“The ice was bad that year,” wrote Charles Wohlforth in the March/April 2004 issue of Orion. “It had been bad for a decade and seemed to grow steadily worse.” Wohlforth’s report from the Arctic Circle was one of the first to document the effects of climate change on far northern indigenous communities—communities that depend on regular movements of ice for their survival. We recently received an update from the author, a life-long Alaskan, on how change continues to visit the top of the world.

In 2002, whalers hunted on the melting sea ice as warming weather brought risk, uncertainty, and a fearful recognition that climate change was here and a threat. A decade later, the whalers’ courage and ingenuity have helped them to adapt to the shifting ice, but the process of change itself has overtaken them.

The cyclic round of arctic life has flattened into a linear path. The landmarks of the rounding seasons have not been replaced; instead, each year passes through a different Earth.

“There might be a new normal,” said whaler and scientist Richard Glenn. “It’s all about change, and monitoring the change. The bar has been raised for us, as far as vigilance and staying in touch with the changes that are going on around us.”

Change is coming too fast to understand. On the beach they’ve been finding sick seals and walruses, losing their hair, with skin lesions, becoming lethargic and unresponsive, wheezing and dying. Officials don’t know what is causing the epidemic, but suspect pathogens are spreading farther in newly ice-free waters.

Polar bears feasted on the dying seals last year, and now bears are showing up with patches of hair loss. Did they get sick from the seal?

This universe fed its people with food so healthy and pure that meat was eaten raw and fish cured by sunlight. Advice to handle meat with rubber gloves and wash knives with bleach—to cook the meat—this imposes on a deep and intimate tradition.

In many villages, traditional fish drying racks don’t work anymore because the sun is too warm and there are too many insects. Favorite berry patches have been abandoned because the hot air dries out the berries. The northward movement of shrubs has brought beavers north; consequently, rivers that were pure enough to drink without treatment now cause diarrhea.

People are getting heat exhaustion above the Arctic Circle. Their houses were made for cold weather. Michael Brubaker of the Alaska Tribal Health Consortium has found villagers gathering in a local clinic by 10 a.m. With the only fans in town, the health facility became a shelter from the heat.

Such change is disorienting, but bigger change is on the horizon. Offshore oil exploration will begin soon in waters made accessible for exploration by the loss of ice in the warmer climate. Shell seems to have defeated the last of the local lawsuits aiming to stop it.

There is talk of building a port for industrial ships. Locals expect large numbers of oil workers to descend on their communities. And if the oil spills, people here are deeply skeptical anything can prevent vast pollution of these waters and damage to the ecosystem that supports their way of life.

Or perhaps the oil won’t spill and the money it brings will help these villages. Maybe, as new species arrive in these waters to replace the old, they may contribute to life and be good to eat. There are no firm predictions in this land of constant change.

Charles Wohlforth is a life-long resident of Alaska. He is the author of The Whale and the Supercomputer and, most recently, The Fate of Nature: Rediscovering Our Ability to Rescue the Earth, out now from St. Martin’s Press. Photograph by Michael Sewell.

Step Gently Out began almost a decade ago, with a wish to look with new eyes at my ordinary backyard and the small life hidden within it. I wanted to go out with no preconceived ideas, and photograph whatever insects and other creatures I found; to have fun, experiment, and, hopefully, create some interesting images.

Although my equipment is more sophisticated these days, I began with a point-and-shoot camera (the resolution of which was less than that of most current smart phones.) I use whatever light I find, but since I’m flash-less, there’s often not enough illumination for a sharp exposure—the frantic pace of life lived in the micro-wilderness leaving behind just a blurred memory of its presence. Using only the sun and whatever light reflects throughout my small yard presents its own set of challenges, and the limited depth of focus helps me create a less clinical, more emotional and impressionistic view.

Ninety percent of my time is still spent in my backyard, but I try to photograph these small lives wherever I find them. My success rate is low—on many outings I return with nothing worth keeping—but when it all comes together, seeing these animals on their own terms is really a marvel: honey bees in flight carrying golden loads of pollen, fireflies mating and hovering over twilight fields, mosquitoes with a belly full of blood, and newly-born praying mantis nymphs emerging from their egg cases.

