Blog

New Books: Trash Animals

June 19, 2013, by Orion staff

Why are some species admired or beloved while others are despised? An eagle or hawk circling overhead inspires excited sounds and the whipping-out of binoculars, while gulls and rats are ignored or openly reviled.

From pigeons to prairie dogs, Trash Animals: How We Live with Nature’s Filthy, Feral, Invasive, and Unwanted Species, out this spring from University of Minnesota Press, offers reflections on reviled animals and their place in contemporary life. Each essay in the collection focuses on a so-called “trash species”—coyotes, carp, cockroaches, magpies, and lubber grasshoppers, among others—examining the biology and behavior of each in contrast to cultural assumptions about them.

The collection includes work from fifteen different contributors, including Orion friends and contributors Kathleen Dean Moore, Lisa Couturier, Jeffrey Lockwood, Michael P. Branch, and Andrew Blechman, the magazine’s managing editor.

Here’s Kathleen Dean Moore on packrat philosophy, from her essay “The Parables of the Rats and Mice”:

In a mountain cabin in Colorado many years ago, when Frank and I were very young, we were annoyed each night be a packrat. It was a lovely brown rat with a softly furred tail, but it pooped on the dishtowels and skittered and crashed all night long, chewing up tin foil and Styrofoam cups. Plus, it was a prime suspect in the disappearance of a bike-lock key. Not really capital offenses, as I think about it now, but we decided to put out poison. In those days, rat poison was a waxy substance in bottle caps. Fools, we put out two. In the morning, one of the bottle caps was gone, and in its place, the rat had left a quarter.

read more →

Voices: Wet, Wild, and Weird #4

June 17, 2013, by Hank Lentfer

What does a furtive, feathered, woodland creature with a pea-sized heart have in common with a deep-water behemoth with nostrils big enough to put your head into?

I’m not sure either. But I do know that last week at twilight, while sleeping in a tent pitched along the beach of a wooded island, I was lifted from sleep by the cathedral of sounds pouring from a hermit thrush and then slapped fully awake by the explosion of breath roaring from the giant nostrils of a humpback whale.

read more →

Seven Lengths of Vermont: An Animal 273 Miles Long

June 14, 2013, by Leath Tonino

The second in an eight-part series in which the author travels the length of Vermont, his home state, via various modes of locomotion.

It’s hard to say much about the Long Trail because you can never say enough. You drive up to the Canadian border on a gray, windy morning in early October with a backpack full of food and a guidebook in your pocket. You walk for three weeks through a rain of colored leaves—273 miles of root, rock, and black mud grabbing at your boots. You climb mountains, drink from springs, watch moths and stars. Weather washes over you like thoughts and your thoughts become like weather. Sometimes you’re happy, sometimes sad, sometimes bored. When you reach Massachusetts—the end of the line—it’s snowing.

What summary could ever do justice to an experience so rich and varied? The Long Trail, America’s oldest long-distance hiking trail, reminds me of Aristotle’s idea of “an animal a thousand miles long”—we can focus on little pieces of the animal at any given time, but never on the whole thing at once. And we can talk about those little pieces we’ve encountered—the summit of Mt. Mansfield, the Clarendon Gorge, a certain stone or stump—but our words won’t ever wrap around the whole vast thing.

The Long Trail is huge, powerful; it’s a beast whose back I’ve walked. I recently completed my second through-hike of the trail. Southbound. Twenty days. A week of rain, a week of sun, a week of cold. But there I go already, reducing the animal to direction, duration, and a meteorological report. It’s hard not to describe my hike this way, yet it also seems unfair.

Countless images come back to me now, sitting here at my desk, each a little anecdote linked to a precise moment in time and a point on the map. The images coat the surfaces of my thoughts like birch leaves papering over a puddle. I search for some theme or design that will turn the leaves into a coherent story, but find nothing. And so they just float there on the puddle, layered and beautiful and random.

Day 2

I’ve climbed up out of the hardwoods onto a narrow ridge that climbs higher still, into the mist. This is the spruce-fir zone, all inky green and needled and boggy. My face is turned down to the trail, as it has been for hours and will be for hours more. The footwork is tricky, mesmerizing. I feel drugged with repetition: step after step, breath after breath. In my ears there’s only the beat of my walking. The world has contracted around my focus.

read more →

Letter from Tashkent

June 12, 2013, by Christopher Merrill

Christopher Merrill’s essay in the May/June 2013 issue of Orion, “The New Face of War,” written largely from the author’s frequent travels to an increasingly thirsty Middle East, depicts the change coming to how we fight and what we fight over. On June 18, join Christopher and guests for a live call-in discussion about the future of war—learn more and register here.

The vice rector, studying the writers’ biographies compiled by the embassy and translated into Uzbek, cut off a student’s question to our panel and turned to me.

