Table of contents for January / February 2010 in Orion

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Elizabeth Bradfield is author of Interpretive Work, winner of the 2009 Audre Lorde Prize, and Approaching Ice, forthcoming this year. She is founder and editor of Broadsided Press and lives on Cape Cod. Lawrence W. Cheek’s most recent book is The Year of the Boat. He teaches in the MFA program at the Northwest Institute of Literary Arts in Washington. Hal Clifford is executive editor of Orion. Andrea Cohen is author of Long Division and The Cartographer’s Vacation. She directs the Blacksmith House Poetry Series in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Michael Collier is author of five books of poems, including Dark Wild Realm. He has received an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Martin d’Orgeval’s photography has been widely exhibited. He lives in Paris, where his work…

Joel Sternfeld is fascinated with the idea of Utopia. His 1987 work, American Prospects, directed a large-format camera lens at the possibilities of this country and how those possibilities have translated into realities. Much of his subsequent work maintained this theme, but in the last few years it has been mingled with a growing understanding of climate change and its implications. That awareness snapped into sharp focus at a 2005 United Nations conference in Montreal. “At this point in America we were pre–Al Gore. Even people who had tried to follow climate change had trouble getting a real sense of the danger because of misinformation put out by the Bush administration and other administrations,” Sternfeld said. “In Montreal the magnitude of the impending calamity became absolutely apparent to me.” His…

When Rebecca Solnit and Bill McKibben asked Barry Lopez if he would join a group of writers in submitting a 350-word piece for 350.org’s effort to publicize that number — the maximum parts per million of carbon dioxide the atmosphere can maintain if we are to preserve the planet as we know it — he, like other writers busy with their own projects, initially declined. But then, compelled by the obligation of embracing this all-important limit in his creative work, he accepted. — The Editors ON A WINTER AFTERNOON, along a trail in the Sierra Madre in the state of Mensajero, beneath an immense rampart of rising cumulonimbus cloud, a deeply imperfect man bent over to collect a small piece of black glass. He recognized its kind: obsidian, a thick…

It sounds like the cracks and clicks of the house settlingas the room warms in morning, it sounds like a fanwhispered up. It tastes of wood smoke — sweet and then stale.It looks like the curve of a mountainunder streaked sky, and everything pale bluejust before sunrise, everything translucent,even stone. The stone is blue, it tastes, after all,like tea in a glass cup, it feels like wanting ablanket on your lap, nesting, hovering arounda wound, no a break, where the mountain opens,wanting to heal, to soften the gap, to close it,like an empty room inside of me, and I want to give it fireand fill it with humming, and make it humand vibrate — the resound of a chamberopened and filled with air — with beating.I want to fill the…

Oxford Press, 2009. $19.95, 288 pages. AS AN ENVIRONMENTAL reporter who focuses on American politics, I thought there was no end to my pessimism about Congress and its inability to act on climate change in the near future. But then, somehow, Down to the Wire managed to make me even less optimistic about the future — despite the fact that the author seems to have intended just the opposite. Environmental and political scholar David Orr’s latest work is a comprehensive look at the climate crisis and the prevailing ideologies that have led us to this point. The conclusion Orr reaches is that the real divide that has caused the current stasis is not between conservatives and liberals — though he gives due responsibility to antiscience and procorporate types — it’s…

David Abram’s essay “The Air Aware” (September/October 2009) is absolutely stunning considering the limited ability of the English language to adequately capture the essence of spirit as expressed by ancient languages. Although no words, ancient or otherwise, can fully capture the feeling one may experience at those times when we observe a connection to the vast mystery, Abram has come as close as any author I’ve read. MIKE GUNDLACH Portland, Oregon As a steward of the land and teacher of environmental literature, I am always eager to see how writers grapple with the human-nature relationship. And I’ve often been delighted by David Abram’s unusual choice of words and ideas. While teaching in Albania on a Fulbright scholarship, I was startled by how my Albanian students conceived of collective versus individual…

Win trembles with anticipation when her chauffeur opens the door of her crate. The petite black-and-white border collie knows she has work to do. Win bounds out, searching for her unconventional quarry, ready to herd. She spots a flock of about a dozen geese feeding on the well-manicured grass of Clove Lake Park in Staten Island. She crouches until her belly is almost on the ground, tucks her tail between her legs, and slinks toward the geese, fixing them with an intense glare. The geese honk in alarm, first trotting across the lawn and then reluctantly spreading their wings and taking off. Win, her body still quaking, keeps up her fierce stare until the geese have disappeared. Scaring off the ubiquitous Canada geese that see New York’s parks, cemeteries, and…

