The Orion Blog

Interviews with an Octopus

November 10, 2011, by Sy Montgomery

Shortly after Sy Montgomery finished writing “Deep Intellect,” her feature about octopus intelligence in the current issue of Orion, she learned that her subject, Athena, had passed away. Athena’s successor is Octavia, the New England Aquarium’s new Giant Pacific Octopus with whom Sy has visited regularly. On November 15, Orion hosted a live web discussion with Montgomery and other animal intelligence experts about Athena, Octavia, and the intellectual lives of octopuses; listen to an audio recording of the conversation here.

Recently, in Boston, I met Steve Curwood and Eileen Bolinsky, both from the radio program Living on Earth, for a segment they were producing about octopuses. As part of the show, we were hoping for an encounter with the New England Aquarium’s new Giant Pacific Octopus, Octavia.

But Octavia, I knew, was a very different individual from Athena—the subject of “Deep Intellect”—who had been so playful and affectionate with me. Bill Murphy, the keeper who has been involved in the daily lives of five different octopuses over the years, characterized Octavia’s personality this way: “Aggressive and standoffish.”

“Because Athena died suddenly, this one, who came from British Columbia, was a lot bigger, a lot older” than the others when they first joined the aquarium, Wilson Menashi told me. Wilson is the volunteer who built the enrichment cubes to amuse the octopuses at the aquarium, and he’s worked with the animals for seventeen years; he’s known as a bit of an “octopus whisperer.” But Octavia hadn’t warmed up even to him.

Usually, he said, before the octopus on public display nears the end of life (around age three), the aquarium orders a young replacement, an octopus-in-waiting, who gets used to being with people at a young age. But Octavia was older when she was caught; she might have been two or even two-and-a-half already.

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Bookshelf: Swamplandia!

November 04, 2011, by Karen Russell

Karen Russell is the author of the book of short stories St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves and the novel Swamplandia!, reviewed recently in the May/June 2011 issue of Orion. We asked Karen a few questions about the intersecting roles of place and fantasy in her writing.

Whenever I’m asked about the ratio of the real to the fantastic in my work, I will shamelessly plagiarize Flannery O’Connor, who said, “The truth is not distorted here, but rather a distortion is used to get at truth.” Another quote that comes to mind comes from the poet Marianne Moore, who calls poets “literalists of the imagination” and poems themselves “imaginary gardens / with real toads in them.”

When I first started writing stories, eons before I ever did any reflecting on “craft” or “process,” I would just sort of naturally begin with setting, usually an aqueous or a densely wooded one, a literal, concrete place that I could see in my mind’s eye. In St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves, the story “The Stargazer’s Log” I imagined as being set on a sleepy beach like Marco Island, on Florida’s Gulf coast; “Ava Wrestles the Alligator” was set on a failing alligator park in a kind of haunted version of the Everglades; and “Z.Z.‘s Sleepaway Camp for Disordered Dreamers” was a camp on an island of pines where it seemed always to be twilight or midnight, a Midsummer’s Night Dream of a woods.

In Florida, fantasy is our big industry, so I think it’s natural that in my writing I keep returning to settings where the boundary between the real and the fantastic, the natural and the artificial, gets effaced. I was very influenced by the theme parks that surrounded me as a kid in South Florida, these artificial worlds like the Miami Seaquarium that fronted the real ocean, or the Gatorland park in Orlando where you walk through a gaping, cartoon-green archway built to look like an alligator’s jaws in order to see the real thing. Here’s a creature that hasn’t changed in millions of years, and who survived its ancestors, the dinosaurs. It’s like a splinter of time. And while this Mesozoic monster is swimming around an artificial lagoon, children are wandering around the park with balloons, and infants are sucking on rubber pacifiers in their strollers while their dads push them, talking on cell phones.

