Orion Magazine

LIKE JUAN PONCE DE LEÓN five hundred years before us, we arrived on the coast of Florida weary with thirst and age. Once named by its European captor for the lush foliage rising from its wet soil, the state now offered us heaps of gray sand, 800,000

THE WAITER SETS DOWN a plain white bowl with a meticulously engineered wall of rice down the middle. On one side, vegetables and meat float on top of a still pool of honey brown curry, which presses against the wall, threatening a deluge. On the othe

MICHIGAN. A TANNINY CREEK. Brown water, greenest grasses. Me in a kayak with my son, not yet two years old. A few weeks earlier, someone asked, “What is the audio world you want to live in?” (I work in radio, so maybe that’s a normal question?) Sudde

LONG BEFORE you encounter one clambering across the trail, before you’re tempted to catch it with both hands and gently trace that thin, pale line down their knobbly back, you might meet a boreal toad (Anaxyrus boreas) in a different form, in a fleet

THE CRACKS HELD MY ATTENTION. Not the weathered French doors that still beckoned to the Pacific. Not the wave-battered wicker chair still airing out from the last storm. The cracks. I couldn’t take my eyes off the cracks that fractured the concrete p

JILL PELTO is a climate artist based in Washington state whose work focuses on communicating human-environment connections. She incorporates scientific data into watercolor paintings to share the emotion behind these stories of change, whether overwh

A FRIEND ONCE TOLD ME about the experience, both hilarious and heartbreaking, of watching her son realize that, where there are buildings now, there once were plants. “Were there plants where our house is?” he asked, wide-eyed, a little horrified. “W

NOT LONG AGO, I VISITED SORONG, a city growing in concrete. Sorong’s infrastructure boom makes the consequences of building with concrete clear: concrete causes floods. Water rolls along horizontal concrete (including asphalt) and splashes off vertic

ON THE THIRD NIGHT OF FLOODING, we learned that the reservoirs upstream had begun to fail. Water had started to flow around their edges, flooding streets, neighborhoods, empty schools. It had been raining for four days. More water is coming, the offi

THE TOWN of Missoula, Montana, begins when a steep fifty-mile corridor of pine, fir, and tamarack ends, at the site where the Clark Fork River exits Hellgate Canyon. French fur-trapping voyageurs called this confluence Port d’Enfer, or Port of Hell.

Chionophilia: a longing for snow. Sirensshatter through my windows, blueand red, the color of a headache. Frontogenesis: zones of air pressure and temperaturesstrengthening. An hour ago,I drove by the lake, waved past by police. I’m not telling you a

aFTER THE FLOOD she consulted with her taproot, who said, Not yet, we will continue to hold the land. And she sent thinner roots out shallow. Spread wider so she wouldn’t fall. She gave the fungus their message to carry. Reddened her veins to accept

In 1941, Harold Fisk was hired by the Mississippi River Commission to embark on a yearslong study of the river’s movements, a project that would entail the procurement of over sixteen thousand sediment core samples to reveal the presence of soil depo

A SHORT STORY They said the seas were rising, but we didn’t believe them. Or we kind of did, but we had other things to do. Like pick up sourdough bread for dinner. And play pickleball with Amy T. from across the street. And sell photos of our feet o

1.The first film I ever recall watching is Joseph Mankiewicz’s Cleopatra. I must’ve been four or five at the time, and they are the first images I remember, painted on the walls of the back rooms of my mind: sitting in front of the TV with my grandmo

Often when I am heading to my mother’s place in central Pennsylvania, I dip into a sweet little coffee shop called Little Amps. Their mascot is the amp, and the decor, some of it anyway, includes LPs on shelves high enough that you have to ask for he

DRY AND THIRSTY, a paintbrush pokes its nose into water, then ground inkstone, and swells with the abundance of expressive potential. It hesitates above the eager surface of the blank (even thirstier) page until the sooty liquid suffuses the fibers,

THE PORT OF BALI: A small town curved around a bright blue bay. Pale terraced buildings latticed down the cliffs. A bull’s-eye on the back of a parasail boat. An old man in a Speedo picking his way across the rocks down by the sea. The beaches they c

MYTHS TRAVEL LIKE SEEDS on the wind, on clouds of radiation from a test site. They travel like zebra mussels in the bilge of an ocean liner, smothering native mussels, devouring the food supply, clogging engines and power plants. This could be an ana

FOR TWO YEARS I’ve lived in a river valley, and I suppose I’m likely to live here for twenty more, or at least I want to, for as long as the ancient rookery remains. The birds could have nested here for well over a hundred years. Each morning and eve