Table of contents for July / August 2010 in Orion

A GALLUP POLL released on April 22, 2010 — the fortieth anniversary of Earth Day — found “historically low levels of public worry about environmental problems.” The poll results indicated that, compared to a decade ago, 10 percent fewer people today describe themselves as either “active participants” in the environmental movement or “sympathetic” to the goals of the movement. This is disconcerting, but not as disconcerting as the next data set: more than a third of Gallup’s respondents think the environmental movement “has done more harm than good.” Meanwhile, the headlines are filled with more bad news about the environment than we have seen for a long time — everything from failed international environmental accords to oceanic dead zones to earthquakes to extreme weather to an unprecedented oil spill. Many…

In the spring season of awards and presentations, Orion staff were especially busy. The magazine won the award for General Excellence at the twenty-first annual Utne Independent Press Awards. This is the second time Orion has earned this prize (we also won in 2004); Editor-in-Chief Chip Blake traveled to Washington DC to accept the award on April 25. That trip came hard on the heels of the National Magazine Awards, which were announced at Lincoln Center on April 22. Orion had a firstever nomination in the Essay category; Chip and Executive Editor Hal Clifford attended the ceremony. Chip, Editor Jennifer Sahn, and Assistant Editor Hannah Fries all traveled to Denver in April for the annual conference of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs. Orion presented two panels that were…

I’VE ALWAYS kind of hated that quote by Edward Abbey about being a half-hearted fanatic (“Be as I am — a reluctant enthusiast… a part-time crusader, a half-hearted fanatic”). Not so much because of the racism and misogyny that characterized some of his work. And not even because of the quote itself. But rather because of how that quote has been too often misused by people who put too much emphasis on the half-hearted, and not nearly enough emphasis on the fanatic. The fundamental truth of our time is that this culture is killing the planet. We can quibble all we want — and quibble too many do — about whether it is killing the planet or merely causing one of the six or seven greatest mass extinctions in the…

THE RAIN HAD JUST STOPPED in the little eastern Kansas town of Osawatomie when thirty thousand people, gathered in an atmosphere not unlike that of a country fair, fell quiet. Their hero, former president Teddy Roosevelt, climbed atop a kitchen table and began to speak in a high, almost falsetto voice, orating amid cheering for ninety minutes. When finished, he had delivered the most controversial and influential address of his career, in which he described a radical new program that was both denounced and celebrated in newspapers across the country. The date was August 31, 1910. The New Nationalism Speech, as it came to be known, emphasized conservation, as did most of Roosevelt’s speeches written by his friend Gifford Pinchot, who had been his conservation chief for the two terms…

Here, a wilderness of wild turkeysthat I pigeon in, shade on the wing & lily-of-the-valleying.Here, gray birches lying down with the silversmithing wind.Clue: Here, what blooms blooms scentlessly, fiercely curledagainst the smithereening spring. Ears ringing, I belly upto my queendom of nimblewill & bicycle chains, greaseslicking my hem the color of gravel with no brookto gravel in. Belled bicycle listing, I play the gamewhere the object is to keep falling. My knees sing.Here, birds nest in the curved road. I confess: I doubtedthe presence of the road & the breathing of the stones untilI became intimate with them. I try not to think of any him.Clue: Here, in the preening field. The bicycle may wellbe a wilder animal…

IN KENTUCKY, the muse might be an older boy who says, “Take ye a slash / o’ this — hit’ll make yore sticker peck out—”or the muse might be the moonshine the boy hands over. Either way, Maurice Manning’s The Common Man begins with a hint of the illicit and a shot of whiskey. Such an initiation forecasts the diction, desire, and occasional delinquency that course through Manning’s fourth collection, which amasses to an oral history of the landscape and community that the poet has consistently and creatively plumbed. Manning’s earlier collections each coalesce around a specific figure: an imagined adolescent (Lawrence Booth’s Book of Visions); Daniel Boone (A Companion for Owls); a breathless shepherd (Bucolics). The eponymous speaker in The Common Man is part listener, whose poems are determined…

Lisa Couturier is the author of a collection of literary essays, The Hopes of Snakes and Other Tales from the Urban Landscape. She lives on an agricultural reserve in Maryland with her family and is writing a memoir about her and her grandfather’s Thoroughbred racehorses. Jessica Greenbaum’s first poetry collection, Inventing Difficulty, was the winner of the 1998 Gerald Cable Book Award. She is the poetry editor for upstreet, and lives in New York City. Michael Hettich’s new book of poems, Like Happiness, is forthcoming from Anhinga Press. He teaches at Miami Dade College. Amy Leach lives in Chicago. She is writing a book about animals, plants, and stars. Barry Lopez is the author of six works of fiction, most recently Resistance, a collection of short stories. BK Loren’s work…

