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McNally Robinson Bookstore Staff Pick

February 26, 2008

The Future of Nature:
Writing on a Human Ecology from Orion Magazine
Selected and Introduced by Barry Lopez
(Milkweed Editions, $18.00)

One of the casualties of the increasing, and increasingly heard, rhetoric of environmentalism has been our nation’s literature of nature. Orion magazine has become one of the few places to find the contemporary likes of Thoreau, Muir and McPhee.These essays are urgently political, quietly personal and, despite some questionable anthropomorphism of salmon or trees, deeply human discussions of our place in the world around us.

Thanks to Ginger Strand for informing us about this…

Scott Russell Sanders in Best American Essays

February 23, 2008

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Scott Russell Sanders’s story “Conscience” (Orion, Jan/Feb 2006) was listed as a Notable Essay in Best American Essays 2007, edited by David Foster Wallace.

For those of you who are keeping score, Scott has had more full-length articles in Orion than any other author. 

Orion Readers Write Songs Too

February 04, 2008

After reading Bill McKibben’s The Unsung Solution (November/December 2007), a reader writes:

Dear Orion,

As a folk musician, I took Bill McKibben’s statement that there were “no folk songs about waste heat recovery” as a personal challenge. The resulting opus can be heard at my website, under the heading “free songs.”

As listeners may surmise, it was written and recorded in less than an hour.

Thank you,

Amy Martin
http://www.amymartin.org/music.html

If you click on that link and scroll down to “Waste Heat Recovery” you can listen to her song.

Thanks, Amy. 

New Web Exclusives on orionmagazine.org

January 24, 2008

We’re pleased to announce two new web exclusives available at orionmagazine.org.

The first is Dispatches from Alaska, written by Seth Kantner. Seth’s dispatches, which appear every two weeks or so, will give a view of life in the far north different than any other. Seth is the author of the tremendous novel Ordinary Wolves, a book that any Orion reader is bound to enjoy.

The other is The Butterfly Big Year, by Robert Michael Pyle. Bob, who until recently was the author of the Orion column The Tangled Bank, will spend 2008 trying to find as many species of butterflies in the U.S. and Canada as he can. His roughly biweekly reports will tell us what he’s seeing.

Caption: Seth Kantner

Caption: Bob Pyle (with Orion Editorial Assistant Hannah Fries)

Richard Louv Wins Audubon Medal

January 22, 2008

We’ve just learned that the National Audubon Society will award author Richard Louv with its Audubon Medal for sounding the alarm about the health and societal costs of children’s isolation from the natural world – and for launching a growing movement to remedy the problem. ”Leave No Child Inside,” an excerpt from Louv’s influential book, was published in the March/April 2007 Orion .

Two Orion Essays included in Best American Anthology

January 22, 2008

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We’ve only just become aware that two essays we published in 2006 are featured in the 2007 Best American Science and Nature Writing anthology, and another was listed among the Notable Science and Nature essays for 2006.

Both Jeffrey A. Lockwood’s “The Nature of Violence” (January/February 2006) and Lynn Margulis’s and Emily Case’s “The Germs of Life” (November/December 2006) are featured and reprinted in the book.

Victoria Finlay’s “The Tears of Trees” (July/August 2006) was a Notable essay.

Congratulations to all the authors! And to us—that’s a strong showing.

The Tortilla Cycle Reprinted

January 22, 2008

Rebecca Allen’s “The Tortilla Cycle” appears in a reprint in the January/February 2008 World Ark—the publication of Heifer International, a charity that has quite a few devoted fans and contributors at Orion. The article was first published in the May/June 2007 Orion.

25th Anniversary Fund Drive Concludes

January 22, 2008

Development Director Madeline Cantwell writes:

Thanks to everyone who donated to Orion‘s 25th Anniversary Fund!

In celebration of Orion‘s twenty-fifth birthday, last April the Kendeda Fund for Sustainability offered a $50,000 challenge grant if we met our fundraising goal for the second half of 2007.

The goal—an ambitious one for Orion—was set at $200,000, and when the 2007 books closed, $222,294 had been raised!  With the Kendeda challenge, that makes for a grand total of $272,294, more than $20,000 over our goal.

Thanks again to those who gave to this campaign—your contributions will be used to fund the ideas, images, and stories of change you find
in Orion.  As you know, Orion accepts no advertising, and so every single gift received makes for a better magazine.

P.S. Don’t be too sad if you didn’t give this time around; the Orion online donation page is open for business 24/7!  Questions?  email .

The Second Annual Orion Book Award

January 17, 2008

Orion Editor Jennifer Sahn writes:

Magazines and books are close cousins, and at Orion we keep one eye focused on the book world at all times. The Orion Book Award, conferred annually to an outstanding, literary, book-length work that is ecological in context and has as its foundation the human relationship with the natural world, is the programmatic outgrowth of the relationship between Orion and its relatives in book publishing.

This year’s call for nominations went out in mid-December to the Orion Society Board of Advisors, the Contributing Editors of Orion, and a select number of colleagues. The nomination process is now closed, and we have 43 contenders for the 2008 award (which goes to a 2007 book).

Many of these books were either excerpted or reviewed in the magazine over the past year or more, while others we have only just heard about for the first time. The 2008 Orion Book Award selection committee will identify five finalists by late March, and then a winning book and four honorable mentions by early April.

This year’s selection committee is comprised of Linda Hogan, Mark Kurlansky, Kathleen Dean Moore, David Rothenberg, and myself.

To learn more about the Orion Book Award, go here. An Orion Readers’ Choice Award will run parallel to the juried award, allowing readers to vote online for their favorite book.

In a time of pulp nonfiction and an endless stream of lifestyle books, it’s heartening to see how many new books are deserving of recognition from Orion. Thanks go out to everyone who played a role in the making of these books.

Jennifer Sahn
Editor, Orion

Orion’s New Editorial Intern

January 08, 2008

Fresh from Yellowstone National Park, Katie Yale is joining Orion in January to slave away in the bowels of the mailroom. Katie comes at Orion with both barrels blazing—not only is she an accomplished and published poet, she also has an MS degree in environmental studies from the University of Montana and extensive field experience studying critters in Colorado and Yellowstone. Her mentors include Orion columnist Bob Pyle, and Doug Smith, leader of the Yellowstone Wolf Recovery Project. We’re delighted to have Katie on board, and expect her to be with us at the Orion offices at least until June of this year.