Orion Magazine

Though inspired by a 1969 California oil spill that resulted in the deaths of thousands of sea animals, the first Earth Day was largely a comfortable and congenial a=air, later described (in an EPA report) as a celebration that brought millions of Am

MEERA SUBRAMANIAN’s article “United in Change” (Winter 2019) is novel, bold, and inspiring. In response to the 2016 election and an ever-widening partisan divide on climate change crisis, she journeys across “really red” country to hear conservative

I n the summer of 2019, the climate activist Tim DeChristopher sat down with Wendell Berry. Berry is a poet and activist, author of over forty books, a recipient of the National Humanities Medal, a 2013 Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Scie

It is hope that enables us to hue, only hope. Everyone will instantly accept that universal truth. But didn’t the Spanish poet Federico García Lorca say the same thing, with equal cogency, about mystery? This second truth is also everywhere recogniza

WITH A POCKETFUL of superglue, anything is possible. I am sitting with my partner, Mark, in the middle of the road outside Parliament, facing a line of police, the full moon shining over Westminster Abbey. For the amusement of rebels, someone tows a

In a 2011 issue of the Japanese literary magazine father and son, who overexcitedly prod and pull at the Gunzo, the popular author Kawakami Hiromi rewrote one of her short stories to reflect the newly unleashed threat of a radioactive landscape. The

I THINK OF NATURE drawing as a spiritual connection to nature, and nature journaling as a written testament of miracles in the wild. Each day, I wake with curiosity over what is happening in my yard. Each day holds discoveries that I write down. The

EARLY ON in the winter of 1969–70, I was driving the great environmental prophet Barry Commoner from a small airport to my small college, where he was to speak to our student body, and I was first alerted to the possibility of a nationwide event in d

A MONTH AGO, my husband and I took six children, two our own, to the beach for a birthday party. The day was brilliant, the beach nearly empty because the wind was cold. There was a storm out at sea, and the waves were rougher than normal, but we saw

Many Americans haven’t heard of, let alone seen, the bird of Janet Essley’s paintings — the red knot (Calidris canutus rufa), a small shorebird about the size of a robin. Its extraordinary migration, among the longest of Earth’s avian journeys, stret

A CROSS thousands of generations, we have sought a deep relationship with nature and with the animals of the forest, ocean, and sky: the deer, buffalo, bear, lion, whale, and eagle. As our human intellect developed, we created markings on our skin an

A WAKE IN THE DARK I am hidden, tiny as dust and calm. I am part of something tremendous, an ocean of rest, the unseen, fear, death, dreams, peace, dead, everything darkness becomes inside a human mind. I wake up with a worry and bring it to the dark

LEARNING often takes circuitous, vortexlike routes. Certainly it did for us. We had set out to the Raja Ampat islands of West Papua to study sea cucumbers, which, since the 1990s, have been one of the most important elements to the local economy, boi

THE OWLS had been waiting for our demise since 1662 —the year the dodo went extinct. Rid from the earth thanks to hungry sailors. Humans, at first, couldn’t believe the bird was truly gone. A prominent naturalist declared it would be impossible for M

Jonathan Lethem is the author of eleven novels, five short story collections, and several nonfiction books, for which he has received the National Book Critics Circle Award and a MacArthur Fellowship. He is presently the Roy E. Disney Professor in Cr

Roger Mello’s flame oranges and reds, gray washes, ash white, and black foretell a serious story that reflects those hues—of a child who works in Brazil’s coal mines tending an oven that turns wood into charcoal. A poetic but focused wasp follows the

Orion’s newest anthology, Earthly Love, makes the perfect read for anyone who has ever fallen in (or out) of love. Purchase at www.orionmagazine.org/love or order by phone at 888/909-6568 for only eighteen dollars. Poetry editor Aimee Nezhukumatathil

Crocodile ranches surfaced along the coasts of Pacific Island communities in the middle of the twentieth century. Fueled by the demand for the crocodiles’ skin, the ranches commodified one of our oldest living species, raising them for the express pu