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 ...

On the ground, my encounters with the habituated mother bear of yearling cubs were becoming increasingly tense. We were both ...

A CATFISH WITH THREE EYES lived in the Gowanus Canal. I can say this with confidence because I have seen the evidence. The catfish was shiny and pitch-dark. After a fisherman hooked it and reeled it ...

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 ...

THE GUITAR LINE UNFURLS with a kinetic, pulsing energy. Soft moans hover over the riff, both spooky and sensual. Then the synth slides in, drums steady the beat, and the song swells with the promise ...

Ellen Wayland-Smith: You describe your book at one point as “a bridge between words—poetry—and the land, which have always been my two primal loves.” This question of language, and how to listen to/be ...

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 ...