I want to celebrate the poetry in these tiny animals living their lives, as well as the poetry of their surroundings, the leaves and the grass and the light.

As an illustrator, I’ve worked with publishers for many years, creating conceptual book covers for novels ranging from mysteries, science fiction, and books based on The X-Files TV series, to Newbery Award-winning books for children. I met novelist and poet Helen Frost at a book signing, and she responded strongly to my wildlife images. After sending her many of my favorites, she wrote a short poem based not just on specific photographs, but also on the feeling of being immersed in their vibrant world.

It was a true collaboration, very different from the usual picture-book process, in which a writer and an illustrator often never meet or talk. The words and images in Step Gently Out have a synergy that reflects their shared creation. Helen and I went back and forth, changing and fine-tuning the poem and images, before I produced a book dummy to send to publishers. Almost three years of rejections followed, but the book eventually found a fine home at Candlewick Press, which published it in March 2012.

Picture books will continue to evolve and include video and animation in the future. Since I work in video as well as with still images, I produced a short trailer for the book—another way to tell the story of the micro-wilderness, where everyone eats, moves, mates, and dies, over and over; a tumultuous and beautiful cycle, always challenging us to see it anew, with a child’s eyes.

Rick Lieder is a painter and photographer living near Detroit, Michigan. His photograph of a bee, suspended in air, appeared on the back cover of the March/April 2012 issue of Orion.

The picture is grim. And yet, in the May/June 2012 issue of Orion, Gus Speth writes, “A future worth having awaits us, if we are willing to struggle and sacrifice for it.” Speth’s long career as an environmental advocate includes work at the White House and the United Nations, and his two-part essay in recent issues of the magazine explores both America’s decline and its possible renewal.

On May 15, at 4 p.m. Eastern, 1 p.m. Pacific, join Speth and Andrew Blechman, Orion’s managing editor, for a discussion of Speth’s “America the Possible: A Manifesto”—the second part of which appears in the current issue of Orion. 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.

While fishing last night sometime between two and three a.m., I heard a great horned owl call from a riverbank cottonwood just as the big waning moon crested a sand dune, and reckoned bird and well-lit sky-hung rock were conversing with each other.

Though this is unlikely, it is utterly possible. There are certainties of which we can’t be certain. Birds may indeed be “holes in heaven through which a man may pass,” as Walter Anderson has it in his Horn Island Diaries, a quote which serves as a section epigraph in poet Tom Crawford’s latest book of poems, The Names of Birds (Sherman Asher, 2011).

The author of five previous books of poetry, recipient of a Pushcart Prize and numerous other awards, Crawford is a meditative-lyric poet who asserts that birds “can enter you from any direction / and a fly-through, even by the common sparrow / can take out the heart” (“The Toll Birds Take”). Although the book’s title implies taxonomy, Crawford’s book is really an avian autobiography, beginning with “Wing”:

When I was eleven
I found a black wing,
just one wing,
on our road.

I was a loaner.
Shy. Afraid a lot.

For a long time
I kept it in my pocket.

If I was really nervous
I’d take it out
and fan it open
like a deck of cards.

Crawford’s reminder—“just one wing”—is fitting since these poems don’t attempt to artificially lift the reader out of the human condition; that is, they aren’t trying to catch a free ride through the firmament on the back of a vireo or a cactus wren (though poetic lift is regularly achieved). Nor are these the poems of an ornithologist, but rather an enthusiast (“Mine was a coarse intelligence, / I knew that, a man / upon whom nuance was wasted,” he writes in “The Enthusiast”) who is equally quickened by the arrival of bird to a feeder, the window of a hamburger joint, or a famous birding destination, as in “Bosque del Apache,” the bulk of which is quoted here:

They gather in the cold
by a lake and then
just stand there, quietly
and stare out
into the darkness.

They love what can’t be
improved on,
first light, bird song,
the perfect hydraulics
of the crane’s legs
that fold back
in a shower of water
as their great wings
lift them all
into the morning sky.

