“The term has become so widely used that it is in danger of meaning nothing. It has been applied to all manner of activities in an effort to give those activities the gloss of moral imperative, the cachet of environmental enlightenment,” Eric Zencey writes in Orion. But the writer doesn’t stop there, no, not nearly: Behold his fantastic essay “Theses on Sustainability,” an 18-point primer and philosophical romp through the meaning(s) of the word.

Source: Orion

Our library contains 1,300 publications—a feast of magazines, journals, alt weeklies, newsletters, and zines—and every year we honor the stars in our Utne Independent Press Awards. We’ll announce this year’s winners on Sunday, April 25, at the MPA’s Independent Magazine Group conference in Washington, D.C., and post them online the following Monday. We’re crazy about these publications, and we’d love it for all of our readers to get to know them better, too. So, every weekday until the conference, we’ll be posting mini-introductions to our complete list of 2010 nominees.

The following eight magazines are our 2010 nominees in the category of environmental coverage.

American environmentalists would be wise to look to Canada’s Alternatives Journal for cogent, well-informed reporting and commentary on green issues. The official publication of the Environmental Studies Association of Canada puts topics from climate change to local food into clear-eyed perspective. www.alternativesjournal.ca

Audubon rightly believes that if you care about birds, you care about the environment. The Audubon Society’s magazine is a must-read for nature watchers of all kinds, digging into its subjects with a keen eye for both natural beauty and the forces that threaten it. www.audubonmagazine.org

Published by the Society for Conservation Biology, Conservation transcends its modest roots with intellectual depth. From profiling “the mushroom messiah” to asking “Is a warmer world a sicker world?” it gets to the environmental stories that demand our attention. www.conservationmagazine.org

A publication of the Earth Island Institute, the group founded by activist legend David Brower, Earth Island Journal reports from the front lines of the environmental crisis. Its global focus and eagerness for stimulating debate make it a must-read for greens. www.earthisland.org/journal

The footnotes in Environment magazine say “academics at work”—but the stories will have you asking “Why isn’t anyone else writing about this?” This publication covering “science and policy for sustainable development” goes in-depth but never gets out of reach. www.environmentmagazine.org

The Western United States is a key battleground for many environmental issues, and High Country News is your experienced and knowledgeable correspondent from the front lines. Its watchdog coverage of mining, ranching, logging—and simply Western life—is unmatched. www.hcn.org

The quarterly journal of the Natural Resources Defense Council, OnEarth keeps tabs on what’s happening to our land, air, water, and wildlife. It’s a pretty nature magazine, but it also brings a keenly analytic eye to the societal and political dimensions of environmentalism. www.onearth.org

The most literary of environmental magazines, Orion takes a big view, touching on spirituality, philosophy, and the arts in its gorgeous pages. Thoughtfully provocative columnists keep it from drifting off into the rapidly warming atmosphere.  www.orionmagazine.org

“Letting go of our parents, or anyone we love, is the hardest thing we do. Paying a professional to handle the dead doesn’t make goodbyes any easier,” writes Hank Lentfer in a recent issue of Orion, in which he ruminates on death and dying, what we do with our bodies afterward, and what purpose our rituals serve.

Lentfer is no stranger to the conversation; he’s been having it with scores of friends and family members—all with varying requests for their remains. His parents want to rest beneath an old birch tree, a friend wants her ashes “tossed someplace where they will quickly enter something alive—a salmon stream, meadow, or old forest,” and another person wants to be dipped in chocolate, rolled in sprinkles, and launched to sea. The directives continue, and Lentfer comes to a profound conclusion:

All these endless options seem like a desperate antidote to the optionless end. We want to believe that, in death, we can get to heaven or back to our spouse; that we can fulfill the dream of that perfect union with nature. Still, no matter how much mythology, religion, or ritual we toss off the cliff, the void remains. Perhaps all the primping, chanting, incense burning, bone crunching, and poison pumping are mere distractions; something to keep the living from having to site quietly on the dark edge of uncertainty.  

Source: Orion (article not available online)

Congratulations to Orion, a 2010 Utne Independent Press Award nominee for environmental coverage and general excellence.

Image by Muffet, licensed under Creative Commons.

When you open up your refrigerator, do you ever pause and ask yourself if the image you see reflects your eating habits and goals? Would you feel any differently if it was on display for complete strangers to see and scrutinize it?

Photographer Mark Menjivar explores the interiors of refrigerators across the country for his thought-provoking project “You Are What You Eat,” which offers a very personal look at people’s eating habits. Menjivar explains his unique subject choice: “A refrigerator is both a private and a shared space. One person likened the question, ‘May I photograph the interior of your fridge?’ to asking someone to pose nude for the camera. Each fridge is photographed ‘as is.’ Nothing added, nothing taken away.”

