Table of contents for November / December 2012 in Orion

WITH THIS ISSUE OF Orion I will be stepping down as publisher and turning over to others the work I started thirty years ago. My hope from the beginning was for a publication that celebrated the wisdom and beauty of the natural world in the belief that humanity will respect and protect that which it comes to know and love — a publication in which both the literary and visual arts would communicate the conviction that humans are responsible for the world in which we live and that the individual comes to sense this responsibility as he or she develops a personal bond with nature. Since the inaugural issue, Orion has sought to explore how to achieve harmony between nature, which sustains and supports all life on earth, and our…

With this issue of Orion, M.G.H. Gilliam — known to most of us as Marion — steps down after thirty years of service to the magazine. With his wife, Olivia, and his colleagues at the Myrin Institute, Marion founded Orion in the belief that there was a need for a magazine about the environment that was grounded in reverence, beauty, and a broader exploration of the place of humans in the world. Marion has been at Orion’s center ever since, working to see that Orion evolved to keep up with changing times and expanded in ways that would support the people on the front lines of conservation and activism. Marion also conceived of or helped organize a number of other Orion initiatives — the Forgotten Language Tour, the John Hay…

In love with the body, especially whenit dances in love with its own dance as it toesand taps… flickers, creepers, chickadeesaround a tree trunk, a click beetle in a flippingsomersault, the soft-shoe swish and swayof the chee and feather grasses, the lissom uvas; in love with the melding of the body,especially when it languishes in the surfof its own sleep… the belly slump of a leopardstretched high on a branch, camouflaged,leaf and fur, the tight sleep of a tumblebug eggin its buried pod of dung, the man in a backyardhammock slowly rocking with the slowlyrolling sun through evening shadows; (so floats the sea otter on its back, bobbingwith the rocking sea, so bobs the gelatinousumbrella and stinging strings of the jellyfish,jelly and sting being the design and eventof the sea’s…

Some birds are people-watchers.The worms can hear us walking over them.The loaves and fishes multiplied the Christians. We were wrong about so many things.We thought the world was mute,or just disinterested, or dead. Yet the sunrise liked being looked atby sleepy cabdrivers. The billboard was unashamedof its live nude 24-hour girls. The night-wind rustledthrough the tops of cedar treesstanding all around a certain house where worried peoplelay in bed and listened.What were the names of those old Greek gods?And where did they go?Atlas — that’s the one who spent a long timeholding upwhat did not belong to him.…

MY DYSTOPIAN FUTURE would be rampant with ticks. Aggressive ticks. Not like the ones that cling to the top of slender grass stalks, waiting passively for your warm-blooded ankle to brush by. No, the ticks in my dystopian future would come searching for me — finding the tiny tears in the screen, that little sliver of space between the bottom of the door and the threshold, then up underneath the overhanging sheets and into my bed while I sleep. Yikes! Gives me the creeps. Ticks lurk in my dystopian future because they have become more and more omnipresent in southern New Hampshire in the past few years. My best friend had Lyme disease; neighbors have it; we even find ticks on us after gardening. They’ve crept into our landscape and…

BY GEORGE BLACK St. Martin’s Press, 2012. $35, 548 pages. GEORGE BLACK’S Empire of Shadows: The Epic Story of Yellowstone is an engaging and comprehensive history of Yellowstone, our first national park. But it is also a history of the American West. Another western historian, Bernard De-Voto, famously employed the technique of synecdoche, by which a single scene is made to represent a larger historical movement, the individual event standing in for the whole. Black’s book is a kind of grand synecdoche, the exploration and “conquest” of Yellowstone standing in for the battles for those various, ever-shifting, and much-romanticized lands we called the frontier. Black brings to life the violence, rapacity, and excitement of survival along the edge of the explored and the unexplored. He is particularly adept at balancing…

