Table of contents for January / February 2013 in Orion

OF THE MANY bellwether moments associated with Hurricane Sandy, one of the most poignant was a public debate featuring the governor of New York State and the mayor of New York City over what kind of new infrastructure—whether floodgates or seawalls or flood-resistant buildings or restored wetlands—would best protect the city from the kinds of storm surges that came with Sandy. Their ideas about what they thought might happen were different, but you could argue that their disagreement over how to deal with climate change–related events was the end of the mainstream debate about whether climate change is real. Climate change is real, and the conversation around it has more traction and more momentum than ever. Now is the time to move forward. The Obama administration, which has doggedly tried…

THANKS to all of our readers for making 2012, Orion’s thirtieth year, such a fun ride. Orion staffers toured the country, from Washington DC to Portland, Oregon, meeting readers and contributors and making new friends. We’re traveled out — but you can spend time with us via the Orion blog, updated five times a week, at www.orionmagazine.org/blog. Sy Montgomery, author of the beloved Orion article “Deep Intellect,” wrote in to say that giant Pacific octopus Octavia, who came to the New England Aquarium after Athena’s sudden death, laid eggs in October. That’s usually the end of an octopus’s life cycle, so aquarium staff and volunteers are grooming another octopus, Kali, to replace Octavia in the exhibit. Listen to Sy Montgomery and others discuss animal intelligence by subscribing to the Orion…

I WANT TO TELL YOU three stories of winning and losing, of selfishness and sacrifice, of this culture. Story one. Last spring I gave a talk in a small farming community in northwestern Illinois. I drove there from my previous talk in Wisconsin, passing through prime agricultural territory, which is to say cleared and plowed and empty cornfield after cleared and plowed and empty cornfield. When I got to my destination, a delightful retired teacher took me to see the last remaining unplowed prairie in the county. It was more or less downtown, between a busy street and yet another field devoted to agriculture. As he led me across the slender tract, I couldn’t stop weeping at the sight of flowers who were once common and now barely hanging on,…

Sick cacti folded inside fungus shroudslike a summer house in winterwhen the furniture is hushed in cloth. Roof with its shingles stripped off, porcelainwith its century rinsed in snowmelt. Even the spoons collect their light like sleep. This is not your house, not your bowlof disarticulated crinoid stems, not the greenphosphorescence of terrarium mossso spring it hurts your eyes. These are not your woods, not your stripedtree snails, not your oxygen whoseeddies drift so fluently between the lungsof certain molluscs, man. Hybrid forms, shiny parabolas everywhere.This is not your earth.…

A PAIR OF SCIENTISTS, sporting white clean-suits complete with helmets and face masks, approach a prefab agricultural greenhouse in a clearing at Duke University’s Research Forest. Inside are two long rows of wooden boxes the size of large horse troughs, which hold samples of the natural world that surrounds them—the pine groves and rhododendron thickets of North Carolina’s piedmont, which at this moment are alive with bird song. Looking a lot like the government bad guys in E.T., the two men cautiously hover over a row of boxes containing native sedges, water grasses, and Zebra fish to spray a fine mist of silver nanoparticles over them. Their goal: to investigate how the world inside the boxes is altered by these essentially invisible and notoriously unpredictable particles. The researchers are part…

I. NIGHT BLACKBIRD SONG, for two piccolos (one doubling on flute) and three percussion (1999) The piece starts with a bang, as the long, drawn-out cry of piccolos brings the listener to attention. After a pause, a wind rustles leaves; a wood block beats out drops of rain. Then a piccolo—the blackbird — starts to sing, warbling over quiet musical gusts of wind. Another bird chimes in, and the two duet (or duel) over a building percussive din. The overall effect is spare and lovely, that of two birds singing to each other, swaying on branches in the dark, trying to be heard over an incidental urban cacophony. In an interview with journalist George Tombs, Emily Doolittle, the composer of the piece, described its origins. It was 1997, and she…

Viking, 2012. $27.95, 433 pages. “COMING UPthe snowfield on the far side was a long trail of footprints, left by a single walker. These footprints were not pressed down into the snow, though, but raised above it: a series of low snow pedestals, each perhaps three or four inches high.” In The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot, Robert Macfarlane goes on to explain the arresting sight of these “footplinths” — which he encountered in the eastern Himalayas—as snow compacted underfoot that gradually “stands out in relief” when the surrounding snow is melted and scoured away. “They are palindromic in form: that which was depressed becomes elevated, and impression is reversed into expression.” Throughout the dramatic walking excursions described in The Old Ways, Macfarlane focuses on the traces and images…

