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Orion at the Environmental Film Festival in the Nation's Capital

March 30, 2012, by Emily Glaser

Orion was proud to be a media sponsor of the twentieth annual Environmental Film Festival in the Nation’s Capital, March 13-25. The festival, which screened more than 180 films at 68 venues around Washington DC, seeks to advance public understanding of the environment through the power of film.

Editor-in-Chief Chip Blake, Managing Director Madeline Cantwell, and Communications Associate Emily Glaser traveled to Washington to attend several film screenings, and to host a reader meet-up at Busboys & Poets on 5th and K Streets.

On Friday evening, Chip, along with Caroline Gabel, the EFF board chair, and Kate Christen, an environmental historian, introduced the film Life Size Memories at the National Zoo; on Saturday, rain and several political rallies didn’t keep audiences from a screening of the 2011 Jackson Hole Film Festival winners (or from grabbing free copies of the magazine) at the National Museum of Natural History.

Orion thanks all the dedicated staff of the Environmental Film Festival, especially Flo Stone and Helen Strong, for helping to bring Orion and environmental issues to such a varied audience. As Chip said before the screening of Life Size Memories, the arts teach us to think differently and force us to ask different questions about what we want from our lives and from the world.

We’ll be doing more traveling around the country this year, so if you missed us in DC, stay tuned here on the blog for updates about future Orion appearances and reader meet-ups.

Five Questions for Duncan Crary

March 29, 2012, by Scott Gast

A few years ago, journalist Duncan Crary interviewed the author James Howard Kunstler; the two spoke for nearly three hours. Now, four years later, Crary and Kunstler are ready to release the two hundredth episode of the KunstlerCast, a weekly talk show about “the tragic comedy of suburban sprawl.” Many of these conversations are collected in Crary’s new book, The KunstlerCast: Conversations with James Howard Kunstler, out now from New Society Publishers. I spoke with the author last week about podcasting, urban design, the particular sadness of sidewalk shrubbery, and much else.

What interests you about the podcast format? Does it help you somehow talk about things you otherwise couldn’t?

Podcasting allows me to present a new voice to the world. A lot of people know Jim Kunstler as a book writer; that’s his most polished voice, his nonfiction book-writer voice. Some people have seen him give a formal lecture, but, in podcasting, I allow him to present something more casual to the world. The format has also allowed us to just keep talking and talking and talking about everything for years.

Humor is a real presence in this book. What’s the role of humor in these conversations?

Humor is vital. I don’t think people would listen to either one of us if we weren’t having fun and being funny. Jim is the resident comedian, but I crack a few jokes here and there. I’ve even had people approach me at conferences and stuff, saying, “You guys can be talking about the darkest subject, but it’ll still leave me laughing.”

The darker the show is, the funnier the sign off usually is. Jim’s trademark expression is “There’s nothing funnier than unhappiness,” which is a Samuel Beckett line. It’s a dark sense of humor.

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New Books: Cabin Fever

March 27, 2012, by Tom Montgomery Fate

“I am a piece of art,” wrote Tom Montgomery Fate in his 2008 Orion essay “The Art of Dying.” Alert readers may notice glimmers of that essay in Fate’s new book, Cabin Fever, which, in some ways, stretches the notion of body and life as art in directions reminiscent of Thoreau. We asked the author about the beginnings of Cabin Fever—the story of Fate’s efforts to live deliberately in the Michigan woods—out now from Beacon Press.

The idea for Cabin Fever came during a sabbatical year, when I had decided to do a study of Walden and Thoreau’s journals. The more I read the more startled I became about Thoreau’s enduring relevance. His commitment to the environment, his material self-sufficiency, and his “less is more” economics powerfully resonates in a high-tech, high-speed culture, which excels at making waste and war.

Despite the vast distances of time and culture, I soon began to read Thoreau’s artful interrogation of his life at Walden Pond as a critique of my own. So I decided to write a nature memoir that was a modern conversation with Thoreau, but from a very different perspective—that of a harried father of three living in an affluent suburb. At the time, I was also trying to build a cabin in the woods on our communal farm in Michigan—so the timing for the project was just right.

Thoreau himself gave me more motivation. In the first chapter of Walden he seems to anticipate those readers who would naively aspire to his ideals: “I would not have anyone adopt my mode of living,” he writes. “But I would have each one be very careful to find out and pursue his own way.” Even when no one would buy his books, and long before there were Thoreau “wannabes,” he advised readers to listen for their own drummer, and find their own way through the forest.