Jason Anthony is the author of a narrative and culinary history of Antarctica, Hoosh: Roast Penguin, Scurvy Day, and Other Stories of Antarctic Cuisine. He lives with his wife in Bristol, Maine. Madeleine Bair is a print and multimedia journalist focusing on human rights, culture, and globalization. She reported on urban farming in Dakar as a member of the Africa Reporting Project at the University of California’s Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. David Gessner is the author of eight books, including The Tarball Chronicles, which recently won the Southern Environmental Law Center’s Reed Award for best book about the southern environment. He is at work on a novel. Tony Hoagland’s books of poems include What Narcissism Means to Me and Donkey Gospel. A teacher at the University of Houston, his…

Tanja Cilia Valletta, Malta WHERE ARE YOU FROM? I am from sea urchins and anchovies and from Lighthouse Sea Salt and the Mediterranean’s best-kept secret archipelago. I am from the Grand Harbour View flat, cozy, homely, comfortable, an islander who feels as much at home in the water as out of it. I am from the tiger-lily freckles and the honeysuckle tendrils and orange-blossom water used as scent because it smells faintly of 4711 cologne. I am from the lion rampant holding the fleur-de-lis; the stubborn and the witty, the tall and the big-footed. I am from the Paul and the Catherine, but also from Valletta, Vittoriosa, and Zabbar. I am from the parsimonious yet generous, proud yet humble, solitary yet friendly clan. The ones who lisp. From the intelligent…

I SEE HIM CLOAKED in cold mist, the Fisher King, a desolate figure in a wasteland of his own making. He hunches silently over his fishing rod in a sea of silence, catching nothing except the reflection of his own shroud in the dead water. The Fisher King, keeper of the Holy Grail, is an enigmatic figure in literature: a rich king wounded by his own spear. The earliest sources show him suffering a moral wounding — a result not of accident but of his own ethical failings. The wound does not heal. Worse, its effects creep out, killing everything around him so the abundance and richness of life is reduced to barren waste. There is a moment in the story when the wound — of both the king and…

In a tenth-floor suite,with my slicked hair and beardand blazer cut right,not even my third glass of gincan stall the folded knitthat recalls camp. And rolling free from bagand tent into the chilly dawnrecalls the green shadeof a banker’s lamp,the books that looked back,and bleary eyes wanting sleep. Fuzzy from ginand the memories nowspreading wide in squares and decks,I step outinto the moist evening air,the moon limninganniversary, injury, laughter, degree— It is distance, thenthat makes this life ambitious— And it will be the moonI thinkthat recalls youwhen I’ve trekked the cold steppes,dined with a countess, andafter many yearslanded back in some patch of grasses: then the small inlet of bloodthat wells within these bordersand this grown beard will be pulled shorewardlike a proper tide, and flashes dot the night.…

A COUPLE OF HOURS past the ferry landing that links Victoria, British Columbia, to Port Angeles, Washington, past the vacation area around Lake Cowichan, with its bait and tackle stores, small grocers, and cabins huddled among tall pines on the lake, the paved road ends and a rutted dirt logging road begins. Almost immediately the forest itself ends, and a clearcut breaks over us like a tsunami. There are four of us in the car, and we all get out to face it. Down the mountains and up the mountains, unrelieved except by the road that cuts through it, lie the remains of a forest. Rounds of massive trunks supply the only focal point for the eyes, while a tangle of ripped branches and limbs fills every conceivable space between…

BY MICHAEL T. KLARE Metropolitan Books, 2012. $27, 320 pages. WHAT LINKS EXPLORATI ON in the depths of the Arctic winter with the tensions that fueled the Arab Spring? Deep-sea drilling off the coast of Florida with forest clearing in the heart of the Amazon? The mining of the Gobi with political intrigue in Gabon? According to this wide-ranging, fascinating, and alarming book, it is the rush by governments and multinationals to secure what remains of the world’s dwindling resources — a scramble that is driving up commodity prices, raising the risk of conflicts, and creating a new set of political and business rivalries. The Race for What’s Left: The Global Scramble for the World’s Last Resources is a tale of what happens when frontiers become fringes, or as the…