Among these curious,
no reckless enthusiasm.
(It’s not a football game.)
The older ones, too frail
for the cold,
watch from their cars
until the birds are out of sight.

That’s it.

The lake water still trembling
but empty.

One or two
might have taken pictures,
their only show
of attachment.

While governed by a gentle, observant engagement with the world, the poems in The Names of Birds also strike apocalyptic (“You’ll have to pull the Columbus in you / out from behind the wheel, America,” closes one section of “Christopher Columbus Discovers the Tar Sands of Alberta”), and ominous notes, as in the conclusion of “Cowbird” where we watch a cowbird, pacing the spine of a soon-to-be-slaughtered heifer, light “at the last moment / when the big metal door slides open.”

Returning to the idea of autobiography, “Cowbird” begins as a recollection to the “Paiute Packing Company” of the poet’s youth, and deftly links the memory with a present tense evocation of “Whole Foods in Santa Fe, New Mexico, sixty years / later, … bent over the counter picking up packages/ of organically grown beef, reading the labels/ to find out what part of the cow I’m holding.” In this poem, and in others like it, Crawford is at his peak while (shameful pun intended) dovetailing past and present. The birds bring him something from his past, and he brings this something—if not a healing then a balm—to the reader, as he does in “Arrhythmia,” about the hermit thrush:

Ornithologists call its song
a “soft whistle.” But there is no song
without affliction, doctor. No bird, if we’ll listen,
that does not build its secret nest in us
out of old string and dead feathers.

Over and over, Crawford’s generous poems recall something T’u Lung wrote centuries ago: “…being unable to find peace within myself, I made use of the external surroundings to calm my spirit, and being unable to find delight within my heart, I borrowed a landscape to please it. Therefore, strange were my journeys.” Replace “landscape” with “birds,” and we have the essence of Crawford’s poetic: to become a bird, even for a fleeting instant, is strange, wonderfully strange, and these poems are the vivid record of such a metamorphosis.

Chris Dombrowski’s second collection of poems, Earth Again, is forthcoming in spring 2013 from Wayne State University Press. This summer marks his sixteenth as a river guide in Montana. Dombrowski’s poem “Possible Psalm” appeared in the May/June 2009 issue of Orion.

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.

When Woody Tasch published his Inquiries into the Nature of Slow Money: Investing As If Food, Farms, and Fertility Mattered in 2009, he inaugurated the Slow Money movement, which aims to steer investor and donor capital toward supporting organic farms and local food systems through grassroots mobilization, networking, and educating. The movement is slowly but surely catching fire around the country with more than 20,000 people signing the Slow Money pledge.

Orion managing editor Andrew Blechman caught up with Woody when he came to speak in Orion’s hometown one evening at a fundraiser for our local land trust. Andrew and Woody met up again the next morning for breakfast at a favorite Great Barrington cafe that specializes in local food.

How would you explain Slow Money to a ten-year-old?

If you had some extra money, would you give it to a stranger to invest, or would you give it to people you know and trust who would invest it in your community, in where your food comes from?

It’s all well and good to ask people to invest locally, but a lot of us in the 99 percent don’t have the luxury of experimental investments. Isn’t that for rich people?

We need to design investment systems for three strata of people: angel investors who have hundreds of thousands or more to spare; middle investors who have thousands to invest; and the rest, who feel this is a critically important movement but who can only afford to invest a few hundred dollars. And the loans can be similarly sized, such as a few hundred dollars to put toward building a root cellar, or a whole lot more for a big piece of farm machinery, or land. It’s more work than traditional investing, but then again farming is hard work, too. But it’s gratifying. I’m putting seeds in the ground. It may not rain, but I’m still putting seeds in the ground.

What’s your theory of change and how it will happen?

For me it’s not about a David versus Goliath takedown or reform of the system. I’d rather focus on the positive, on building the kind of world we want to see. I’m glad people are lobbying the farm bill, but I don’t think we’ll ever see the sort of political change we want so much as simply making our own change. I see a lot of people doing a little. It’s going to take time, but it’s going to be fun.

How do you define “fast?”