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Subscribe to Orion on Kindle

November 02, 2011, by Orion staff

Looking for a paperless, portable way to spend time with your favorite Orion writers and artists? This week we’re excited to launch Orion on Kindle. Just like the print and digital versions of the magazine, the Kindle version is brimming with thoughtful essays, poetry, and journalism exploring nature, culture, and place like only Orion can. And at only $1.99 a month, it’s easy to share with friends and family this holiday season—we’re confident that a subscription to Orion beats socks and flavored popcorn, no matter who you’re dealing with.

Inspire someone else, and yourself—subscribe to Orion on Kindle today and get all the articles from our November/December 2011 issue, including Christopher Ketcham’s “The Reign of the One Percenters” and Sy Montgomery’s “Deep Intellect,” plus other features not available on the website. Enjoy!

Taking Back the Street—and the Story

November 01, 2011, by Josh Stearns

In the July/August 2011 issue of Orion, I highlighted the way local communities are taking the media into their own hands—creating innovative community media and digital storytelling projects. The Occupy Wall Street protests are an experiment in this kind of DIY media culture. Occupiers in cities around the world are employing new and old tools to tell their story—from social networks to pamphleteering. In New York City, protesters have even published their own journal—the Occupied Wall Street Journal. Below, my colleague at Free Press, Megan Tady, examines the media’s role in the Occupy movement from the perspective of a few independent journalists on the ground. —Josh Stearns

The “Media Circus” of Occupy Wall Street Coverage

Big news: The establishment media are finally picking up on the Occupy Wall Street story. In fact, Occupy Wall Street coverage increased to nine percent of the overall news hole from October 10–16—up from two percent two weeks prior. As Jon Stewart of the Daily Show said, the media dial has gone from “media blackout” to “media circus.”

Increased airtime and column inches, however, don’t necessarily equal quality reporting. Protest coverage has consisted mostly of reporters and news anchors making sweeping generalizations about a “hippie movement.” Media watchdog groups like Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting say stories have been short on actual facts and long on criticism of the protests. From interviewing scholars and “experts” to speak for the protesters instead of talking with the legions of folks at the encampments themselves, to pinning the movement on a few scantily clad youngsters, the media are fumbling to tell this story in a quick, seamless sound bite.

But why are the mainstream media botching this? And if the mainstream media aren’t telling the full story, who is?

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Orion at Occupy Wall Street

October 26, 2011, by Jennifer Sahn

Yesterday I went down to Liberty Plaza, aka Zuccotti Park, and spent some time talking to folks and handing out photocopies of Christopher Ketcham’s Orion article “The Reign of the One Percenters.” It has been exciting to have that article in production, allowing Orion a somewhat rare opportunity, as a bimonthly publication, to be in sync with current events. Credit for that goes mostly to the author, who pitched the story last winter, believing passionately that income inequality was a problem that our culture had not begun to reckon with in any serious way. Several months and several revisions later, the article is out, and we’ve been sending photocopies of it (as well as boxes of magazines) down to the informal library created by the Occupiers.

I can think of no more important place, at this moment in time, for Orion to be found than the Occupy Wall Street Library, aka The People’s Library. I can think of no more important place for our authors’ books to be found. The People’s Library is organic, democratic, and philanthropic. It is comprised entirely of donated books—donated by individuals, by authors, by bookstores, and by publishers. Using donated software, the Occupiers have begun to catalog the library, which is said to be at about 3,000 titles and growing daily. And they’ve established a free WiFi hotspot for Occupiers and others to use. People browse the stacks—which are organized by genre and stored in plastic tubs—occasionally recommending books to one another. Several librarians occupy a table in a corner of the library, where they catalog incoming books and help others locate titles within the eclectic collection. This is what ingenuity looks like. This is what the gift economy looks like. Here is a group of people who cherish the exchange of ideas, and have worked to create a space where that can freely happen. This is democracy in action.