BY KRISTENI VERSEN Crown Publishers, 2012. $25, 400 pages. ON THE OUTS KIRTS of Arvada, Colorado, where Kristen Iversen grew up, there was a secret factory, owned by Dow Chemical. Even the townspeople lucky enough to land one of the high-paying blue collar jobs at Rocky Flats didn’t seem to know what was manufactured there — was it Scrubbing Bubbles? — and after a while, they forgot to ask. It was not until much later, when townspeople began dying of cancers linked to radiation, that they began to investigate. And it wasn’t just workers — all over Arvada, Iversen’s friends and family became sick with thyroid and lymph node problems, brain tumors, and testicular cancer (this last shockingly present in pubescent boys, including Iverson’s first crush). Full Body Burden —…

BY NICK HAYES Viking, 2012. $32, 336 pages. Nick Hayes’s graphic adventure The Rime of the Modern Mariner brings a contemporary twist to Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s classic poem. Set off by an act of mindless killing, this modern mariner’s journey takes us through a dark and haunted sea filled with oil spills, trawling nets, and the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Compelled to tell his tale to a hostile urbanite on a park bench, the narrator and his wry rhymes reanimate this ecological parable. Maintaining the meter of the original, the poem weaves through illustrations that evoke the hallucinatory, underwater dream world of angry sea gods through which the mariner must travel. Only when he understands his role in the ocean’s destruction is he released from his nightmare journey, back into…

As a botanist and lover of succulent plants, I was delighted to see Beth Moon’s beautiful pictures of Socotra’s botanical treasures in the July/August 2012 issue (“Otherworldly Trees”). As with all things wondrous and fragile in our world, the future of these trees is threatened. Recent studies have shown that the dragon’s blood tree is not regenerating on the island; the climate has been getting drier and appears to be too dry for seedlings to establish. It, along with the desert rose and tree cucumber, is also being devoured by increasing numbers of goats. It is foreboding of the potential destructive effects of anthropogenic climate change when arid-adapted plants no longer thrive. JOHN ZABORSKYOregon, Wisconsin While I agree with David Sobel (“Look, Don’t Touch,” July/August 2012) that children need more…

I’M SURE BY NOW most of us have heard the allegory about how if you put a frog in a pot of water and heat it slowly, the frog won’t jump out. The allegory seems to suggest that beings don’t really respond to dangerous changes so long as those changes happen gradually, and, as a result of failing to respond, they’ll slowly become accustomed to discomfort, then pain, even the agonizing death of being boiled alive. The allegory is harmful for several reasons. The first is that it attempts to explain away passivity in the face of victimization: Look, it’s completely natural to do nothing when someone is torturing you. It’s natural to not even notice. This mindset is used to justify passivity in the face of all sorts of…

THE PROBLEM WITH environmentalists, Lynn Margulis used to say, is that they think conservation has something to do with biological reality. A researcher who specialized in cells and microorganisms, Margulis was one of the most important biologists in the last half century — she literally helped to reorder the tree of life, convincing her colleagues that it did not consist of two kingdoms (plants and animals), but five or even six (plants, animals, fungi, protists, and two types of bacteria). Until Margulis’s death last year, she lived in my town, and I would bump into her on the street from time to time. She knew I was interested in ecology, and she liked to needle me. Hey, Charles, she would call out, are you still all worked up about protecting…

I AM SIMULTANEOUSLY enchanted and haunted by trees. As a child, I was a tomboyish tree-climbing tree lover — a daydreamer held in mahogany arms. If I went missing, my family knew where to find me: perched on a branch, peering up into the sky or speculating about the world below. Then, I did not know the word sacred, but I sensed the meaning, especially sheltered from the world by a dome of emerald leaves. It was the one place where I felt the most whole. I experienced an inexplicable kinship with trees, which is probably why I developed an insatiable curiosity to learn their names: maple, pine, birch, willow … Live oaks were my trees of choice. At that time, there was no way for me to grasp the…

