Orion Autumn 2018

In the old days, like fifteen years ago, learning the whereabouts of rare birds was a different business than it is today. You’d hear about a rare bird through word of mouth, or you’d call a phone number that — through a recorded message — would give an update on the rare birds that had been found in your area, usually accompanied by some hard-to-follow directions. The internet changed all that. Now you just go online to read about all the birds — rare and common alike — that have been seen by other people. You can even download a map that will steer you right to the pond or tree or bush in which a certain bird was seen. And so it came to pass that, on a late…

Urvashi Bahugna’s debut poetry collection, Terrarium, won the 2017 Emerging Poets Prize and was published by The (Great) Indian Poetry Collective. Megan Mayhew Bergman is the author of two story collections and a forthcoming novel. She was a fellow at the American Library in Paris in 2016. Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello is the author of Hour of the Ox, winner of the 2015 AWP Donald Hall Prize for Poetry. Linda Connor’s monograph Odyssey spans three decades of her globetrotting adventures as an artist. Susan Elbe is the author of The Map of What Happened. She passed away in 2017 in Madison, Wisconsin. Buff Elting is a painter inspired by the natural world. Her work was featured in Landscapes of Colorado. Martin Jude Farawell’s poetry collection, Excitable Earth, will be published in…

FROM OUR READERS IN “WILD AND DOMESTIC” (Summer 2018), Wendell Berry hones the point that he has been making for decades now and that politicians seem unable to understand. As the United Nations’ recent climate change report notes, we have twelve years to implement what we have known we must do for the past fifty, during which time we have pretended that we can have our cake and eat it too. It boils down to this axiom: “Teach him he must deny himself.” Perhaps as we near a hard wall, we will start listening to the cultural voices that Berry has preserved for us, like a good farmer preserving the essential seeds for posterity. — Loys Maingon WENDELL BERRY’s redefining of “Wild and Domestic” is both thought- and action-provoking. In…

AT FIRST GLANCE, Spokane, Washington, population 200,000, strikes one as the embodiment of a gritty industrial city past its prime. Hard up against the Idaho border, Spokane’s glory came in 1974, when it hosted the World’s Fair. Building the site for Expo 74 required a massive makeover of the city core, one that saw its rail yards, parking lots, and warehouses turned into a charming waterfront park bisected by the Spokane River. But as a result, the city was confronted with mounds of concrete that had been ripped up from the industrial downtown to create the park. About two miles from the Expo site runs a long, steep bluff, the east side of a wide valley gouged out by ice age floods twelve thousand years ago. According to local lore,…

WHEN I FIND Warren Senders on the side of a Boston suburbs highway, he is ready to hand me a sign that reads, environmental justice is social justice. It’s only 7:30 on a late September morning, but the day is already steamy. This makes his own sign, which leans against a guardrail and proclaims, climate change is real, seem especially appropriate. As I put down my things and accept the square of cardboard, Senders warns me away from a patch of poison ivy. He knows the spot well — at last count, he’s been out here every weekday morning for 154 weeks. Senders spent years searching for a meaningful way to protest climate change. Eventually, he came to the idea of a daily practice. He’s a musician who teaches private…

ZANE MOORE wobbles on tiptoes, trying to get high enough to look through the scope of his laser rangefinder. We’re standing on the side of a hill in a grove of coast redwoods, Sequoia sempervirens. Moore is trying to get his laser to light on the topmost branch of two of these redwoods, which he thinks may be unusually tall. Somewhere far below, near the base of the trees, his dad, Steve, stands holding a prism. Zane will shoot first the distance to the tip of the trees, then the distance to the prism. From those measurements, he can calculate the triangle’s third side in order to estimate the height of the trees. But he’s having a hard time. There’s a pesky bay laurel tree in the way, and Moore,…