“What is your interest in water?” he said.

Our session on contemporary American literature, at the National University in Tashkent, had taken an unexpected turn. My fellow writers looked at me. A line from Thomas De Quincy’s Confessions of an Opium Eater—“It was a year of brilliant water”—had furnished the epigraph and title for a collection of my poems, Brilliant Water, which had nothing to do with the issue the vice rector wanted me to address: the shrinking Aral Sea, which lies between Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan.

I began with a story: how in my childhood a hurricane, making landfall on the south shore of Long Island, had swept my family’s house out to sea, sparing only my bedroom—a fact that once inspired Richard Nelson to observe that Native American elders would interpret this to mean that I was destined to witness great chaos from the safety of my bedroom.

“Great chaos within his bedroom!” replied a friend.

This drew laughter from the students in Tashkent. Likewise my decision to pour a glass of water from a plastic bottle set before the microphone. What the hurricane impressed upon me, I explained, was the power of nature to upend our lives—a recurring theme in my work.

read more →

New Books: Weird Life

June 11, 2013, by David Toomey

From bacteria near undersea hydrothermal vents to single-celled algae in Antarctic ice, scientists have learned that life persists in some of Earth’s most extreme environments. David Toomey’s new book, Weird Life: The Search for Life That Is Very, Very Different from Our Own, explores whether the universe might harbor life even more extreme than these extremophiles. Here’s David on the concept of panspermia, the possibility that our most distant ancestors could be of extraterrestrial origin.

In the nineteenth century, many natural philosophers believed that life arose spontaneously from inorganic matter, and that it was arising continuously by a process they called spontaneous generation. In 1860, French chemist and microbiologist Louis Pasteur effectively put an end to such ideas. After conducting a series of careful experiments in which a meat broth was kept separate from contamination by microorganisms, he found that after an extended period, the broth showed no new growth. In short, spontaneous generation had not occurred. It followed that life arose only from other life, and that life’s ultimate origin was sometime in the past, perhaps a very distant past. Many natural philosophers assumed that that origin was on Earth. Many, but not all. A few years after Pasteur’s experiments, British physicist Lord William Thomson Kelvin suggested that the first life on Earth might have arrived from elsewhere via “seed-bearing meteoric stones.”

In the second half of the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, scientists had no means to replicate the journey of an organism through space. For this reason Kelvin’s hypothesis, which has come to be called “exogenesis,” was largely untestable, and it was filed away among science’s unanswered—and perhaps unanswerable—questions.

The few scientists who did entertain the possibility of exogenesis had difficulty naming an organism that might be up for the trip. Space, after all, is a notoriously hostile environment. Then, in the 1970s, biologists began to discover a great many life forms that survived and even thrived in some very unpleasant conditions, conditions that most of us would call extreme. There were tube worms in the scalding hot water near hydrothermal vents in the ocean floor, algae in the slushy brine in veins of Antarctic ice, microbes in water as acidic as that in an automobile’s battery, and even a fungus in the water core of the Chernobyl nuclear reactor, the last metabolizing in a place whose radiation levels were a thousand times greater than that which would kill a human. Organisms that might endure the rigors space travel seemed within the realm of the possible.

read more →

Five Questions for the Editors of Utne Reader

June 10, 2013, by Orion staff

Each year, the Utne Reader, the twenty-nine-year-old magazine that publishes work from the best of the alternative press, recognizes another publication with its Utne Media Award. This year, Orion was a finalist in the award’s general excellence category. We asked Utne editors Christian Williams, Suzanne Lindgren, and Sam Ross-Brown about the magazine, the award, and what it’s like to maintain the greatest library of independent magazines under one roof.

For those who may be new to the Utne Reader, can you tell us a bit about the magazine? What do you aim to do with each issue?

Editor-in-chief Christian Williams: When Eric Utne printed the first issue of Utne Reader back in 1984, he called his digest of reprints and excerpts “the best of the alternative press.” His goal was to shine a spotlight on the groundbreaking ideas and visionary voices flying under the radar of mainstream, print-based media. Simply put, if it was surprising, cutting edge, or thought provoking, Eric would share it with his readers.

While we have a much larger well of information to work with now thanks to the internet, we’re carrying on Eric’s mission twenty-nine years later. We know we don’t have the magic bullet answers to the problems that this world faces, but the first step toward finding solutions is thinking about all of the angles of a particular issue and engaging one another in thoughtful, respectful conversations. Our aim with every issue of the magazine is to provide the fuel for those conversations, and to emphasize the active role that all of us need to play if we hope to leave this world better than we found it.

read more →

The Rise of the Megafarms

June 07, 2013, by Dena Jones

The recently announced agreement to purchase the world’s largest pork producer, U.S.-based Smithfield Foods, by Shuanghui International, a giant Chinese meat processing company, has garnered significant attention from the agricultural industry and beyond. Concerns are being raised regarding potential impacts to the environment, food safety, and the welfare of animals and agricultural workers—on both sides of the sale.