ON THE FIR ST MORNING of the last week of Kenneth Brant’s life, he woke to the mewling of a catbird. Not the most melodic of requiems, but then he wasn’t planning on this being his last Tuesday on earth. He liked that little gray bird despite, or maybe because of, its gregariousness. Catbirds got close fast. Annoying in people — less so in birds. He eased himself out of bed and opened the back door to see what the racket was. His vision was weak, but the bird unmistakable. It wore a skullcap slightly darker than the rest of its feathers and was standing on the corner of the deck, chittering and yapping as if desperately needing to impart a message to Brant. But Brant, curious despite the early…

The tide ignores its limits, all last nightclimbing over the railing, battering the door.White spume flew its ghost against the glass.The bay’s in its third day of outrage,but the ducks have to eat. The white-winged scoterkeeps me at the window, three sleek ones.I count the in and out of their pristine heads—bodies down for improbable minutesbefore coming back up, black and whiteagainst the white-capped black water shovingagainst the row of stone pilings that mark the tide’s high rise.By 8 a.m. I’ve seen enoughas the rocks submerge and the overwrought current,something like a boxer pounding and pounding,slams the ducks diving there— I’ve seen enough to know what I’ll find tomorrow on the wasted beach:a washed-up duck, still intact,limp sack beneath the flawless designof its feathers, nothing odd except the crumpled pose.Audubon…

BY SABINA BERMAN TRANSLATED FROM THE SPANISH BY LISA DILLMAN Henry Holt, 2012. $24, 256 pages. THE NARRATOR of Sabina Berman’s novel Me, Who Dove into the Heart of the World is Karen Nieto, an autistic woman whose exceptional connection with animals, particularly tuna, leads her to revolutionize her family’s tuna cannery in Mazatlán, Mexico, and then the tuna industry at large. As Karen struggles to make tuna slaughtering more and more humane, she faces the United States Trade Embargo on Mexican tuna, corrupt Mexican politicians, a jealous colleague, a craven venture capitalist, animal rights terrorists, and, finally, the quixotic nature of her mission. Political without being pedantic, Me, Who Dove into the Heart of the World draws on real-life events to create a story that contributes to contemporary conversations…

BY KATHLEEN FLENNIKEN University of Washington Press, 2012. $24.95, 80 pages. IN PLUME, her second book of poems, Kathleen Flenniken chronicles growing up during the Cold War in Richland, Washington — a small community nestled between the Columbia and Yakima rivers. Richland has traditionally been home to employees of the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, a plutonium production plant that fueled the nation’s atomic defense since the Manhattan Project in the 1940s. After many cases of radiation-related illness surfaced among employees and their families, the government declassified documents in the late 1980s revealing a decades-long history of contamination despite official assurances to residents that the area had always been safe. According to the U.S. Department of Energy, the Hanford site is now home to the world’s largest environmental cleanup project. Plume takes…

THE MOMENTS in which I suddenly focus on certain odd things in motion — a herring gull’s quickly dipped wing, the shiver of an apple leaf — are often a mystery. Hard to say why that bird or leaf catches and holds the eye when a moment earlier I paid less attention to the gust that unsteadied laughing gulls and stirred a shoreline of spruce. But alert, aware, reading the scene for meaning, I attend to the selected movement as I might to the shift of my wife’s hand. I like not knowing why I see what I see. I treasure the mysterious aesthetic, the empty observation. I remember that like the leaf and bird I was in motion just then, observable in the act of making contact, of being…

ORION FOR THE HOLIDAYS Forgive us for boasting, but a subscription to Orion makes a great gift. Get a head start this year by ordering gift subscriptions for family, friends, and colleagues at www.orionmagazine.org/gift, and we’ll send a card to the recipients on your behalf. THE PSYCHOLOGY OF PLANETARY DAMAGE Join Orion for a discussion with Trebbe Johnson, author of “Gaze Even Here” (see p. 66 of this issue). We’ll talk about the emotional impact of ecological degradation and how to retain a love of place through trying times. The event is on November 13 at 7 p.m. EST; as always, it’s free and open to the public, but registration is required. Find out more and register at www.orionmagazine.org/discuss. BECOME A SUSTAINING PARTNER Set up a monthly recurring donation of…