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Voices: Wet, Wild, and Weird #2

May 17, 2013, by Hank Lentfer

This sound is as wet, wild, and weird as a voice can get. It was picked up by a hydrophone anchored to the bottom of Glacier Bay. Five miles of cable snakes past bath-tub sized halibut, colorful starfish, fluorescent sea pens, clacking crabs, snapping shrimp, and clam siphons the size of your wrist and eventually plugs into a set of speakers continually spilling sound into the little corner office of my friend and neighbor Chris Gabriele who, as a scientist for the Park Service, has devoted her life to trying to fathom what motivates humpback whales to do all the bizarre things they do. That’s a lot of cable out there, I say. For a whale, explains Chris, it’s all about sound—the acoustic habitat is like a tree to a robin, a rock to a barnacle.

Chris calls me up sometimes, says “Listen to this,” and holds her phone to those speakers while I press mine to my head as it fills with whooping hoots, bellowing groans, clicks the size of a federal building, and any manner of indescribable noises emanating from some school-bus sized winged-whale lurking in the cold depths. Sometimes Chris just leaves her phone by the speakers and goes back to her research paper due on Friday, and I let the dishwater get cold and just sit on the couch listening and grinning.

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City Mouse, City Flower: A Discussion of Urban Nature, May 16

May 15, 2013, by Orion staff

Did you know that some of the best places to go birdwatching are in the sewage treatment lagoons of major cities? Not only do creatures like birds and mice survive in cities; they’re thriving and evolving for life there, as a new study recently showed. In fact, if you know where to look, life abounds in so-called urban wastelands, such as vacant lots, road and rail waysides, brownfields, fencerows, dumps, and alleyways.

How much more life is evident in our cities? And how much has our thinking about urban nature evolved in recent years?

Join us for a free live discussion featuring urban ecologists from all over North America, including Beatrix Beisner, co-editor of the new urban ecology guidebook Nature All Around Us, Liam Heneghan of DePaul University/Chicago Wilderness Science Team, and Kevin Anderson, proprietor of the blog Marginal Nature. The event will take place on May 16, at 4 p.m. Eastern/1 p.m. Pacific.

The event is free to join, will be moderated by Orion staff, and is open to all readers and friends. Register here.

Orion hosts live web events every month. Sign up to be alerted by e-mail when a new one is announced.

New Books: Bug Music

May 14, 2013, by Orion staff

This year, in the northeastern U.S., spring and summer bird song will have a sonic partner—the click and whirr of the seventeen-year cicada. In his new book, Bug Music: How Insects Gave Us Rhythm and Noise, author David Rothenberg listens to cicadas and other thrumming, humming insects, and considers the idea that we humans may have learned our own rhythms, beats, and synchronizations from our antennae-bound neighbors. Here’s David on his new book, which completes his trilogy of books on nature and sound, out now from St. Martin’s Press.

Birds, whales, and now insects—you’ve written about and made music with all of them. What is it like moving between these different musical languages? Is it at all like moving between different kinds of human music, say, jazz and throat singing and heavy metal?

You’re right, each one is a genre into itself. Each kind of creature changes the way I think about music, and what music means to me. With insects, each one is a single simple organism that makes complex music only when part of a huge emergent order of which it need not comprehend much beyond its own simple sound. But together, they make a rich complex music of many species. As a human, it is a challenge to join in.

Bug Music makes the case that humans’ sense of rhythm and dance may have arisen out of our coevolution with the sounds of insects. Do you think the wide variation in human music across cultures has something to do with the variation in the vastly different soundscapes in which different cultures developed?

Yes. Just listen to the way the Bayaka pygmies’ songs fit into their rainforest soundscape in the Congo. This is a human song that knows its place in the layers of birds, frogs, and crickets.  Can we in the West ever do as well? (Click here to listen to an audio sample from the Congo, depicted in the sonogram below.)

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Postcard from a Turtle Hospital

May 10, 2013, by Andrew D. Blechman

As editors, the stories we work on inevitably affect us in some way, although some more than others. While working on the photo essay “Tortuga Rising” (May/June 2013), I became fascinated with the plight of sea turtles, Dr. Wallace J. Nichols’s work to save them, and simply charmed by these amazing and gentle creatures.

While editing the feature, I had the opportunity to visit the Mote Aquarium while on holiday in Sarasota, Florida. With help from Dr. Nichols, I was able to take a private tour of Mote’s turtle hospital (who knew!), speak with Mote’s dedicated team of turtle rehabbers, and meet Binx, Chelsea, and Grinch—all patients at the hospital—and then explore the aquarium itself.

Below are photos from the sea turtle exhibit. These turtle specialists have taught the turtles to perform tricks! Although seemingly “untrainable,” many sea turtles can actually be taught to recognize shapes and colors and swim towards them for treats.

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Wildbranch 2013: Apply Today!

