Table of contents for March / April 2010 in Orion

ONCE UPON A TIME there was a genre called nature writing. It was thoughtful and earnest, poetic and deep. It was built on a tradition — a transcendental, antisocial, largely pastoral tradition. It grew and flourished to the point where it even earned its own little section in the bookstore, where everyone who wanted to read it knew where to find it… and those who were looking more broadly for something good to read wouldn’t likely stumble over it again. There it sat, isolated from those works more generally known as literature. Writers began to fear being placed there. Over time, even those who originally embraced it would come to reconsider the value of the box. Orion has periodically suffered a similar fate, having been grouped with what are known…

In December we learned that Orion will be awarded a $15,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts as part of the 2010 Access to Artistic Excellence program. The funding from the NEA will support the publication of work by writers who are not necessarily associated with environmental writing but who can bring a new layer of depth and imagination to the subject. Orion editors gathered in mid-November at the Blue Mountain Center in New York’s Adirondack Mountains with fifteen young writers. The conference was titled “Forget Nature Writing: Let’s Talk about What Comes Next.” Thanks to Blue Mountain Center for its generous support of the event. Picture editor Jason Houston and art consultant Taj Forer traveled to Lishui, China, in November, as curators for the 13th Lishui International…

ANOTHER 120 SPECIES went extinct today; they were my kin. I am not going to sit back and wait for every last piece of this living world to be dismembered. I’m going to fight like hell for those kin who remain — and I want everyone who cares to join me. Many are. But many are not. Some of those who are not are those who, for whatever reason, really don’t care. I worry about them. But I worry more about those who do care but have chosen not to fight. A fairly large subset of those who care but have chosen not to fight assert that lifestyle choice is the only possible response to the murder of the planet. They all carry the same essential message — and often…

THE BEAR DID NOT know he was capable of love. This would come later. Now he only knew hunger from the bait oozing down his chops — and fear from his trap-ruined paw and the sound of dogs baying behind him in close pursuit. Earlier, a five-gallon bucket of lard-and-honey mash had led him to a clearing. He had knocked it over and slurped at the pooling discharge of it and groaned with pleasure soon interrupted by the pain of a steel-fanged trap arcing up out of the crab grass to swallow his front left paw. For an hour he yanked at the trap and chewed at the chain that bolted it to the ground. Whimpering, bleeding, he circled the trap’s anchor, dragging the clattering chain, trying to find some…

BY JOHN D’AGATA W. W. Norton & Company, 2010. $23.95, 240 pages. JOHN D’AGATA has written a book about one of the nation’s most nagging environmental concerns, but he does not come at his topic as an eco-scribe — and his style is both refreshing and effective, the kind we would expect from one of America’s best contemporary essayists. About a Mountain is an excellent literary work, but it is also a relentless and thorough examination of our government’s dodgy plan to store high-level nuclear waste inside Yucca Mountain, a desert-island mountain range just outside the city of Las Vegas, Nevada. There’s a cultural narrative here too, and it’s tempting to mistake the biting, nearly gleeful irony of D’Agata’s prose for an outright mockery of modern American life. But there…

BY PAOLO BACIGALUPI Night Shade Books, 2009. $24.95, 361 pages. READERS OF NATURE WRITING may not be aware of the deep green streak that runs through much science fiction, so Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl might be missed. It shouldn’t be. Bacigalupi has plenty of street cred in the science-fiction world, but those coming to his work for the first time (myself included) may be more impressed with his literary chops, which are considerable. The Windup Girl is set in the not-too-distant future of Bangkok, following the Contraction, when globalization — the Expansion — fell apart in a nightmare of war, genetic engineering tragedies, and the end of the oil-based economy. Not that life in the Contraction is much better. Genetically engineered crops, and their consequent diseases, are the norm.…

The Orion Book Award is conferred annually to an outstanding book that is ecological in context and has its foundation in the human relationship with the natural world. The winner will be announced at the beginning of April. Only books published in 2009 are eligible for the 2010 award. Winner, 2009: Trespass: Living at the Edge of the Promised Land By Amy Irvine (North Point Press) Winner, 2008: The Zookeeper’s Wife: A War Story By Diane Ackerman (W.W. Norton) Winner, 2007: Wild: An Elemental Journey By Jay Griffiths (Jeremy P. Tarcher) Go to orionmagazine.org/oba to learn more.…