The University of Chicago Press, 2012. $45, 203 pages. There are worlds within worlds within this world — you need only to lift a stone or turn a leaf to visit them. Photographer David Liittschwager’s new book, A World in One Cubic Foot, is a celebration of those worlds, a who’s who of the incredible biodiversity above our heads and under our feet. Liittschwager, a contributor to National Geographic, produced the gorgeous, high-definition images in this large-format book with the help of a bright green cubic metal frame, which he set in locations from Costa Rica to Central Park. In each place, he photographed every life form visible to the naked eye that moved through his cube within twenty-four hours. By scaling these images to the same size and setting…

Robert Dawson is an instructor of photography at Stanford University. His photographs are in the collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. David Gessner’s cartooning career began at the Harvard Crimson, with a drawing called “The Trickle Down Theory.” He is the author of eight books, including The Tarball Chronicles, and is at work on a novel. Paul Kingsnorth is a writer and poet living in Cumbria, in northern England. He is cofounder and director of the Dark Mountain Project, a network of writers, artists, and thinkers; his essay in this issue of Orion was first published in the third issue of Dark Mountain. Katherine Larson is the author of Radial Symmetry, winner of…

1. KOI. When contained in Japanese-style water gardens, these colorful carp are a symbol of love and friendship. When released into wild ponds and waterways, they become a destructive terror, outbreeding and outcompeting all the natives. Their resemblance to goldfish is also problematic, especially for children. Boys and girls who snag one of these giant bottom feeders during fishing trips may believe they’re about to land a largemouth bass. What they find instead is the emotional equivalent of a puppy with a hook through its mouth. 2. CHICKENS. Animal rights advocates have repeatedly warned us that if these birds were ever allowed to truly grasp the gross abuse of their species by American agriculture, they would start a Planet of the Apes – style uprising and slaughter us all. The…

Thinking back, your plenty was huge, massive,the size of a gorge, a regular canyon, so greenand spectacular whole families on their last gallon,driving on fumes, everyone silent, sticky, and leaninginto the destination, hoping not to miss it,came to peer out over the edgeand watch the wind part your hair and ruffle your blazeras you leaned hard for leverageand the floodgates opened the mighty damthat was your vast moneyflow, O it seems the preliminary drawingsfor the commemorative park, the one containing forestsand waterfalls, sluiceways and glaciers, square miles of fluvia,were somehow misplacedin all the hubbub and may have slipped into a shipmentof scrap metal (old TV sets) that may even now(we think) possibly be arriving, somewhere— in a town, say, that would make the devil weep with loneliness,where the wind off…

ANCHOR CHAIN. The hideous, booming clatter that awoke me our first morning out was, I thought at first, the warning bell that announced we should all assemble on the foredeck and prepare to zip ourselves into survival suits, those bulky, lurid orange jumpsuits in which you could, they say, float and survive in an Arctic sea for up to six hours. Happily, it was just the anchor chain going out, meaning that we were at our first destination, and I did not yet have to try out that orange jumpsuit or those Arctic waters. The chains were huge beasts in the stern of the boat that rattled like the end of the world on their way up and their way down. ANIMALS. There was no wait. Before we boarded the…

They should have taught us birds and treesin school, they should have taught us beautyand weaving bees and had a classon listening and standing alone—the children should have studied lightreflected from a spider web,we should have learned the branches of streamsspread out like fingers or the veinsof a leaf—we should have learned the skyis the tallest steeple, we should have knowna hill is a voice inside the sky—O, we should have had our schoolon top and stayed until the nightfor the fog to bloom in the hollows and riselike cotton spinning off a wheel—we should have learned a dream—a child’sand even still a man’s—is madefrom fog and love, my word, you’d thinkwith the book in front of us we shouldhave learned how Fog Town got its name.…

W. W. Norton, 2012. $25.95, 256 pages. SUSAN LINDLEY believes she murdered her husband, Hal. What actually happened — that Hal caught her having sex with a co-worker on the floor of her office, and therefore decided to head off on an ill-conceived trip to Belize, where he got himself knifed in an alley, bleeding to death before help arrived—is irrelevant, Susan would say. Hal wouldn’t have been in Belize at all had he not caught her with perhaps the least significant of the countless men she had slept with during their marriage, one who played fantasy baseball and didn’t even “have the wit to make a joke out of it.” Welcome to the vivid and arresting world of Lydia Millet’s imagination, where the women are razor sharp and wholly…

Metropolitan Books, 2012. $28, 318 pages. ON MY PORCH, I have four chairs from the Auburn Bar in River Rouge, an industrial town on the border of Detroit. My grandfather drank there each afternoon, on his walk home from work at Great Lakes Steel. The chairs are weirdly fragile, considering they held steelworkers for any number of years, but I keep them. With initials carved in them by dock workers and pile drivers, the chairs remind me of home. In Detroit City Is the Place to Be, Mark Binelli captures the Motor City I know, love, and, like Binelli and much of my generation, left, in all its toughness and fragility. Binelli, who has also authored one novel, writes for Rolling Stone, and it shows in the book’s prose. It’s…

