30
YEARS
For thirty years, Orion
has been a meeting place
for people who seek a
conversation about the
environment that is rooted
in beauty, imagination,
and hope.
The community of ideas
and people that Orion has
gathered together over the
last three decades has
been made possible by
support from readers in
the form of subscriptions
and donations.
Now Orion is depending
on you to help sustain
another thirty years of
conversation and
community.
To discuss making a gift
of stock or securities, an
outright gift, or a planned
gift to Orion’s 30th
Anniversary Fund, please
contact Madeline Cantwell,
Managing Director, at
413/528-4422 ext. 28,
or at mcantwell@orion
magazine.org; or use the
envelope bound into this
copy of Orion to request
more information.
A
poster boy for Gessner’s antideclensionist
environmental narrative, since every mile
paddled shows how successful Driscoll’s
e=orts have been in healing the river. Gessner’s corollary assertion is that we need to
reimagine the nature that is worth preserving as including degraded landscapes. If
we can’t view a river that runs through a
city as real nature— but only as a shipping
corridor, turbine spinner, or waste disposal
system—how dim are our prospects for
solving global environmental problems?
Gessner also argues persuasively for the
simple idea that caring about nature—or
even fighting to protect it — is not the same
as experiencing nature viscerally. My Green
Manifesto challenges us to put away the Sierra Club calendar and instead go outside,
into whatever ragged patch of field or forest
we have at hand, and once there to discover
new ways to appreciate what we’ve found.
Like the river it follows, My Green
Manifesto is a meandering, recursive
book, one rich with lively stylistic ri<es
and digressive back eddies. Its narrative voice
is irreverent, wry, and
exploratory, and in this
sense the book is a direct
descendant of another
fine New England river
book, Henry David Thoreau’s A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers
(1849). David Gessner is a
thoughtful and engaging
traveling companion, and
his provocative new brand
of environmentalism—which is equal
parts meditation, invective, lyricism, and
beer swilling—is sloppy, undisciplined,
and open, which is also why it is so hopeful, welcoming, and refreshing. Most
importantly, My Green Manifesto demonstrates that, to paraphrase Robert Frost, a
great deal can be made of a diminished
thing.
—Michael P. Branch
Fire Season
BY PHILIP CONNORS
Ecco, 2011. $24.99, 246 pages.
THAT IncEnDIARy pHIloSopHER
Heraclitus once wrote: “The thunderbolt steers
the universe.” Were he around today and
looking for work, the ancient sage might
fancy the gig Philip Connors found for
himself. Over the course of eight
seasons— totaling more than a thousand
days—Connors served as fire lookout
atop a remote ten-thousand-foot peak in
New Mexico’s Gila Wilderness, a region
annually receiving more than thirty thousand lightning strikes. There, in a compact “glass-walled perch” atop a
fifty-five-foot metal tower, he ostensibly
watched for smoke over the vast and rugged terrain of forest, scrub, and grassland
that constitutes the Black Range. Yet it
should come as no surprise that this former editor at the Wall Street Journal also
kept a close eye on the interior landscape, recording
his thoughts in journals
that became the basis for
his first book, Fire Season:
Field Notes from a Wilderness Lookout.
Part memoir and part
primer on public lands
management and fire
history in the American
Southwest, Fire Season
is compelling as it is informative. Six decades of
Smokey Bear propaganda have left the element of fire with an undeservedly wicked
reputation in the public eye. Connors’s
purpose is to “o=er another view of fire
and its place in nature, a view too little
glimpsed on our television screens.” He
succeeds admirably, inviting us to consider fire as yet another organism in the
ecosystem: “Think of fire as an endangered species, which, after its nearly