I found the organizing principle for the book in the one word that I think best describes Thoreau: deliberate––as in “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately.” I discovered that deliberate is etymologically tied to libra, and libration—to the two-pan scale of justice. I began to try to imagine Thoreau’s quest for a deliberate life as a search for balance: first, as a search for balance within himself––as a person and as a writer—a balance between the I and the eye, between self and world, but also between many other things.

Each chapter in Cabin Fever is a deliberation on two significant aspects of human experience: nature and technology, reason and instinct, art and activism, love and sex, religion and spirituality, and many others. My hope is that each chapter will feel like an invitation to readers—to consider their own struggles for balance in their own lives—and a reintroduction to Thoreau’s increasingly pertinent work.

Tom Montgomery Fate is the author of Beyond the White Noise and Steady and Trembling. He teaches at College of DuPage in Glen Ellyn, Illinois.

Breaking Up with the Sierra Club

March 23, 2012, by Sandra Steingraber

Orion‘s search for a more truthful relationship between humans and the natural world occasionally calls for the expression of outrage. The more we learn about a gas-drilling practice called hydraulic fracturing—or “fracking”—the more we see it as a zenith of violence and disconnect, impulses that seem to be gathering on the horizon like thunder clouds.

Long-time friend and Orion columnist Sandra Steingraber has been particularly vocal about the dangers of fracking. Her columns in recent issues of the magazine have frequently been dedicated to the issue; and last year, after receiving a Heinz Award for her work, Steingraber donated the cash prize to the fight against fracking in her home state of New York.

In February, Time magazine broke the news that the Sierra Club, an old and respected environmental defender, had, for three years, accepted $25 million from Chesapeake Energy, one of the largest gas-drillers in the world. (In 2010, Michael Brune, the Sierra Club’s new executive director, refused further donations from the company.) The story prompted Steingraber to write an open letter to the Club, posted below. We invite you to read the letter, which testifies to the confusion, fear, and outrage that’s pouring out of communities in gasland—but which is also, importantly, a bold call to courage.

No right way is easy. . . .We must risk our lives to save them.
—John Muir, Sierra Club’s founder

Dear Sierra Club,

I’m through with you. 

For years we had a great relationship based on mutual admiration. You gave a glowing review of my first book, Living Downstream—a review that appeared in the pages of Sierra magazine and hailed me as “the new Rachel Carson.” Since 1999 that phrase has linked us together in all the press materials that my publicist sends out. Your name appears with mine on the flaps of my book jackets, in the biography that introduces me at the speaker’s podium, and in the press release that announced, last fall, that I was one of the lucky recipients of a $100,000 Heinz Award for my research and writing on the environment.

I was proud to be affiliated with you. I hoped to live up to the moniker you bestowed upon me.

But more than a month has past since your executive director, Michael Brune, admitted in Time magazine that the Sierra Club had, between 2007 and 2010, clandestinely accepted $25 million from the fracking industry, with most of the donations coming from Chesapeake Energy. Corporate Crime Reporter was hot on the trail of the story when it broke in Time.

From the start, Brune’s declaration seemed less an acknowledgement of wrongdoing than an attempt to minister to a looming public relations problem. Would someone truly interested in atonement seek credit for choosing not to take additional millions of gas industry dollars (“Why the Sierra Club Turned Down $26 Million in Contributions from Natural Gas Interests”)?

Here, on top of the Marcellus Shale, along the border between Pennsylvania and New York—where we are surrounded by land leased to the gas industry; where we live in fear that our water will be ruined, our mortgages called in, our teenage children killed in fiery wrecks with 18-wheelers hauling toxic fracking waste on our rural, icy back roads; where we cash out our vacation days to board predawn buses to rallies and public hearings; where we fundraise, donate, testify, phone bank, lobby, submit public comments, sign up for trainings in nonviolent civil disobedience; where our children ask if we will be arrested, if we will have to move, if we will die, and what will happen to the bats, the honeybees, the black bears, the grapevines, the apple orchards, the cows’ milk; where we have learned all about casing failures, blow-outs, gas flares, clear-cuts, legal exemptions, the benzene content of production fluid, the radioactive content of drill cuttings; where people suddenly start sobbing in church and no one needs to ask why—here in the crosshairs of Chesapeake Energy, Michael Brune’s announcement was met with a kind of stunned confusion.

The Sierra Club had taken money, gobs of it, from an industry that we in the grassroots have been in the fight of our lives to oppose. The largest, most venerable environmental organization in the United States secretly aligned with the very company that seeks to occupy our land, turn it inside out, blow it apart, fill it with poison. All for the goal of extracting a powerful heat-trapping gas, methane, that plays a significant role in climate change.