THE FIRST WRITTEN ACCOUNT of a taniwha is most likely the one recorded by Captain Cook during his 1777 voyage. While anchored in Queen Charlotte Sound off the South Island of New Zealand, Cook wrote the following about statements by a local Maori: “We had another piece of intelligence from him, more correctly given, though not confirmed by our own observations, that there are snakes and lizards there of an enormous size. He said, they sometimes seize and devour men.” Maori would not have known a lizard of the size Cook related, and would never have seen a snake, as there are no native snakes in New Zealand. What Cook described, “eight feet in length, and big round as a man’s body,” was most likely a longfin eel. I had…

Every now and again fortune turns a cornerand there dally the first dandelion flowerswhere the jail was razed, and on the stoopsacross the street sit families who had moved inwhen they could only afford the divvied, shyof-true brownstones with a rented view of the five-storyImmigration and Naturalization Services prison,and now they can see straight through the lot over the tops of the dandelions already whiteand blowing right and left, to a street like theirs,where residents have also put up window boxesfor the first time, as if both sides had shiedfrom spiking an inmate’s sense of drowningluck by sending up perennials in the sight lineof her cell but now sit beneath blue, red, and gold bloomswith an open gaze, talking before dinner.…

I WENT TO AN AUCTION last Monday. Not an auction for foreclosed homes. Not an auction for priceless art or jewelry or land. I went to the New Holland Livestock Auction in the Amish and Mennonite country of New Holland, Pennsylvania, where each week horses are sold—though I’d no intention of buying one. I know a thing or two about horses. I spend a significant amount of time with them and can groom them, bathe them, saddle them, walk them, run them on a lead, ride them, feed them, blanket them, work them in a round pen, give them medicine, soak their sore hooves, lift and stretch their hindlegs and forelegs, clean the undersides of their feet, bandage their legs, and minister to their wounds. But I could not foresee,…

LET ME BEGIN by saying I make my living teaching creative writing, teaching young people to observe and honor the world around them and to be rigorous with their every utterance. It is work I deeply love, for in this consumerist culture of ours it is truly something to see some twenty college students — cell phones silent a moment—tumble into the real world through words. All that said, I must admit I’m getting tired of vampire stories. And anything with aliens. Or wizards. Or elves. Or wizards fighting elves, a pack of slobbering aliens waiting to take on the winner. And I have to say I’ve more than had my fill of burnt-world, we-need-a-hero dystopian visions, which is why I approached Steven Amsterdam’s Things We Didn’t See Coming, described…

AMY GREENE’S de but novel is one that sticks with you, gets under your skin, and wrenches your gut. It enchants with the magic of legend, and chills with the meanness that can fester in people. Greene writes a world both delightfully fanciful and painfully real, a testament to the strength of deep roots and the fragility of old ways in an increasingly pavedover world. Somewhere in the hills of Appalachia, the folks of Bloodroot Mountain live in relative isolation from the town twelve miles below. Their children are raised on mountain lore and nurtured by the landscape they know “like [their] bodies, every scar and cleft and fold,” and men and women are variously endowed with mystical qualities, like the ability to heal people or commune with animals, or,…

COYOTES ARE consummate illusionists. Take a western landscape, a few piñon pine gnarled like arthritic knuckles, chamisa blooming like handfuls of sunlight, mesas miraged in the distance, and there, on that wide horizon, they will materialize. Where there was nothing, now there is something, long-legged, loping. They give you their tough-guy glance and, panting, they move on. You barely believe you’ve seen them before they sink back into the earth. You think of the word vanish, and understand the sound of it now, the hard v at the beginning, the hush by the time it ends, how quickly something comes to nothing. The Hubble telescope pointed its powerful lens at a bigger expanse of nothingness than any poet’s wasteland could ever define, and more than ten thousand galaxies appeared, 78…