THANK YOU To the thousands of readers who have donated to Orion over the past three decades and throughout 2012—Orion’s thirtieth anniversary year—thank you. Your financial support allows Orion to host a unique conversation about nature and culture. And it’s never too late to become an Orion donor; go to www.orionmagazine.org/donate, or give us a call at 800/909-6568. NEW BOOKS FROM In 2012 Orion published three new books—Thirty-Year Plan, Change Everything Now, and Wonder and Other Survival Skills—and there are more to come. See the full selection of books available from Orion at www.orionmagazine.org/books. THE 2013 ORION BOOK AWARD The seventh annual Orion Book Award will be presented in April. Stay up to date on this year’s selection committee, book selection process, recommended reading, and other book award news at…

THANKS to Sandra Stein-graber for her exceptional essay in the September/October 2012 issue, “The Fracking of Rachel Carson.” I live in Idaho, where we too are in the fracking industry’s bull’seye—seismic testing in a fifty-square-mile area began near here in August. A few of us in Payette County have tried desperately to sound the alarm, but most of the time our pleas fall on deaf ears (especially if those ears are attached to state lawmakers). Steingraber’s article draws clear and concise parallels between what is happening in Rachel Carson’s backyard—and subsequently all of our backyards—and the future we’re destroying for our children and future generations. There are days when I just want to curl up in a fetal position, cry, and question whether I’m making a difference. But, fortunately, every…

Jelle Cauwenberghs Gamvik, Norway I LIVE IN THE OLD BAKERY for the I summer, working as a guide and a housekeeper. It’s a yellow house on the verge of collapse. The faucets leak and the walls weep when the rain seeps in. Mold stains cloud the ceiling. I keep the rein-deer skins and the old books upstairs in the attic, to keep them dry. Downstairs is the tack room where I keep the saddles for the horses and the wood for winter. When they announce hurricane winds I tie rope to the door handle so it doesn’t slam open. This is the knife edge of a continent. You will find kindness here, the raw hospitality of a sliver of land caught between the fjells and the sea. From my bedroom…

PADDLING MY CANOE along the Kentucky River last fall, I passed beneath hundred-foot-high limestone palisades, following a great blue heron as he too, in short intervals of flight, made his way upriver. I suspected he was heading toward an impressive rookery built in the crown of a dying syca-more that leaned out over the water about a mile upstream. The heron’s blue-gray plumage was on clear display as he stopped often to preen on deadfalls near the banks. He would wait for me to catch up, then fold his head and neck into a tight S shape and climb back into the air. We played this game for about an hour. At times the heron would wade into the shallows, spear a small silver fish, then swallow it whole with…

A ROUND MIDNIGHT, unable to fall asleep, I abandon my bed to sit at my desk, an oak escritoire facing my apartment’s western windows. Lying on the desktop is my copy of Tom Jones, which I brought to the cemetery earlier this morning. I arrived there at dawn, taking my usual seat on the stone bench beneath the maple, and read for an hour. Now I sit with it again, trying to pick up where I left off. But I find that although I am not tired enough to sleep, I am yet too tired to read, so I put down the paperback and recrease a flimsy page corner to keep my place. (I have reached the seventh chapter of the fifth book, when Allworthy, Tom Jones’s adoptive father, is…

Wings Press, 2012. $16.95, 224 pages. A CENTRAL PART of any thinking that aims at restoring environmental health is a recognition that we’re all in this together: any planetary catastrophe implicates all of us. One of the greatest virtues of Cecile Pineda’s Devil’s Tango: How I Learned the Fukushima Step by Step may be, simply (or not so simply), the author’s inability to let go of her personal involvement in the tsunami-driven accident at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear reactor in the Fukushima Prefecture of Japan in 2011, though she herself lives in California, and is no more or less affected by it than any American. A loose and associative memoir written in a series of vignettes, the book dates itself relentlessly from the Fukushima disaster — counting days, for example,…

W. W. Norton, 2012. $26.95, 398 pages. WILLIAM BRYANT LOGAN, author of Dirt: The Ecstatic Skin of the Earth and Oak: The Frame of Civilization, has brought his capacious thinking to the subject of air: the air that we breathe; that carries dust containing essential phosphorus from the Sahara to the Amazonian rainforests; that is packed with spores, pollen, pheromones, and bacteria riding on rafts of human skin; through which planes and herons and warblers fly; that carries our music and voices and the thrush’s song, and also spins into devastating hurricanes and tornados. Unlike oak, which is a subject with foreseeable parameters for a writer, the “theater of the air” is inevitably a challenge to contain—impossible, really — for almost everything in the world could be included. Logan allows…