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Janisse Ray & Friends: Reading in Tallahassee, Florida, November 1

October 25, 2011, by Erik Hoffner

Join frequent Orion writer Janisse Ray along with Lola Haskins and Julie Hauserman as they share their prose and poetry next week in Tallahassee. This evening reading, which takes place on Tuesday, November 1, 2011 at 7:00 p.m, is part of the Natural Areas Association’s annual conference, and it promises to be memorable.

Go here for Google Map directions and further information, or, if you’re local, drop by Florida State University Conference Center Room 208 (555 West Pensacola St, Tallahassee, Florida, 32306).

The event is free and open to the public; seating is general admission. Books will be available for purchase and signing after the reading.

Deep Intellect: Live Discussion of Animal Intelligence with Sy Montgomery & Friends, 11/15

October 22, 2011, by Erik Hoffner

What does an octopus think? What might it feel like to be a bat? On November 15th, authors Sy Montgomery, Marc Bekoff, and aquarist Scott Dowd discussed animal intelligence during Orion’s latest live web event. Listen to the conversation here.

Montgomery’s article, “Deep Intellect,” in the November/December 2011 issue of Orion, explores this fascinating topic through the lens of a particular octopus—Athena—at the New England Aquarium. Her piece sheds light on how these incredible creatures are helping scientists grasp the extent of animal intelligence and the meaning of consciousness.

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

A Conversation with Helena Norberg-Hodge, Part II

October 21, 2011, by Scott Gast

For more than thirty years, Helena Norberg-Hodge has promoted the personal, social, and ecological benefits of local economies. She is an author, filmmaker, and founder and director of the International Society for Ecology and Culture; much of her work has focused on Ladakh, a corner of India whose economy and culture has remained relatively resilient in an age of globalization. On October 18, Norberg-Hodge joined author Richard Heinberg and Orion staff for a live web conversation about the end of economic growth—listen to an audio recording of the discussion here.

I spoke with Norberg-Hodge about her new film, The Economics of Happiness, and the future of local economies on our teeming, changing, still beautiful planet. What follows is the second in a two-part series. —Scott Gast, Editorial Assistant

Scott Gast: We’ve been talking about the kinds of prices we’ve paid, both in the industrialized world and in the developing world, as globalization has taken root. In response to those prices, of course, there’s been no shortage of calls for a different kind of development—a strengthening of local economies being one. But how do you see us actually finding the will, as a civilization, to pursue those alternate paths? Your focus on happiness and cultural vibrancy—on the personal, emotional impacts of globalization and growth, rather than the purely economic or political—comes to mind. Does that make sense?

Helena Norberg-Hodge: I think it does. I believe that those of us who have been making a plea for development that’s kinder to the natural world could do a better job of asking: What are our deeply human needs? What drives us as human beings? What makes us happy?

Across the industrialized world—and that includes my native country, Sweden—people are feeling more and more pressure to run faster and faster. If you want to assure a future for your child in the current dominant system, you have to work even harder, send them to an even better private school, an even more expensive one. And this isn’t done out of some blind greed; it’s done, really, out of fear. The result is a sort of fear-driven development, which, to a great extent, is not irrational. Because the dominant economy creates this kind of artificial scarcity of work and educational opportunities—an artificial scarcity in a world that is more and more crowded.

At a very fundamental level, we need to recognize that since the beginnings of the modern economy, we’ve allowed our leaders to put more and more of our wealth into technologies that use up energy while systematically replacing people. Fuller employment, with more human care, intelligence, and work involved, and less energy—whether it’s in medicine or agriculture or schooling or construction—would be a huge plus.

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A Conversation with Helena Norberg-Hodge, Part I

October 17, 2011, by Scott Gast

For more than thirty years, Helena Norberg-Hodge has promoted the personal, social, and ecological benefits of local economies. She is an author, filmmaker, and the founder and director of the International Society for Ecology and Culture (ISEC); much of her work has focused on Ladakh, a corner of India whose economy and culture has remained relatively intact in an age of globalization. On October 18, Norberg-Hodge joined author Richard Heinberg and Orion staff for a live web conversation about the end of economic growth—listen to an audio recording of their discussion, here.