Jason Anthony’s Antarctic essays have appeared in VQR and Best American Travel Writing 2007. He is currently writing a book on the history of Antarctic cuisine. David Paul Bayles is a landscape photographer living in Oregon. His book Urban Forest was selected by the Christian Science Monitor as one of the top seven photography books of 2003. Anthony Doerr lives in Boise, Idaho. He is the recipient of the Rome Prize, the Discover Prize, and three O. Henry Awards. His fourth book, a collection of stories titled Memory Wall, will be published by Scribner this July. Brian Doyle is editor of Portland Magazine at the University of Portland and author of, most recently, Thirsty for the Joy. Carolyn Drake is a documentary photographer based in Istanbul. She was recognized as…

Tracking Trash I hate throwing things away, but my downstairs neighbors clearly love it. Every week, they park a pile of detritus at the base of our streetlamp, an offering to New York’s Strongest: huge plastic toys, toilet seats, unfashionable lamps, plywood bookshelves. The garbagemen dutifully feed these once-desired, now unloved objects into the maw of their clanking machine, and my neighbors gleefully appear with new boxes from Bed Bath & Beyond. What would it take, one wonders, to jolt them from their unthinking cycle of consumption and waste? MIT’s SENSEable City Laboratory thinks technology might just do it. In particular, the deployment of mobile technologies: sensors and tags that can offer us more data about the world we inhabit. Trash/Track, the lab’s project premiering recently in Seattle and New…

Vagrant angel of convalescence, our sedulousmessmaking shames the cattails. (Homemade hula skirts, you said, & upside-downed them around my waist.Downy hems, I said, & fluffed the pods.) I stockpile my mind with purpling knives of irises, rising like the cow pondwe wade into. Pondwater tenses then releases our radiant skirts. I wing my elbows for balance & you, yourwings, bidding the helloing bullfrogs to plunk in. It sounds like endings when the surface takes them.Scummed knuckles & a stick, I jostle duckweed & algae into a pea-green orbit. A slimy cosmos, you say, pearlingmy hair with frog eggs. To grace me, I say, scanning the bank for something to cut.…

Your two cats squat, heraldic sphinxes, with suchdesert indifference, such “who-the-hell-are-you?” calm,they rise and stride away leisurely from your touch,waiting for you only. To be cradled in one arm,belly turned upward to be stroked by a brushtugging burrs from their fur, eyes slittedin ecstasy. The January sun spreads its balmon earth’s upturned belly, shadows that have always fittedtheir shapes, re-fit them. Breakers spread welcome.Accept it. Watch how spray will burstlike a cat scrambling up the side of a wall,gripping, sliding, surrendering; how, at firstits claws hook then slip with a quickening fallto the lace-rocked foam. That is the heart, coming home,trying to fasten on everything it moved from,how salted things only increase its thirst.…

A Novel BY SONNY BREWER MacAdam/Cage, 2009. $23, 224 pages. I DIDN’T MIND much when Cormac Mc-Carthy killed o= his cowboy heroes, though I loved them all dearly. I did not even mind when he assassinated nine-tenths of the human race in post-apocalyptic mayhem, as I love the general population somewhat less than cowboys. But when I read the back cover blurb of Sonny Brewer’s The Widow and the Tree about the murder of a fivehundred-year-old Alabama live oak, I trembled as I thumbed the first page. And I had good reason to. Like all serious literature, The Widow and the Tree is a marvelous and confusing little book. The Ghosthead Oak, with a cancerous gall like a twisted human face, has a name, while the human characters do not,…

A Mongolian Winter’s Tale BY MATTHEW DAVIS St. Martin’s Press, 2010. $26.99, 320 pages. I ONCE HEARD the noted memoirist Kim Barnes claim that for a life to be dramatically whole, it must contain an experience one can look back on and say, That is where my life changed. There was before. There is after. And always there is that. For women, she continued, this experience was and often still is pregnancy, birth, and motherhood — or maybe the refusal of or thwarted desire for pregnancy, birth, and motherhood. But men — and here she looked at us twentysomething, longhaired, too-sensitive-by-half, creative-nonfiction writers dotting the audience — are dramatically adrift. We no longer have war, that ancient measure. Men coming of age in the last twenty or so years, she…

Erasmus Darwin’s grandson, who learned taxidermy from a man who had been a slave in South America, who once collected beetles as a competitive sport, who deftly evaded becoming a parson by going to sea, and who, when trying to decide if he should ask his cousin to marry him, wrote that one advantage to marriage was that a wife would be a better companion in old age “than a dog, anyhow,” once cleared a small plot of land in his orchard and then carefully tracked the germination and growth of everything that landed and sprouted there. Despite Darwin’s results — more than half the wild seedlings vanished as soon as they emerged, Darwin blaming slugs for the devastation — this seemed like an excellent lazy natural history project for…