How about that 1,000-point drop in the Dow that happened in a matter of minutes because of some mysterious issue with automated high frequency trading? I’d say that’s pretty fast. I still haven’t heard an explanation for what happened that I fully understand; have you? Trillions of dollars are swirling around the world in milliseconds and few people understand where it’s headed and why. These sums of money are so vast that they’re hard to even imagine. To try to put it in perspective, consider that a trillion seconds is 32,800 years.

You spend a lot of your time deep in the world of finance and numbers—which creative writers have also influenced your thinking?

I love Wendell Berry. He’s a huge inspiration for me, as is E.O. Wilson. I’m a big fan of poetry, too. In particular Gary Snyder. I love how he uses the poetic impulse to pierce through preconceived assumptions. Ideally, I’d like people to invest with both sides of their brains: the money side and the Biophilia side. When we merge our rational thinking with our creative and emotional side, then all sorts of actions are possible.

Andrew Blechman is managing editor of Orion.

Fans of Mary Oliver won’t be disappointed by her “Life Story,” a shape-shifting meditation on belonging to place and nature; Eva Hooker’s “Prairie, Under Full Moon” will leave you restless and drunk on language; and if you don’t have spring fever yet, Michael Hettich’s “The Garden” might make you drop your magazine and head straight for the back door.

And in this issue, we introduce you to poet Susan B. A. Somers-Willet with “Tallahatchie,” her first piece to appear in Orion. The poem, written for Emmett Till, is a mirror, as the Tallahatchie River has made a mirror of the boy’s murdered body. Asked for some background on her poem, Susan wrote:

“Tallahatchie” is a central poem in my manuscript-in-progress, tentatively titled Glass Casket, which takes as its anchoring points photographs of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib prison and photographs of lynching. In these poems, I explore the documentary and political uses of these images with the truly complex emotional responses we have in looking at them. “Tallahatchie” is an unrhymed sonnet whose language literally folds upon itself, describing Emmett Till’s funeral portrait and the location of its circumstance in the first half and my response as a white Southern female viewer in the second half. I wish to explore how these images of others in pain are not apart from us: they mirror us and inform how we see ourselves.

Hannah Fries is poetry editor of Orion.

“The Supple Deer” has an uncanny quality that engaged me as an artist: that moment of the deer pouring through, the wonder of it. I asked myself, “How can I make the deer liquid?”

I usually begin an illustration by reading the material—in this case, the poem—over and over and over, doing sketches off the top of my head to catch initial impulses, because those can be vital. After that, I’ll consult numerous sources to learn more about the subject, and sketch, sketch, sketch. For the broadsides, I’ll run the most promising candidates past Alastair Johnston, at Poltroon Press, to see if they mesh with his thinking about typography, before selecting the final sketch to work up for the block.

Design-wise, the biggest challenge was to make a plausible opening for the deer in the fence, while retaining the astonishing sight of the deer’s passage through that narrow opening—the contrast being essential to the meaning of the poem. I ended up building a model made of sticks, strung up with yarn and stuck into sandbags to help me visualize. I believe I also enlisted a toy horse.

This print was made from a linoleum block, which works well with letterpress, as the blocks are very near “type high” (meaning they can be printed on traditional letterpress equipment, which Alastair uses at Poltroon Press). It is a relief technique, like wood engravings or wood cuts, meaning the areas you don’t want to capture are gauged or carved out, and the surface is then rolled up with ink for printing.

Though I am primarily an etcher, I am increasingly drawn to the power and graphic quality of relief work. Something about the sharp contrast and puzzle of its binary nature appeals to me. Wood engraving, which I am using increasingly in the studio, uses a much harder block of end-grain wood, or a synthetic substitute, carved with sharp line tools to exquisite effect. Much of my studio practice now is in this more traditional technique of wood engraving, in great part due to Alastair’s influence as a scholar of the renowned 18th century engraver and naturalist, Thomas Bewick, who used just such a method.

Jinny Pearce is an artist and printmaker based in Berkeley, California. “The Supple Deer” is available as a broadside with a donation to Poetry Flash.