The Second Life world described in “Get a (Second) Life” (Mac McClelland, March/April 2010) seems to be the logical extension of many social trends — toward global interconnections, instantaneous gratifications, rampant multitasking, encroaching technological absorption, obsession with novelty, and a pervasive adolescent attitude that anything we wish can and must be possible. As the real world gets hotter, dirtier, and more dangerous, as ecosystems and communities are sacrificed piece by piece for economic profit, as ever-increasing demands on our time limit our ability to engage in solving real problems, as politics become progressively more toxic, as we lose the fitness needed to do real physical work, the seductions of virtual worlds will only grow stronger. Are there benefits? Sure, just like there are “benefits” to television. Virtual worlds can be…

He loved frogs, so he spent his afternoonswading in the tall grass, or standing in the leafy waterwhere the stream turned. Charmed by their storiesof woods and muck, he practiced singing with themat dusk at the edge of that pond, while his mother and fathersat talking, with their cocktails, on the porch. As dark fellhis parents called him, most evenings, for dinner,but sometimes they let him stay down there until the frogswere hushed by the cicadas, whose conversationsstartled him back to himself. Then he walkedup to the house, through the tall grass, through the dark,still singing in his own language. Don’t think of him now,drinking in a city bar, talking to strangerswho ignore him. Don’t think of him walking out intothe empty street, slightly drunk. He’ll be fine.Think instead of…

THE BARREN MOUNTAINS rose swiftly from the plain, an accordion of jagged walls from which no water seemed to flow, the vault itself harboring creases of fugitive shadow amid planes of adobe brown and burnt sienna light. Two hours after sunrise little life moved on the plain below, aside from small rodents and their hunters, coyotes and hawks. Less life stirred above in the stone redoubts. The woman in the blue pickup, seen from the high ridgeline, was no more than a dark dot on the gray sage flat, and would have been lost to the eye had she not been following the straight rule of the highway. From behind the steering wheel the black road ahead would appear to terminate at the foot of the mountains, but the woman…

If only the absence of the co-worker whose life’s dull plot you know by heart,or the shiny nose on the tiny bust of the great dead man on the lobby wall.Lean away from the desk, instead toward the window, its view of a bendin the tracks where the bullet trains whoosh by, blurringpresent and past and the many years you hope to have ahead.Then walk home at a loll, letting the lush profusion of nasturtiumand the sound of the phrase itself re-instill the loyalty to beautythat work downplays, savor the way trout tune their flex to turbulenceto survive the whitest water, as well as the triumph of mysteryin the stutter-step flight of a common butterfly,which evades understanding and so ensures the simple questionswill continue to be asked, for example, how…

DIANA BERES FORD-KROEGER is on a mission to teach us that trees are vital to the health of people and the planet. A native of Ireland, with degrees in medical biochemistry and botany, Kroeger now lives on a 160-acre homestead in Ontario where she has spent decades cultivating and becoming intimately familiar with over six thousand species and varieties of flowers, trees, and shrubs. She obviously knows what she’s talking about and it shows in her newest book, The Global Forest, a slender and oddly unsettling collection of short essays. From the opening paragraph to the final page it is clear this is no ordinary book. I was immediately hooked by Kroeger’s poetic language as she speaks of growing up among the fields of Ireland. A remembered mushroom was “huge,…

THEIR NATIVE WATERS span the Pacific Rim, from Kamchatka to Mexico, yet after years of artificial propagation and mass transport, rainbow trout now swim on every continent save Antarctica. They are among the hundred most invasive species in the world. In An Entirely Synthetic Fish, Anders Halverson traces the history, cultivation, and dissemination of rainbow trout, the politics of sport fishing, and various other well-intended programs with unintended consequences. The global spread of the rainbow began in the 1870s when the newly formed United States Fish Commission hit California with the aim of propagating fish to replenish American waters, which had rapidly become devoid of fish due to the construction of dams, deforestation, pollution from sewage and mills, and overfishing. While Americans fished for food as much as for sport,…

SUMMER SALE ON BACK ISSUES Looking for summer reading? Back issues of Orion, all the way back to the first issue in 1982, are available for purchase at the Orion website. They’re as relevant now as they were when they came off the press, and they're 25 percent off through the end of August. EDUCATION IN A CHANGING CLIMATE Join John Calderazzo, SueEllen Campbell, Cindy Thomashow, and others August 1–4, 2010, at Unity College in Maine for a workshop offering powerful and practical ways to reach and educate audiences about climate change. Visit the “for Educators” section at orionmagazine.org. VISIT THE READER’S CORNER Join the expanding conversation about books and media at orionmagazine.org. You’ll find new content posted every few days about books the Orion staff are reading, related reviews…