May 08, 2013, by Orion staff

The Wildbranch Writing Workshop is the country’s foremost writing workshop for people interested in honing their ability to write honestly and powerfully about the natural world. This year, join Orion editor-in-chief H. Emerson Blake and writers Alison Deming and Robert Michael Pyle for a week of writing and conversation in the rolling hills of Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom.

Over the years, Wildbranch has served as a forum for conversation and community, but it’s also been a home to students and faculty who’ve gone on to produce beautiful writing about the natural world.

This spring, in fact, two books from former Wildbranch students have hit shelves: Kevin M. Bailey’s Billion-Dollar Fish: The Untold Story of Alaska Pollock and Julia Corbett’s Seven Summers, the story of a naturalist-turned-professor who flees city life to pursue a lifelong dream of building a cabin in the Wyoming woods.

Also of interest to prospective Wildbranch students will be Wildbranch: An Anthology of Nature, Environmental, and Place-based Writing, a collection of poetry and essays by more than fifty contributors associated with the Wildbranch Writing Workshops.

The application deadline for this year’s Workshop is May 10—apply today! Learn more and download the application form here.

See you in Vermont!

The Place Where I Write: Maya Smith Janson

May 07, 2013, by Maya Smith Janson

Any attempt to speak to where I write becomes tangled-up with the when and how and why, the where of it existing as just one element in a formula that involves interiors and exteriors, a sort of psychic littoral zone that has to do with looking inward and outward at the same time. Has to do with being stationary and concentrated and mobile and expansive. Both parts equally important, the whole endeavor influenced by factors seasonal and situational and temperamental.

For example, this past January, in order to meet a commitment to write every day, I began rising before dawn and wrote until sunrise. This meant I had an hour or so before daylight and the stirring of my family signaled the end of the day’s early work. The assignment required that I develop a new routine. First rule: no houselights. I stoked the woodstove and boiled water in the dim light provided by my bicycle headlamp. Then, for reasons mostly romantic, I wrote in the small globe of light afforded by one candle, looking through the French doors out to the snowed-over yard.

Five a.m., but not really dark, the yard bright with snow and illuminated by what I came to think of as dual moons. The real one and a small, domesticated one in the form of a solar-powered paper lantern hung on an ornate iron crook in the dormant Budleja bed. The actual moon waned toward mid-month, then waxed to full by its end. It featured large in my writing. Every poem in some way moonie, moon-soaked. (Did I notice a small, brightening of mood in the lines on the page as the moon returned, fattened, taking up more space within the white pines as it drifted from east to west? I did.)

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Voices: Wet, Wild, and Weird #1

May 01, 2013, by Hank Lentfer

The first strands of music and fledging utterances of language stirred in the minds of early humans whose lives were embedded in the deeply complex soundscape of the natural world. Distilled from that complexity is the small suite of sounds endlessly re-combined to form presidential speeches, Inuit riddles, Tibetan prayers, and conversations unfolding around tables and campfires the world round. Also winnowed from the diversity of whistles, howls, and hoots of the natural world are the twelve familiar notes that we continuously re-arrange to create everything from low-down blues to high-flying rock and roll, from foot-tapping Irish reels to angelic choirs.

Just as a piece of cultural and acoustic diversity is buried when the last native speaker of a language dies, there is a great loss when the original source of language and music becomes buried beneath the whine of wheels and drone of jets. I’ve often fantasized about some guy on the Lewis and Clark expedition carrying a parabolic dish and digital recorder alongside his musket and powder bag. Each morning, at daybreak, while his companions kindled the morning fire, he’d walk from camp and capture the voices of a continent unfettered by industrial sounds. He’d record the whisper of tall grasses, the thunder of 10,000 bison hoofs, the rush of a sky filled with passenger pigeons. He’d hear the scream of mountain lions beyond the edge of camp, the gurgle of the Columbia River unimpeded by dams, the sound of waves crashing on a new shore.

When I find myself getting bummed by all we have lost, it helps to remember that our culture is also responsible for the largest conglomeration of protected lands on the planet. The good old U.S. of A., exporter of Big Macs and Coke, is running the world’s grandest experiment in communal land ownership. Nowhere is that more evident than outside my door here in Alaska where the chirps, grunts, drips, growls and songs of the natural world still dominant. With enough hardtack and endurance, I could step off my porch and spend years exploring over 23 million contiguous wild babbling acres of public land.

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Five Questions for Bonnie Nadzam

April 29, 2013, by Orion staff

The March/April 2013 issue of Orion features “Cartography,” a short story by Bonnie Nadzam. It’s a particularly short short story—it spans just two magazine pages—but manages to unfurl a lush fictional world in a handful of well-crafted lines and paragraphs. We spoke with Bonnie about her story, the effect of fiction on the heart, and how, in a way, we’re all mapmakers in the big, big city.

“Cartography” is a story told in second-person; the narrator speaks to a protagonist who, it seems, is also the reader. Who is the narrator, as you imagine him or her?

