While we the living, not sleeping, move through days of snow and cloud, rain and fog, the willow stems lie dormant, perhaps dreaming, or perhaps only sleeping. Listening to the rill of the river ...

BRENDAN AND I wouldn’t ever speak directly about our estrangement. There were some topics we’d learned to avoid entirely to “keep the peace,” as my mother would say. I bit my tongue when the topic of ...

AFEW YEARS AGO, while living on the Diné Nation, I first heard a striking proclamation that rang through the community with profound urgency: “Tó éí íín´á!”—“water is life.” I saw these words in bold ...

AFTER ABOUT A YEAR AND A HALF of dating, Sam and I decided he should move into my house. We had each lived with partners before, but those moves had been swayed by financial stress and global ...

THE CHICKEN WAS UNWELL. She no longer ran to the summons of the leftovers pail to scratch at the compost heap with the other hens. Morning found her in a corner of the henhouse facing the wall, with ...

adrienne maree brown has been on my radar for a while. As a thinker, activist, and teacher, she provides essential insights into how we relate to both human and natural ecosystems. Our conversation ...

I first encountered Robin Wall Kimmerer’s book, Braiding Sweetgrass, in the ecology section of my local bookstore. For Orion's Winter 2025/26 issue, we're chasing elusive cryptids and grappling with ...

I OWE MY CAREER to Robert Redford. The list of people who can say that is long, but not many of those work at environmental organizations. I first met Bob in fall 2003 at the dedication of The Robert ...

I’M NO ARTIST, but, if you had asked me when I was a child to draw the shape of a life, I might have drawn a horizontal line. A few years after that, I would have drawn life as a mountain. The upward ...

THE HISTORY OF the plastic carrier bag—the kind so often found caught on a tree branch and flagging in the wind—is a story of persuasion. But in the United States, the paper grocery bag proved far ...

AS PART OF HER tenure as the 24th U.S. Poet Laureate and in association with the Library of Congress, Ada Limón commissioned fifty-two contemporary American poets to reflect on their place in the ...