I spoke with Norberg-Hodge about her new film, The Economics of Happiness, and the future of local economies on our teeming, changing, still beautiful planet. What follows is the first in a two-part series. —Scott Gast, Editorial Assistant

Scott Gast: Your film, The Economics of Happiness, opens with a description of the strange intersection we’re at as a civilization, between an environmental crisis, an economic crisis, and a crisis of the human spirit. It’s this last crisis—the crisis of the human spirit—that the film seems to dedicate most time and attention to. Why? Why, in the midst of all this other trouble, focus on happiness?

Helena Norberg-Hodge: I’ve been waxing on about happiness for a long time because I think it’s time we realize, in the West, how much our notion of “progress” has cost us—how much it’s cost us personally. For me, and for the rest of us in ISEC, it’s clear that the damage we’re doing to the seas and to the earth, to the birds and to the bees, is a damage that we’re inflicting on our selves. Once that becomes really clear, I think we’ll have a much stronger movement for change.

SG: And for me, as a viewer of the film, the moments of stark, personal confrontation with that damage are the most moving. There’s a scene in the film, near the end, in which a few women, who I assume are Ladakhi women, are standing in a Western nursing home, looking with a sort of sadness and pity at a white woman who’s sick in bed, watching TV alone. It’s an extraordinarily moving image. And it seems to me that that sort of thing—the emotion of it—is an important driver of cultural change.

HNH: I agree. There’s far too little awareness about the high price we’ve paid for our path of progress. And there’s been very little articulated about what it has meant to lose community—not only in terms of a human connection, but also in the sense of a communion with the rest of life.

From my point of view—and there’s plenty of evidence to back it up—that’s the fundamental reason for most of today’s human malaise, including an epidemic of depression in the Western world, and an epidemic of self rejection that takes the form of things like plastic surgery at a young age. And now, throughout the so-called Third World, where there’s media there’s even a desire for lighter skin, for blue eyes—we touch on all of that in the film. This is a terrible, terrible price that we’ve paid, and it’s something that is simply not recognized or articulated enough.

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Bookshelf: The End of Growth

October 11, 2011, by Richard Heinberg

Before Occupiers swarmed Wall Street, and before Lehman Brothers fell, Richard Heinberg was writing about a growth economy with nowhere left to grow. His newest book, The End of Growth, is already in the hands of the Liberty Square protesters; and on October 18, Heinberg joined filmmaker Helena Norberg-Hodge and Orion staff for a live web discussion about the end of growth, and what it means for the #Occupy movement. Listen to an audio recording of the conversation, here. What follows is Heinberg’s recent message to the Occupiers.

Here’s a fact that’s hard for all Americans to swallow: economic growth is over. Given the finite nature of our planet and its resources, the recent trend of economic expansion was destined to end. No stimulus package or slashing of social programs is going to flip the economy back to an expansionary trajectory. We’ve hit the proverbial wall, and this will be the defining reality of our lives from now on.

The growth-seeking political-economic system has failed us—and that system is dominated by Wall Street. “Goldman Sachs rules the world,” trader Alessio Rastani told us in a now-viral BBC interview. I met people like Rastani in researching The End of Growth. At one lavish conference, eight hundred global investors packed a hotel ballroom to consider climate change. There was no talk of how to avert floods and droughts. Instead, the discussion turned on how to profit from global warming with—no joke—weather derivatives. These folks were just doing their job, despite any private feelings of concern, remorse, or dread. And each was getting paid enough to single-handedly fund a midsize school district.

Both Wall Street and Washington are trying to do something impossible: grow human consumption forever in a world of limited energy, minerals, water, topsoil, and biodiversity, while protecting and expanding the riches of the top 1 percent.

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