This is such a hard question for me. It’s been my experience in recent years that as something of an artist (and not, by contrast, as a scholar), there are certain narratological questions that I just need to ignore—philosophical questions about fiction and fictionality that I just have to bypass in order to get on with the work and remain true to the feeling or impulse that it began with. Often these questions manifest just as you’re sensing: Who is the narrator? Why is he/she telling us this, and from where/when? I just don’t know.

The city in this story is a kind of ethereal place, its borders out of sight and its distances vast. What is your experience of cities, and how do they work on your imagination?

I’ve lived in some serious cities (Cleveland, Phoenix, Los Angeles) and in some pretty remote places: (Telluride, CO; Cataldo, ID; in a boat at sea). But here’s a funny thing: both Telluride and Cataldo are Superfund Sites. In the boat, I was collecting, counting and documenting plastic in the Sargasso Sea (and saw, for example, hundreds of miles from the coast, an entire and intact bright orange Tide detergent bottle float past). Practically speaking, ecologically speaking, and in terms of our responsibilities and quality of life, urban places like Los Angeles don’t really have borders. Not metaphorically or figuratively but quite literally, then, we live in one big city.

I was feeling some of this when I wrote “Cartography,” but not in an altogether gloomy way—also and perhaps more so in an empowering way. Humans (myself included, I can tell you…) are both good enough and horrible enough to do anything. Well then, what do we choose to do? I don’t mean in the future, or in terms of a career or a goal, but like right now—in this very minute.

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Ten Reasons to Give the Gift of Orion

April 25, 2013, by Orion staff

There are ten thousand gifts a graduate might expect to open this spring—gifts that suggest productivity, mobility, or a creative spirit. But the graduates you know—be they a child, niece, nephew, sibling, spouse, or friend—deserve a gift that they’ll not just use, but cherish. A gift that celebrates their curiosity and their hope for a better future.

In case you’re still not convinced, here are ten more reasons to give a graduate (or anyone) a gift subscription to Orion:

1. It’s plastic-free, advertising-free, made from recycled paper, and will last a long time.
2. The recipient also gets a free, organic cotton t-shirt.
3. They’ll say, “How beautiful! I love it.”
4. The articles, essay, poetry, and fiction make for great summer reading.
5. They’ll think of you every time it arrives in the mailbox.
6. They can share the magazine with friends.
7. You’re showing you know they care about a better future for the planet.
8. It will inspire recipients to write, photograph, draw, and explore.
9. Each issue will spark their curiosity and inspire them to keep learning about our world.
10. Orion is unique—just like them.

Give a gift that will inspire. Give a gift subscription to Orion.

Letter from Chemung County Jail, #2

April 25, 2013, by Sandra Steingraber

Earlier this month, Orion friend and columnist Sandra Steingraber was sent to an upstate New York prison for blocking a facility used to store hydrofracked natural gas. Sandra has continued to write from jail; her most recent, and final, letter from Chemung County Jail is below. She was released today, shortly after midnight.

My book, Raising Elijah: Protecting Children in an Age of Environmental Crisis, was released in paperback this week. But, being in jail, I was unable to grant interviews or otherwise to participate in its promotion. That’s not a situation that book publicists appreciate, although mine is being very good about it. But, being in here, I feel that I am walking my words.

The fundamental message of Raising Elijah is that the environmental crisis is a crisis of family life, as it robs parents of our ability to carry out our two most basic duties: to protect our children from harm and to provide for their future. When inherently toxic chemicals—including developmental toxicants linked to asthma, birth defects and learning disabilities—are legally allowed to freely circulate in our children’s environment, we can’t protect them. When heat trapping greenhouse gases create extreme weather events that slash the world’s grain harvests (this is happening) and acidify the oceans in ways that threaten the entire marine food chain, starting with plankton (and this is happening too), then we can’t plan for our kids’ futures—no matter how much we sock away in their college funds or Tiger Mom them into athletic or musical mastery.

This crisis requires our urgent attention. And by attention, I mean sustained political action, not intermittent, private worrying. Hence, unless the kids can get there and back, under their own steam, then piano lessons, karate, Little League, play practice, SAT prep, and Scout meetings are cancelled until further notice. Ditto for yoga, date night, and book club (with apologies to my long-suffering publicist).

Look, one in every four mammal species is headed for extinction. The world’s available drinking water is becoming less and less available. Insect pollinators, which provide us one-sixth to one-third of the food we eat, are in trouble. The price index for thirty-three different basic commodities is rising, and financial analysts are predicting shortages of the kind that lead to social unrest. Meanwhile, the world’s leading and most powerful industry is preparing to blow up the nation’s bedrock and frack out the last wisps and drops of gas and oil—releasing inherently toxic chemicals into our communities to do so.

In short, we don’t have time for out-of-town sporting events.

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