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Five Questions for Michael Shuman

March 20, 2012, by E. Hoffner

While Wall Street cheerleaders hail shaky evidence of an economic recovery, what usually goes unreported is the fact that local businesses comprise more than half the economy by output and jobs. A new book by Michael Shuman, Local Dollars, Local Sense, asks why it is that so few of us are able to invest in those local businesses, as opposed to the Wall Street banks largely responsible for our current troubles. On March 22, join Shuman for Orion’s next live web event, during which he’ll discuss opportunities for local investment and answer listener questions. Register here.

Your book notes that Americans have $30 trillion in long-term savings (mutual funds, bonds, stocks, pensions) tied up on Wall Street. Why don’t we invest that locally?

It’s not that the 99 percent are prohibited from investing in firms that are small—it’s just that the legal costs of complying with the SEC rules are so high that almost no small business bothers. The historical reason for these complicated rules was to prevent Bernie Madoff and his ilk from selling Florida swampland to Grandma. But as we’ve learned with eBay, you don’t need to keep the masses out of the marketplace to prevent fraud—all you need to do is provide peer feedback on buyers and sellers, and the marketplace polices itself.

On that topic, you were supportive of something called The Entrepreneur Access to Capital Act, HR 2930. What came of that bill?

This week is a watershed moment to end what I sometimes call “investment apartheid,” because the Senate finally came up with a compromise bill. The House overwhelmingly supported reform already, and President Obama says he’s prepared to sign.

And what is the Act meant to do?

It would basically eliminate the legal hassle, red tape, and expense for small businesses that seek small investments from the 99 percent. Under the Senate bill, every American will be able to invest two thousand dollars, per company, per year—or 5 percent of their annual income, whichever is greater.

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Poetry: “Be Here First”

March 16, 2012, by Orion staff

Spring’s wet breath is lifting life out of the soil, and we can’t wait to get out and splash in a puddle or two. Here’s a poem from our March/April 2009 issue, by Ellen Doré Watson (who’ll be reading her work, tonight, in Williamstown, Mass.!)—just the thing for the coming months in which everything’s “eager, rude and alive.”

Be Here First

I don’t know my trees but I know my trees.
Their angling for what has spurned them;
their spitting and drooling, the battered

crocuses at their feet. We share the roofline,
the cesspool, I’m responsible for all that salt.
From my stone stoop I watch the lilac’s sun-

starved horizontal heroics, the still-naked
redbud shrugging off bitty unlit lights.
Neglect leans back on the lawn chair.

Must we dislike ourselves to change? 
Sick of every other part of me, I approve
my hand slobbered by the horse’s jawing

a hacked apple. I say fear is behind our
everything. Or brazenness, which is just
a jacket fear puts on. The mare’s sudden

stillness says look: fox. The world as ever
offering now distraction, now danger.
But no. How much I owe the trees, the hissing

raccoon outsmarting my heart. The shed
moving towards ruin in its own slow time.
There’s something sprouting on the kitchen

table that’s not supposed to. Everything
eager, rude and alive. Not just the knotweed
but the crows’ hideous vowels; buds blasted

open or whipped young off the tree. Take your
pick: the ridge hurtling for the last rag of snow
or simply lifting off with the first smack of dawn.

- Ellen Doré Watson

Read more poetry published in Orion, here.

In the Hall of North American Mammals

March 13, 2012, by Brian Doyle

Recently I was standing in the delicious dim of a museum I had not savored since I was a small boy, many years ago, when the dinosaurs were young; I was staring at the otters in a sort of trance, remembering being in this exact reverie nearly fifty years ago, and thinking Manhattanish thoughts of salted pretzels bigger than your hand, and slightly burnt, and roasted chestnuts, and taxicab drivers cursing in Urdu, and drifts of straw near the horse carriages, and the whistle of hotel guys flagging cabs in their long gray cossack coats, when I noticed a small girl gaping at the otters also, and an eternity went by like a meditative freight train, and we have been absorbed by otters for many thousands of years, right?

Certainly thousands of us have stared at them thinking meat thoughts, and how to steal their excellent coats, and how to persuade them to harvest fish for us, perhaps, but I’d bet far more millions of hours we gawked at them in sheer wonder, a quiet crush, a sort of yearning astonishment, as if they are our smaller cousins, easier in the world, muddy and playful, water-addled, never still for a moment, until they’re stuffed and frozen in time in the Hall of North American Mammals.

After a while an uncle or dad comes to reclaim the small girl, and she leaves reluctantly, and she is me, and it is my father saying do you want to spend your whole day with the otters?