China’s food industry has been plagued by scandals in recent years; Shuanghai itself was caught feeding livestock a chemical harmful to people back in 2011. In 2008, tainted milk formula sickened hundreds of thousands of Chinese babies and killed a half dozen. Earlier this year, thousands of dead pigs were discovered floating in rivers near Shanghai, and just last week, more than 100 Chinese workers died when a locked poultry slaughterhouse caught fire.

The buyout of Smithfield is expected to increase U.S. pork exports to China, currently the world’s largest consumer of pork products. Increased production under Smithfield’s intensive, highly integrated structure, would lead to increased manure production, and a potential increase in related air and water pollution in the U.S.

As to the welfare of pigs, the Smithfield sale has potential to be both advantageous and problematic. Exporting Smithfield’s production practices to China would likely lead to improvements in the care of pigs in that country during transport and at slaughter. The treatment of animals on the farm, however, is another story. Intensification and consolidation of pig farming in China will result in the replacement of thousands of small family farms with massive animal feeding operations, where pigs are crammed by the thousands into windowless sheds, fed antibiotics to stave off disease, and then mutilated with the clipping of their tails and teeth to allow such close confinement.

read more →

On the Shelf: Jill Sisson Quinn

June 05, 2013, by Jill Sisson Quinn

As an English teacher, I do a lot of reading (and re-reading) of the typical high school fare: research paper drafts and personal narratives, Julius Caesar, To Kill a Mockingbird. Our seniors graduate two weeks before school ends, so when I found myself with one junior in a senior class, I devised a plan to get us both out of the mold. For the last two weeks of school we would have a “book club.” This is a kid who recently wrote a very convincing paper proving through quantum physics that free will does not exist. I wanted to give him one of those non-required texts I had found so eye-opening at that age: Robert Pirsig’s Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Daniel Quinn’s Ishmael. Or something I still find mind-blowing every time I read it, like anything by Milan Kundera, especially The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. Or perhaps, I thought, we could tackle some Tolstoy or Dostoevsky. But I decided to make two rules: he must pick the book and it must be something neither of us has read.

“I want to read World War Z by Max Brooks,” he said. So there you have it. I am currently a third of the way through a documentary-style collection of first-person accounts of the zombie apocalypse, sprinkled with a little social and political satire. I’m looking forward to our first discussion and to the essay question based on the book that I’ll need to come up with for his “final.” (Any suggestions? Submit them in the comments below!)

To counter the blood and gore of World War Z, I am also reading David Gessner’s Return of the Osprey, a pleasant record of the comeback of ospreys at his Cape Cod home, post-DDT. I find this book very different from what I’ve read (and loved) of Gessner so far: I’m on page forty-four and I don’t think I’ve encountered any profanity.

read more →

The Future of War: A Discussion of How We’ll Fight Next, June 18

June 04, 2013, by Orion staff

War has been around for a very long time, and, unfortunately, it’s likely to continue in the future. But how humans fight—and what we fight over—changes with the times.

In the new issue of Orion, Christopher Merrill shares observations from his hectic travel schedule as director of the International Writing Program for the University of Iowa—a role that casts him as a kind of cultural envoy for the United States. Merrill finds himself in the midst of conflict on a regular basis, whether it’s in Burma or Baghdad, and he synthesized his experiences in the essay “The New Face of War.”

On June 18, at 4 p.m. Eastern/1 p.m. Pacific, join Christopher Merrill and guests Christian Parenti, Jodie Evans, and Leah Bolger for a free live discussion of Merrill’s essay and the future of war in an increasingly unpredictable world.

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.

Voices: Wet, Wild, and Weird #3

June 03, 2013, by Hank Lentfer

There’s a chunk of bedrock rising from the cold waters of Glacier Bay to form a little scrap of an island topped with a tuft of spruce trees. The rock has not always been in Glacier Bay. In fact, a mere 400 million years ago it was not a rock at all but a growing blanket of broken shrimp legs and abandoned clam shells settling into the mud and muck of a tropical backwater lagoon.

Heat, pressure, and time molded the bits, parts, and goo into a solid mass, which immediately began (thanks to the restless wandering of the ocean’s crust) making its way north and slightly east on a collision course with my backyard. When the former lagoon ground against the leading edge of North America, it was scrapped from the ocean floor with a continental-sized spatula.

All that scrapping and grinding broke the rock into island-sized chunks—one of which we boated past last week and, since the clacking kittiwakes, piping oystercatchers, whistling guillemots, and bellowing sea lions were making such a glorious racket, all three of us aboard the boat scrambled for the microphones faster than a passing puffin.

read more →