Scott Russell Sanders’s essay “Mind in the Forest” (November/December 2009) turns on a weave of thinking and metaphor: Crowd of pebbles, fungi like balconies, a muscular current — these and other metaphors not only help us cross the bridge of Lookout Creek, they also reveal that thinking of this kind has its roots in our experience of the earth as a living, phenomenal being, a correlative of our symbolic under-standing, including language. I too, though rarely, have experienced in meditation contact with what I’d call a larger mind, if only by emptying my own smaller mind of clutter. Maybe meditation will one day make it possible to experience forms of intelligence other than our own. I’ve worked on lichens at times, though they’re stubborn and crusty and taste like moldy…

The flyer read: “LOST, Ring Tailed Lehmur, Large Reward,” followed by a federal license number, and three phone numbers. Never mind the misspelling. In the photograph, the lemur sat upright like a child, a blue harness around its chest, its arms outstretched as if ready for a hug. It was the spring of 2005, and I had just moved to Lubbock, Texas. Later, I heard that the owner of Mattress Sale on 34th Street kept a pet black bear. When I called and spoke with an associate, he confided that no, they don’t own them, those five black bears. They just know the people who do. “Listen,” he said. “We use them mostly for advertising purposes. We use real horses. Real bears. And real Chihuahuas. Not those fake ones.” But…

MAY I SAY — somewhat defensively — that I haven’t cooked red meat in many years? That I haven’t visited a McDonald’s since college? That if you asked me how I like my steak, I’d say I don’t really remember? I’m not a moral abstainer — I’ll eat meat when poor people in distant places offer it to me, especially when they’re proud to do so and I’d be an ass to say no. But in everyday life, for a series of reasons that began with the dietary scruples of the woman I chose to marry, hamburgers just don’t come into play. I begin this way because I plan to wade into one of the most impassioned fracases now underway on the planet — to meat or not to meat…

WHENEVER I’M OUTDOORS for more than ten minutes I start picking up rocks. In Patagonia, in Phoenix, in a Home Depot parking lot — my gaze is invariably sucked downward into the gravel. I weigh the merits of pebbles by some fickle and mutable aesthetic and either pitch them back or pocket them and stack them among hundreds of their brethren on the counter behind our kitchen sink like fortifications against an army of tiny invaders. Pebbles from Canada, pebbles from Cleveland, pebbles from carriageways in Caledonia. Maybe the echoes of miners reverberate in my genes; maybe I share a That’s-Pretty-and-I-Want-It covetousness with thieves and princesses and bowerbirds. Maybe I hope someday I’ll finally overcome the fundamental truth of pebbles and find one that looks prettier dry than wet. Or…

There were feathers and the light that passed throughfeathers. There were birds that made the feathers and the sun thatmade the light. The feathers of the birds made the air soft, softerthan the quiet in a cocoon waiting for wings,stiller than the stare of a hooded falcon.But no falcons in this green made by the passage of parents.No, not parents, parrots flying through slow sleepcasting green rays to light the long dream.If skin, dew would have drenched it, but dusthung in space like the stoppage oftime itself, which, after dancing with parrots,had said, Thank you. I’ll rest now.It’s not too late to say the parrot light was thickenough to part with a hand, and the feathers softeningthe path, fallen after so much touching of cheeks,were red, hibiscus red split by…

NATURE IS BEAUTIFUL, complex, eternal. And yet it is always changing. Why does it take all the forms it does — by necessity, randomness, or invention? The possibility that all its myriad shapes and species might have evolved over millions of years had been in the air for a few centuries before Charles Darwin came up with a picture of how this change could have come about. How did he do it? Darwin paid close attention to the details of the natural world through firsthand experience and deep appreciation. He loved nature so much that he devoted his entire life to the description and articulation of its beauty, preferring the “bright tints of nature” to “the dingy high-art colors.” Indeed, it was a love of beauty before all sense of…

The Secret Legacy of Coal in the Heartland BY JEFF BIGGERS Nation Books, 2010. $26.95, 336 pages. THE ONLY SAFE PLACE for coal is in the ground. Despite the industry’s “clean coal” mantra, repeated now for more than a century, there is no way of mining coal, shipping it, burning it, or storing the leftover ash without harming people, land, waters, and atmosphere. As a writer and radio correspondent who has worked in Appalachia, Je= Biggers knows well the public history of our ruinous fling with coal. That history became personal for him when a strip mine tore up the land in southern Illinois where his ancestors had lived for two hundred years. On returning to the once-verdant site of the family homestead in the Eagle Creek Valley, he found…

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