It’s not often that I send my wife a text reading “In maggot painting room with kids.” She arrives to find our daughters wearing white gloves and happily standing over a tray of maggots writhing in nontoxic paint. “Give me the flashlight!” says eight-year-old Nell, as she forces another red-and-yellow grub to wriggle away from the light, creating abstract, maggoty art in the process. “Look, I’m getting the maggot to write my name!” says eleven-year-old Lola. It’s all part of Pestival, the four-day celebration of “the art of insects and insects in art” at London’s South Bank arts complex. Created by naturalist Bridget Nicholls, it’s designed to make children and adults think about insects in new ways. The maggot painting is fun, but it makes a scientific point, too, as…

1. CORNELIA HESSE-HONEGGER is sitting in her apartment in Zürich looking through her microscope. Beneath the lens is a tiny golden-green insect, one of the leaf bugs from the suborder Heteroptera that she has been painting for more than thirty years. The binocular microscope magnifies to eighty times. The centimeter scale in the left eyepiece allows her to map every detail of the insect’s body with precision. Cornelia collected this animal close to the Gundremmingen nuclear power plant in southern Germany. Like most of the insects she paints, it is deformed. In this case, its abdomen is irregularly shaped, a little crinkled on its right side. To me, even under the microscope, the deformity is all but imperceptible. But just think, she says, how such an anomaly must feel if…

For Wired magazine founder Kevin Kelly, technology is neither the practical nor the neutral result of scientific discoveries, but a powerful universal force for creating opportunities. He speaks in unapologetically theological terms. The internet is “a miracle and a gift” that allows humans to organize and create in radically new ways. He says that we are moving from being People of the Book to People of the Screen. Kelly’s radical pronouncements earn fire from both sides of the chasm between religion and science, even as he seeks to see beyond those dogmas. Today he wants to “talk about faith using the vocabulary and logic of science.” When I arrive at Kelly’s home south of San Francisco, he’s sweaty from riding his bike up the steep hill, which rises from the…

WHEN I WAS A CHILD, my favorite show was Thundarr the Barbarian, a cartoon about a muscled warrior who wears furry underwear and battles wizards and monsters in a post-apocalyptic wasteland. I grew up on a ten-acre lot choked with pines, and I would hike the game trails that snaked through it and imagine myself as Thundarr, a survivor, one of the last men on Earth, my only companion a German shepherd whom I renamed Ookla and liked to think of as a kind of wookie. Together we would track deer and scavenge for berries. I would pretend a baseball bat into a glowing sunsword and I would knock the limbs off trees and slash open the bellies of rotten stumps. In high school, I read a dog-eared copy of…

Little, Brown and Company, 2009. $25.99, 341 pages. THE COMPARISON is almost too obvious: If Eating Animals had been penned in an earlier era, undoubtedly it would have incited a firestorm of reform not at all unlike Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle. But this is a new age, and it’s unclear whether books still hold that kind of sway with the public. It’s hard not to be cynical — even after we learn of links between factory-farmed animals and mad cow disease, swine flu, and tainted meat recalls, we continue to support industrial agriculture in its basest forms. That said, if any book can launch the revolution, this one is it. Even on the heels of so many best-selling food books, Jonathan Safran Foer’s first nonfiction work stands alone — so…

The Sacred Universe Earth, Spirituality, and Religion in the Twenty-first Century By Thomas Berry, Edited and with a Foreword by Mary Evelyn Tucker, Columbia University Press, 2009. Written over several decades, these essays represent scholar, ecotheologian, and Catholic priest Thomas Berry’s prophetic warning against ecological destruction. Berry imagines a revitalized role for the world’s religions in healing alienation, calling for interfaith dialogue, the emergence of a diverse and robust global spiritual community, and a vision that reconnects humanity with its origins in nature, Earth, and the universe. Half the Sky Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide By Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, Knopf, 2009. Half the Sky bears witness to both the shocking cruelty humans can inflict upon one another, and the tremendous strength exhibited by those brave…

FAREWELL to the oughts — a decade that will be remembered for its war on terror, its economic meltdown, and, especially, its distinction as the period when the Western world reached functional agreement that the burning of fossil fuels was destroying the planet’s atmosphere but failed to do anything significant to stop it. What will the teens bring? Things are likely to get worse before they get better, thanks in part to the excesses of previous decades. It’ll be like a movie — only real: hopefully not too dystopic, but hope is no match for the multiple crises bearing down on humankind at present. “The best horror stories take a knife to the anxieties of a time,” writes Benjamin Percy in his review of the movie adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s…

Editor-in-chief Chip Blake attended the Thomas Berry memorial service at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York on September 26. Mary Evelyn Tucker, a former Orion Society board member, and her husband, John Grim, organized the event. The first Thomas Berry Award was granted to Martin S. Kaplan, another friend of Orion and a longtime supporter of Berry’s work in religious ecology. Contributors Curtis White and James Howard Kunstler teamed up to speak to classes and give a lecture to the public at nearby Williams College on October 8. White was promoting his new book, The Barbaric Heart, and generously donated the proceeds of that day’s sales to Orion. And on October 24, Orion staff joined about sixty other Great Barrington residents to mark the International Day…

