The Orion Blog

Reign of the Ninety-nine Percenters?

October 06, 2011, by Christopher Ketcham

Christopher Ketcham’s essay “The Reign of the One Percenters,” published on Orion’s website and forthcoming in the November/December 2011 issue of the magazine, calls for a swift kick to Wall Street’s pedestal of profligacy. We’re excited to hear that people are listening and, thanks to the brave citizens behind #OccupyWallStreet, taking action. So what’s next? Christopher Ketcham reflects.

When I wrote the first draft of “The Reign of the One Percenters” in the autumn of 2010, I had little hope that the kids in New York would pull off anything like the growing revolt in Liberty Square and beyond. I am delighted to be proved totally wrong.

Some thoughts, then, for present and future Occupiers everywhere. I’d suggest they take a page from the Populist movement of the 1890s. Like Occupy Wall Street, Populism was a broad, economics-driven revolt that targeted a predatory elite of corporate capitalists—the Robber Barons of the Gilded Age—who had captured government and established monopoly power over the political economy.

The Populists were social visionaries, anticipating and driving the Progressive Era of reform of the early 1900s. They sought to dismantle the centralized power of corporations in the economy and return economic liberty to individuals and small business. Long before anyone else, they envisioned the graduated income tax, the secret ballot, the regulation of banks, the right of workers to set the terms of their labor. They transformed the political discourse of their time.

In the midst of this our Second Gilded Age, the Occupiers need to remember that the Populists also formed a political party—the People’s Party—and they ran candidates who won office, and they formed real-world cooperatives between business and labor to challenge the hegemony of corporate capitalism. Theirs was not a platform of quixotic revolution, but one of radical reform that took decades of hard labor to bear fruit.

In the meantime: the politics of radical protest; the politics of turmoil and disruption; the politics of ridicule and shaming; the politics of the rhetorical rotten egg smashed in the eyes of the criminal banking class—these are the orders of the day. The protest in Liberty Square, the protest of the Ninety-nine Percenters, is currently driven by no mere platform of demands, nor should it be. It is driven by moral outrage, as a challenge to the authority of an immoral economic system.

Christopher Ketcham is working on a book about political rebellion in the United States. He lives in New York and Utah.

Bug Hunt

October 04, 2011, by Scott Gast

On a recent weekend, on the fifty-four-acre grounds of Project Native, a native plant nursery just minutes from the Orion office, a small crowd gathered beneath a willow tree. Noah Charney, who is slender, sharply featured, and probably not much older than thirty, was crouched on his heels, peering under a wooden bench. Charlie Eiseman, in a backpack and sandals, narrated: “That’s the cocoon of an ichneumon wasp; they parasitize spiders.” There are thousands of species of this particular wasp, Charlie explained, nearly all of which pupate inside other insects. There are cricket wasps, cicada wasps, aphid wasps, spider wasps—“There’s a wasp for everything,” he said.

Noah and Charlie are coauthors of Tracks and Sign of Insects and Other Invertebrates: A Guide to North American Species, which won the 2010 National Outdoor Book Award and is probably the first insect tracker’s field guide in existence. The two friends drove down from Vermont to raise some money for Project Native, promote their own work, and lead small workshops for the day. The book itself—all 592 pages—isn’t exactly light reading: according to the jacket copy, the book “offers details for identifying beetles, spiders, flies, ants, butterflies, moths, dragonflies, earwigs, mayflies, crickets, grasshoppers, centipedes, millipedes, scorpions, earthworms, slugs, lacewings, wasps, bees, damselflies, alderflies, crabs, and many other invertebrates from the sign they leave behind.”

It turns out that the “sign” insects leave behind is pretty much everywhere. Spend enough time staring at a leaf, or a stone, or a fence post and you can’t miss it: eggs, scat, casings, galls, burrows, droppings, secretions, coverings, mounds, tracks, trails.

I watched Charlie study a leaf fluttering near his shoulder. After Noah finished with the ichneumon wasp, Charlie directed the group to the egg of a green lacewing, which, he said, if you looked close, dangled vertically from the underside of the leaf. I looked close. So did the guy next to me who had a pair of binoculars around his neck, and we didn’t see anything. Then Charlie pointed it out with his fingernail: there it was—tiny, the size of a carpet fiber, and wiggling in the breeze. A woman with a floppy sun hat leaned in with a magnifying glass.

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Live Web Event with Richard Heinberg and Helena Norberg-Hodge, October 18

September 29, 2011, by Erik Hoffner

On October 18th, Orion hosted a dialogue on the end of economics as we know it, with Richard Heinberg and Helena Norberg-Hodge.

Must economies always grow? Heinberg thinks not, and argues that the global economy will not come out of its current recession, given that our prosperity is built upon unsustainable behaviors whose costs are coming due. Instead, he posits that we can manage contraction and still thrive, a view illustrated by Norberg-Hodge’s film about the many upsides to going truly local, which features commentary from people on every continent.

This free live web event was a unique opportunity to hear these important thinkers expand on these ideas. Listen to the full audio here.

