Introducing Winter 2019

The Winter 2019 issue of Orion arrives into homes and stores everywhere starting this week. This issue includes a number of stories in which the ground, and the stories it tells us, takes center stage.

Here’s some of what’s included: 

  • In Meera Subramanian’s tour of middle America (“United in Change”), she bonds with strangers across the political spectrum in the most literal place: the land beneath their feet.
  • Lisa Wells, in “Views of the Apocalypse,” encounters the ghost of Freud while walking the grounds of Orvieto, a city built above an underground network of caves.
  • Heather Altfeld’s “Unearthing the Mammoth” is a personal atlas of woolly mammoth fossils and a meditation on excavating the past from the ground and examining it in the present.
  • Derrick Jensen asks if those who come after us will wonder why we didn’t do more to save planet.
  • Will Hunt goes on a pilgrimage, following the footsteps of those who came before.
  • In “Sharing the Table,” Samantha Harvey plants and harvests alongside a community of artists, activists, and farmers.
  • Gabrielle Brady watches nature’s cycles continue on an island where time has stopped for refugees.
  • Priscilla Solis Ybarra sits down with Cherríe Moraga for a discussion on identity and environmentalism. 

Other essays cover bioluminescence, migration, Ed Abbey’s ghost, Instagramming nature, the disappearance of olives, Bangalore’s urban wilds, and more.

Poetry by Rajiv Mohabir, Kevin Young, Ellen Bass, Stuart Dybek, and Cecily Parks. 

Books reviews include Greta Thunberg’s No One is Too Small to Make a Difference, Sarah M. Broom’s The Yellow House, Jedediah Purdy’s This Land is Our Land, Olga Tokarczuk’s Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead (translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones), and Sarah Wolfson’s A Common Name for Everything

Broadside by Ilya Kaminsky, with artwork by Nikki McClure. 

FORTHCOMING: SPRING 2020

The Spring 2020 issue will commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of Earth Day by looking closer at hope and despair through new narratives of resistance, resilience, and survival. Also in the issue, Jay Griffiths superglues herself to the highway, Tim DeChristopher challenges Wendell Berry on localism, and we trace the environmental legacy of man-eating crocodiles.

Subscribe, renew or gift a holiday subscription today to start your issue cycle with this issue. Already a subscriber and wish to deepen your support? Consider donating or becoming a sustaining partner

This is a collection of Orion Staff contributions.