Brian Doyle is the editor of Portland Magazine at the University of Portland, and the author of ten books, including, most recently, the novel Mink River.

Five Questions for Flo Stone

March 09, 2012, by E. Hoffner

During her fifteen years at the helm of public programming at the American Museum of Natural History, Flo Stone learned that film was a great draw. In 1993, Stone founded the Environmental Film Festival in the Nation’s Capital (EFF), an event that celebrates its 20th anniversary this month. From March 13th to the 25th, over 30,000 people will gather in locations all over Washington, DC for screenings of 180 different films—from documentaries to animated features. Orion is a proud media sponsor of this year’s Festival, and several staff members will be in attendance and hosting reader meetups. Watch our Facebook page for details.

What’s the role of film in dealing with our environmental challenges?

In the first years of the EFF, people often asked: why environmental films? To attract large audiences, some suggested that we drop the word “environment,” but, for me, the environment is all encompassing and central to our life and future.

Film tells stories in so many different ways. We need talented filmmakers to give us unforgettable experiences and a greater understanding of the challenges we face. Never underestimate the power of film at its most compelling and artistic.

What has surprised you about the films you’ve screened over the years?

The range of responses often amazes me. Film is a subjective medium—a film may offend one person and not faze another. Once, a staff member on a written evaluation described a film as the best that year, while a loyal volunteer wrote that it was impossible to understand how such a boring, confused look at pollution had been allowed in the lineup! And we’ve been challenged by people not wanting us to screen certain films: Gasland, The World According to Monsanto, and The Price of Sugar come to mind. We’ve always shown what we’ve scheduled, though.

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Local Dollars, Local Sense: Live Web Event with Michael Shuman, March 22

March 07, 2012, by Orion staff

UPDATE: listen to the audio recording of this event.

Not even 1 percent of Americans’ long-term savings are invested locally, largely because it’s not possible under the current system. But what would our towns look like if a larger fraction of this $30 trillion was invested at home?

Orion has published numerous articles over the years exploring how healthy local economies might work, and Michael Shuman’s new book, Local Dollars, Local Sense, adds importantly to the topic. In it, he details how local investing can be done, using a variety of approaches from cooperatives to local exchanges.

Learn about options for shifting your money from Wall Street to Main Street during our next live web event, March 22nd at 7 p.m. Eastern, 4 p.m. Pacific. Shuman will discuss the rules that preclude 99 percent of Americans from investing locally, illustrate the alternatives, and answer listener questions. It’s free to join, will be moderated by Orion staff, and 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.

The Place Where I Write: Nigel Pitman

March 05, 2012, by Nigel Pitman

By one of those happy accidents of personal history, I live these days in an abandoned granite quarry in southern Brazil. Some of the immigrants who settled this part of South America came from stone-quarrying regions of Italy, and soon after laying eyes on the mountain we live on—a charismatic granite dome that looks like El Capitan—they got down to the business of cutting it into cobblestones. For most of the twentieth century the mountain was riddled with claims, and the stonecutters and their fires and their goats stripped the forest down to scrap.

Today the stonecutters have retreated and the forest is coming back. Walking through the woods you’re always coming across boulders that someone split in half decades ago, and piles of cut stone that were abandoned on the last day of work, and mountain tracks that used to transport product down the hill to the city. In the few quarries that have survived the stonecutters sit all day in the shade of araucaria trees tapping away at desk-size blocks of granite. In the summer, when the forest is dense, the sound of their work is drowned out by the plink, plink, plink of the bellbirds. In the winter, when the forest is sparse and the wind blows from the south, I can sometimes hear the plink, plink, plink of their tools from where I’m sitting at my own desk.

When we hire a man to do some work around the house, he shows up in the morning carrying an iron spike, a mallet, and a lunchbox. All morning long he sits tapping away at a boulder in the yard, while I sit tapping away at the keyboard in my office. Every now and then, when I run into a hard patch in my own work, I’ll go down and sit with him to clear my head. These stonecutters see veins and planes that are invisible to everyone else, and they’re proud of their Old World skills. Once, watching a man split dictionary-shaped rocks into perfect halves with a few blows of the mallet, I wondered out loud how long it would take a novice to learn to do the same. He pushed back his cap and laughed at me in a skeptical way, failing to recognize a fellow traveler. He said: “Kid, I’ll tell you what—you’d have to spoil a whole truckload of perfectly good rocks.”

Nigel Pitman is a biologist who specializes in the conservation of South American forests. He lives in Curitiba, Brazil. His first piece for Orion, the short story “Five Modern Crusoes,” was published in the November/December 2011 issue.