Heinberg’s latest book is The End of Growth: Adapting to Our New Economic Reality and Norberg-Hodge’s new documentary is called “The Economics of Happiness,” an acclaimed film about the re-localization of our economies.

Poetry: “Gypsy Moths, or Beloved”

September 26, 2011, by Orion staff

Fall is the season of nostalgia and memory. The sound of leaves skittering over the sidewalk, the sharp, sweet smell of fallen apples, insects singing at a trembling peak—a poignancy wells up through it all, in the face of the shortening days. In this spirit, we bring you Paula Bohince’s poem “Gypsy Moths,” from the September/October 2008 issue of Orion, an end-of-summer love song to the oft-maligned gypsy moth. —Hannah Fries, Poetry Editor

Gypsy Moths, or Beloved

tremor in the walnut grove,
stand of near emptiness where I once stood,
demolished, hooked
unto a sorrow as the moths
belong now to these branches, the smoke
and burn of twilight…

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Tools, Trees, and the Necessity of Failure

September 22, 2011, by Dina Strasser

Recently, not far from Orion’s home in western Massachusetts, educator and writer Dina Strasser led a workshop for Teaching the Hudson Valley, an organization for Hudson River educators. Her workshop, “Place and the Digital Native,” challenged participants to think critically about the role of technology in connecting kids to nature—and about the opportunities, difficulties, and open questions in store for us all as we attempt to remain human in a digital age.

As a teacher, I’ve found that when failure is imminent, it’s good to be up front about it. So when I discovered that I had no idea how to work the older-model GPS devices the workshop coordinators had so kindly provided for our geocache, the only honest thing to do was embrace the failure—and ask my participants to do so with me.

Geocaching, for readers unfamiliar with it, is the use of a GPS device to locate a set of coordinates where a “treasure” is hidden—usually a container of some sort holding trinkets and a signature log. A kind volunteer had set up six small geocaches on the conference grounds. I asked workshop participants to find them. With grace and humor, they dove into the work with the unknown technology.

I hoped to have them explore what Richard Louv describes in The Nature Principle as our need for a “hybrid mind”: one that can switch with smoothness and ease from a technological mindset to one in which all sensory information is fully embraced and interpreted.

One of the younger participants in the workshop, who had some experience with geocaching, felt that it was the perfect means for developing a hybrid mind: GPS brings the seeker to a general location, but then he or she must interact with the environment in order to find the cache itself. (The geocaching community, as it turns out, has codified this experience. They call it “using your geo-senses”: using sight, sound, and touch to find a cache, since a set of GPS coordinates alone rarely brings you to an exact location.)

“But I couldn’t hear the birds,” countered a different participant. “I was stuck on finding the cache, so the sense I engaged was overwhelmingly visual. That’s not bad, necessarily; but we’re going to have to think carefully about what our goals are before assuming that just being outdoors connects our students to nature in the ways we want.”

Which leads to the question: when we say “connect to nature,” what do we really mean?

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From the Archive: “The Naturalist”

September 19, 2011, by Orion staff

What is a naturalist? What is her role in human culture? In his essay in the Autumn 2001 issue of Orion, Barry Lopez explored these questions and others. “The modern naturalist…[is] a kind of emissary,” he wrote, “working to reestablish good relations with all the biological components humanity has excluded from its moral universe.” What follows is an excerpt from Lopez’s essay in that issue; read the rest, here.

A naturalist of the modern era—an experientially based, well-versed devotee of natural ecosystems—is ideally among the best informed of the American electorate when it comes to the potentially catastrophic environmental effects of political decisions. The contemporary naturalist, it has turned out—again, scientifically grounded, politically attuned, field experienced, library enriched—is no custodian of irrelevant knowledge, no mere adept differentiating among Empidonax flycatchers on the wing, but a kind of citizen whose involvement in the political process, in the debates of public life, in the evolution of literature and the arts, has become crucial.

The bugbear in all of this—and there is one—is the role of field experience, the degree to which the naturalist’s assessments are empirically grounded in firsthand knowledge. How much of what the contemporary naturalist claims to know about animals and the ecosystems they share with humans derives from what he has read, what he has heard, what he has seen televised? What part of what the naturalist has sworn his or her life to comes from firsthand experience, from what the body knows?

One of the reasons native people still living in some sort of close, daily association with their ancestral lands are so fascinating to those who arrive from the rural, urban, and suburban districts of civilization is because they are so possessed of authority. They radiate the authority of firsthand encounters. They are storehouses of it. They have not read about it, they have not compiled notebooks and assembled documentary photographs. It is so important that they remember it. When you ask them for specifics, the depth of what they can offer is scary. It’s scary because it’s not tidy, it doesn’t lend itself to summation. By the very way that they say that they know, they suggest they are still learning something that cannot, in the end, be known.

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Make the Wildwood Ring

September 15, 2011, by Robin MacArthur

In 2006, I sat in the northeast corner of my grandparents’ two-hundred-year-old farmhouse in Vermont and listened to my grandmother, who was dying, sing “The Ballad of Marjory Gray.” She had lost her ability to remember most things on her deathbed, but she knew every word of that nineteenth century Vermont ballad about a pioneer woman who gets lost in the old-growth woods. Her voice, which had thinned to nearly nothing in her last days, swelled into a deep and warm vibrato.