Chicago-based artists Molly Schafer and Jenny Kendler’s Endangered Species Print Project offers limited-edition art prints of critically endangered species. The number of prints available corresponds with the remaining animal or plant populations. For example, only thirty-seven Seychelles sheath-tailed bats remain in the wild, so for this edition, only thirty-seven prints will be made. All proceeds are donated to conservation organizations. A different organization — whose mission is to ensure the survival of the species depicted — is chosen for each print. — endangeredspeciesprintproject.com…

Is it important that it was twelve belowand even though the wrecked jeep belonged to Patit felt like stealing to go through the chain linkinto the deserted scrap yard, jack upeach corner and switch out his new tireswith our old bald? It was twelve below.The snow squeaked underfoot like Styrofoam.We were trying to make it in a placewhere everything we thought we needed— insulation, wool, tomatoes —had to be shipped in from Outside.There was a raven calling, watery cluckechoing the lot. There was us cursingthe lug nuts, then another sound,out of place, high and keenand you and I startle like any goddamn bird.I see your head tilt,ear to the sky, and while Anne is jumpingblood back into her toes and Pat is wrestlingwith the left rear, there is within the…

The bird was on the wire and then it wasn’t,though the wire still stretched from pole to pole.You saw it perched and still, except for the defensivetilt of head, the tail feather flickering alertand silhouetted through the setting sun.You saw the sun set the eucalyptus trees on fireand burn the land that once was sea.You saw the sea in tides of dust and sandthat swept across dry fields and vacant lotsand in flocks of gulls and stranded pelicans.You saw it in the cloudless days, the house trailers anchored in their parksand palm trees, like massive tube worms, waving in the sky.You saw its shadow sweep across the broad flat avenueslaid out in grids, in the bare mountains that ringed the valley,the citrus groves bulldozed for houses. You smelled itin the…

Nan A. Talese / Doubleday, 2009. $26.95, 435 pages. UTOPIAS MAKE for lousy fiction. Who wants to read a novel in which everyone is flawlessly educated, respects wildlife, and recycles their aluminum? Give me dystopia every time: gunned-down dissidents and simmering metropolises and haywire genetic experiments. Margaret Atwood’s latest book, The Year of the Flood, is about as dystopian as novels get. As in her 2003 novel, Oryx and Crake, Atwood presents a vision of a miserably hot, totalitarian future in which people live either in gated corporate compounds or in seething “pleebs.” Corporations kill off employees, smuggle viruses into pills, and grow human replacement organs inside pigs. An all-seeing security army executes illegal immigrants and uses cyborg honeybees to spy on enemies. Oh, and Wisconsin is a desert. And…

St. Martin’s Press, 2009. $27.99, 400 pages. A PEARL IS, essentially, an irritant in the gonads, coated with layer after smooth layer of aragonite and conchiolin as the mollusk attempts to ease its discomfort. The layers happen to be shiny, and therein hangs a tale. In Tears of Mermaids, Stephen Bloom traces pearls’ path through the global economy, detailing how spheres of calcium carbonate become gems. Traveling all over the world, he takes us from the moment a mussel, dangling in a basket hung from a green bottle on a lake in Zhuji, China, is hauled out of the water and split open with a machete to the moment at a Christie’s pearl necklace auction when a mysterious bidder phones in an o=er of $6.3 million. The story starts with…

The University of Georgia Press, 2009. $24.95, 424 pages. “JUST IMAGINE / No dead birds because of / No dead trees because of / No dead people because of …” El’Jay Johnson was eight when he wrote these lines in 2000. His poem won a River of Words prize, founded by poet laureate Robert Hass, who had asked schoolchildren to write about their own watershed. “No dead trees”: the strange Dickensian fact is, that sewage from the houses of Congress was flowing with the Anacostia River through black neighborhoods around Washington. “Just imagine a kid,” says El’Jay, “living by the Anacostia River.” Centuries of African-American poetry stand behind “Just imagine,” starting with Phyllis Wheatley’s 1773 “Imagination! Who can sing thy force!” This sentiment comes out loud and clear in Camille…

IF YOU ARE AN ARDENT WOODEN boat enthusiast, as I am, you may find it impossible to walk through a forest and not see boats in the trees. Look at those Sitka spars! That crooked white oak, preshaped for a schooner’s stem! I’ve just emerged from an Olympic rain forest hike, and I’m clambering across the logs piled on Ruby Beach, ninety miles west of Seattle. A bare, sun-bleached log about the thickness of a human thigh sports a graceful wishbone bend where a branch had once cantilevered itself off its trunk. The poise of the curve, the rhythms of its grain, and even the stringy beach grass rigging around it form a perfect abstraction of the stern of a historic twenty-six-foot spidsgatter residing not far away at the Port…

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