were disconcerting, their minds impenetrable. You could stare all day into their dark eyes and never know what they were thinking.” And while the stories themselves are full of animals — ostriches, dogs, octopuses, sea turtles, stingrays, manatees, beetles,…

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013. $25, 336 pages. AFTER THREE DAYS HIKING in the Chisos Mountains, driving up from the Big Bend country of West Texas, through the scrublands and creosote hills of the Chihuahuan Desert, something went wrong with my eyes. The light, the glaring gradations of dun and ochre, and the blown and blowing dust and sand — I blinked and blinked, and for a moment I could see again, though soon a searing crescent crashed across my vision and the bright pain returned. I pulled over, stumbled out. While I reclined in the passenger seat with a wet cloth over my face, my wife drove us the rest of the way. We camped that night north of the Guadalupe Mountains, mountains I hadn’t even seen on the way…

BRIGHT, high-running clouds, the dry taste of grass and August blackberries — you’re on your way back from the park when you see a hand-lettered sign for a farmers’ market. It’s nearly the kids’ nap time, your wife’s not sure what in the world you’re doing, but you crank the wheel anyway and drive on down the old two-lane through bands of tree shadow, turn where the cardboard arrow tells you to turn, and pull to a dusty stop by the old whitewashed Grange Hall. Your son and daughter, at four and two, are just old enough to wonder, ceaselessly, why. You don’t have an answer. You just haul them out of the car, and while your wife shakes her head and wanders one way, you take in each of…

The landscape restoration work described by Meera Subramanian in “The City and the Sea” (March/April 2014) is the most encouraging response to climate change I’ve heard. Whether or not a person “believes” in anthropogenic climate change, it makes great sense to begin to align human systems with natural systems. We can learn from the living earth how to arrange our economy and civilization in ways circular and dynamic — just like an ecosystem. And the more we understand the complex elegance of natural systems, the less we will crow over our own accomplishments. I hope that we follow the example of the work described by Subramanian and begin to temper our technical knowledge with the wisdom to follow nature’s lead. PATRICIA DEMARCO Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania Thanks to Sy Montgomery for a…

I WAS AWAKENED one morning by a not-sound. It was a sudden silence, as if someone had just gasped, and the breath taken had left a sharp non-noise in my ears. It was the sound of not-raining. After two months of deluge last winter, I could hear the quiet, breathing world, the unharried air. Needless to say, in that most exceptional period of rainfall Britain had known for 248 years, the moment of calm didn’t last. The clouds, swollen with rain, let fall again. My cat killed a bedraggled bluetit, whose feathers were too waterlogged to fly. The water saturated my house until the wood hissed and bubbled. The damp valleys of Wales became sodden swamps. Water seeped, leaked, and soaked everywhere across Britain, but the Somerset Levels were hit…

IN A FAMOUS LETTER advocating for the preservation of wilderness, Wallace Stegner called it “the geography of hope.” Stegner was among a group of conservationists who spent years making a case for setting such land aside. In 1964, four years after he wrote those words, the Wilderness Act was passed by Congress. The idea was to create a higher level of protection than other public land designations provided, setting aside relatively untouched tracts so that natural processes could unfold without human interference. Today, there are 758 wilderness areas in the United States and Puerto Rico, many of which are situated inside or alongside national parks and national forests. The Wilderness Act specifies that these are places where “man himself is a visitor who does not remain.” In wilderness, we practice…

I SAW SEVERAL BISON the other morning as I followed the usual left and right turns that take me to the rural outskirts of Enumclaw, a town forty-five minutes from my house in Seattle. The bison were actually boulders or bushes or clumps of hay that had wandered away from the stack. But I saw them as clearly as I did on mornings when I walked to my job along the lake in Yellowstone, following the gravel paths that passed dangerously close to the resting mammoths. Always, now, since leaving Yellowstone, I see shadows of wilderness wherever I go. It is the same for my friend on the other side of the continent who, decades later, still sees the Beartooth Mountains in the jagged clouds above Philadelphia’s streets. It is…

The Gates of the Arctic are open. We arrived by wings. An Otter with wings delivered us here — It was here, a yellow-billed loon called from the lake. It was here, a circle of white wolves — five on the flanks of the mountain — appeared. It was here, an emissary of crowned caribou emerged from a fold in the land. We arrived just before the snows. The tundra was red, gold, and green. My presence was dark. I had just signed a restraining order against my brother, not because of him, but because of me. I was afraid for both of us. My heart had become a violence, a ticking time box that forgets nothing and holds everything red. The tundra was red and gold with blueberries. I…

Milkweed Editions, 2014. $16, 96 pages. PAW-PRINTS dotting the snow, rain squiggling down a window, tunnels raised up through the lawn — do designs like these tempt you to read them? As if, “written” by the fox, cloud, and vole respectively, each conveyed a necessary message? Those predisposed to scan the natural world for signatures and missives, as if it were all one gigantic three-dimensional book, may also enjoy Jody Gladding’s third full-length poetry collection, Translations from Bark Beetle. It’s easy to see how Gladding, who translates French novels such as Jean Giono’s The Serpent of Stars and Pierre Michon’s Small Lives into English, might be inspired to attend to lesser-known foreign literature, yet in this case, she’s reached beyond human language entirely to render testimony from a species rarely…

Bloomsbury, 2013. $28, 268 pages. BRIAN FAGAN’S The Attacking Ocean gives us a fifteen-thousand-year perspective on rising sea levels, storm surges, and the other wet and salty threats that have killed millions of people throughout recorded history. In a comprehensive though sometimes geologically paced narrative, Fagan makes clear that while past sea level rises, including an astounding seven hundred feet in the last ten thousand years, can be attributed to the natural variability of climate, ice ages, tectonic shifts, and other forces, the present period of rapid sea level rise is directly linked to human production of greenhouse gasses. Plus, fifteen thousand years ago when fewer than 5 million humans lived on the planet, it was no big deal, comparatively, to pick up camp and move out of the way…

THE WILDERNESS ACT AT 50 This issue of Orion includes The Future of Wilderness, a special section exploring what wilderness means today, and what the future may hold for both the idea and the reality of wilderness. You can find out about the October conference commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the Act at www.orionmagazine.org/wilderness. ORION IN BOOKS If you’d like to read more from Orion, be sure to check out the Orion Readers book series. These short themed anthologies on subjects like food, animals, activism, and education appeal to individuals as well as reading groups and classrooms. Go to www.orionmagazine.org/books to see them all. ORION AT BREAD LOAF The second annual Bread Loaf Orion Environmental Writers’ conference will be held June 1–7, 2015 at the historic Bread Loaf Campus in…