We sat there crying—her husband, four children, and five grandchildren—but there was wonder as well: my grandmother was leaving us, but the songs she sang and collected throughout her lifetime were not. Her life, her landscape, and the stories contained in that landscape had become a fabric of song that was lasting and full of grace. We could carry them with us, sing them ourselves, and come to know the place where she had brought us all to live.

My grandmother—Margaret MacArthur—moved to Vermont in the 1940s, the twenty-year-old wife of a professor. Near penniless, with two babies and another on the way, she and my grandfather bought an abandoned 1803 farmhouse and 130 acres of overgrown pasture on a road without neighbors or electricity or telephone. The windows were broken and the floors eaten by porcupines. “I love it!” my grandmother exclaimed, and it was true. She loved the house—its reverberant history and overgrown lilacs and the view, which faced the far-off hills of Dover.

But once settled, she found herself feeling adrift.

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Sandra Steingraber Wins Heinz Award

September 14, 2011, by Orion staff

The Heinz Family Foundation has named Orion columnist and Contributing Editor, Sandra Steingraber, as a winner of the 17th Heinz Award. This year, the Award, which “annually recognizes individuals creating and implementing workable solutions to the problems the world faces through invention, research and education while inspiring the next generation of modern thinkers,” was given to ten individuals whose work “focus[es] singularly on the environment.” We’re excited to share Sandra’s response, below.

The Heinz Award and What I Plan to Do With It

I’m thrilled to receive a Heinz Award in recognition of my research and writing on environmental health. This is work made possible by my residency as a scholar within the Department of Environmental Studies at Ithaca College. Many past and present Heinz Award winners are personal heroes of mine—and Teresa Heinz herself is a champion of women’s environmental health—so this recognition carries special meaning for me. 

And it comes with a $100,000 unrestricted cash prize. Which is stunning.

As a bladder cancer survivor of thirty-two years, I’m intimately familiar with two kinds of uncertainty…

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Bookshelf: Raising Elijah

September 12, 2011, by Jennifer Sahn

Jennifer Sahn, Editor of Orion, reflects on adapting a selection from columnist Sandra Steingraber’s newest book, Raising Elijah: Protecting Our Children in an Age of Environmental Crisis, for publication in the March/April 2011 issue of Orion. Steingraber’s latest column, “Household Tips from Warrior Mom!” appears in the September/October 2011 issue of the magazine.

I first read Sandra Steingraber’s book Raising Elijah in manuscript form. I had asked Sandra whether any chapters from the book might be adapted into an Orion article, and she sent me the whole work, chapter by chapter, which I then printed out and read.

I read a lot of books before they become physical books (or bytes, depending on your delivery mechanism), but rarely do I read a manuscript that gives me such a strong sense of privilege—of being accessory to the creation of a revolutionary text, one that has the potential to change the course of history. Raising Elijah is the story of a mother who is determined to protect her children from harmful substances that lurk in our air, our water, our furniture, clothes, and food. Her efforts are extensive, heroic, and painstaking—confiscating a brand-new Curious George raincoat from her son because vinyl contains endocrine disruptors; switching her children’s school because of an arsenic-laden play structure. But she cannot ultimately succeed in her quest. Toxic substances are too deeply embedded in our environment, our industry, our way of life. The pesticides drift, the student on the bicycle gets a face full of auto exhaust, and most young people will at some point encounter a tuna fish sandwich, which inevitably will have mercury in it. A sobering thought, this is: that even the most dedicated mom cannot entirely protect her children from this kind of harm.

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Letter from the Everglades

August 25, 2011, by Amy Green

Driving north through South Florida on U.S. Route 27, you can almost imagine how the Everglades used to be. The river of grass is missing, but you’ll still see scattered, swampy tree stands and flocks of birds rising in a pink and orange sky.

Route 27 begins near Florida’s southernmost tip and stretches north up the state’s center, separating Miami from saw grass prairie, cypress forest, and mangrove marsh. Farther north are sugarcane fields reminiscent of Iowa’s cornfields with their row after row of grassy, bamboo-like stalks. I drove this route one day last year as the sun was setting, and it took me past vegetable stands, sugarcane fields, and, eventually, the town of Clewiston, Florida, near Lake Okeechobee’s southern shore. There, the road strings together a Wal-Mart, a few banks, motels, and eateries with names like Dixie Fried Chicken and Seafood Café.

Clewiston is flanked on one side by the second largest freshwater lake in the lower forty-eight and, on the other side, beyond the businesses lining Route 27 and the tidy neighborhoods tucked behind it, the U.S. Sugar Corporation. The company is the nation’s largest sugar producer, turning out some 700,000 tons annually, and comprising up to ten percent of the nation’s domestic supply. The mill is the heart of Clewiston, employing at least half of the town’s population; its smokestacks loom with a physical might matching that of the lake itself, pumping smoke like a heart pumps blood.

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