His images are identified only by a few key details such as occupation, location, household size and one fact that gives some insight into the image. The result begs the viewer analyze each item and its relationship to the owner’s lifestyle. And in turn, it provokes some degree of introspection as well, which is exactly what Menjivar hopes the project will do—make people think. The series has been showcased at universities as part of conversations about food issues.

This slideshow offers only a few images from the project; you can find more images of other refrigerators, in Menjivar’s portfolio.

(Thanks, Orion.)

All images courtesy of Mark Menjivar.

Digital culture pioneer Kevin Kelly is bridging the gap between technology and spirituality. His “techno transcendentalist” philosophy, explained to Orion magazine, acknowledges that all creation and discovery, including the alphabet, the internet, and even the sun, can be seen on a cosmic level as technology. Humans are able to create technology, but our inventions have fundamentally changed the nature of humanity in ways that people cannot control. People are now more distracted, but we’re learning more, too. “You could say that humans are the sexual organs of technology,” according to Kelly, “that we are necessary for its survival. But it has its own inertia, urgency, tendencies, and bias.”

People tend to fear technology, in the same way that people fear all change. Change tends to breed discomfort. But Kelley believes people should not make blanket prohibitions on new inventions, no matter how frightening they may be. “I don’t think technology is neutral,” Kelly told Orion. “But I think the proper response to a bad technology is not to stop it—to stop thinking—but to have a better idea.”

Source: Orion 

Image by Dominic, licensed under Creative Commons.

Green your Twitter feed—in a single click. Investigative reporter Osha Gray Davidson, editor and publisher of the Phoenix Sun, has set up a TweepML list for the Society of Environmental Journalists. With one click, users can follow 58 environmental reporters, writers, and publications, including Utne Independent Press Award-winning High Country News.

(Thanks, @orion_magazine.)

Activist and Utne Visionary Derrick Jensen has never been the sentimental type. I’d go so far as to call him pathologically unsentimental. In his essay "Forget Shorter Showers," published in Orion, he takes on the activist phenomenon of simple living as a political act.

Simple living as a political act, he writes, “accepts capitalism’s redefinition of us from citizens to consumers”:

By accepting this redefinition, we reduce our potential forms of resistance to consuming and not consuming. Citizens have a much wider range of available resistance tactics, including voting, not voting, running for office, pamphleting, boycotting, organizing, lobbying, protesting, and, when a government becomes destructive of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, we have the right to alter or abolish it.

“The endpoint of the logic behind simple living as a political act,” he adds, “is suicide”:

If every act within an industrial economy is destructive, and if we want to stop this destruction, and if we are unwilling (or unable) to question (much less destroy) the intellectual, moral, economic, and physical infrastructures that cause every act within an industrial economy to be destructive, then we can easily come to believe that we will cause the least destruction possible if we are dead.

So what do we do? Jensen never signs off without a call to revolutionary action:

We can follow the examples of brave activists who lived through the difficult times I mentioned—Nazi Germany, Tsarist Russia, antebellum United States—who did far more than manifest a form of moral purity; they actively opposed the injustices that surrounded them. We can follow the example of those who remembered that the role of an activist is not to navigate systems of oppressive power with as much integrity as possible, but rather to confront and take down those systems.

Source: Orion 

Image by Robert Shetterly.

The latest edition of the Oxford Junior Dictionary (OJD) will be published without an evolving list of seemingly passé entries, which includes; tulip, melon, acorn, fungus, cheetah, leopard, beaver, otter and magpie, among many others. The dictionary’s publisher, Oxford University Press (OUP), is perpetuating a bleak world without violets, bluebells or passenger pigeons, writes Robert Michael Pyle in the July issue of Orion. But there are plenty of blackberries there (and not the kind you eat.) He writes:

On the other hand, in OJD-world you’ll have no trouble locating blogs or chatrooms. Celebrities are there, spending euros. You can check your broadband MP3 player and send attachments with bullet points, all while bungee jumping if you so desire…

OUP responded that the volume must be kept small for small hands, so when new words are added to keep up with the times, old words must come out. Sharp howls of protest arose from people who hold to the quaint belief that an essential societal good comes from young people getting to know –or at least know about—their natural surroundings.

Also on the chopping block— canary, lark, dandelion, lavender, willow, weasel, porcupine, fern, beech, sycamore, pelican, starling and stork.

Source:  Orion  (article not yet available online)

Image by  YoungLadAustin , licensed under Creative Commons.  

Derrick Jensen is an environmentalist who sure knows how to rile up the environmentalists. The radical green author and Utne Visionary has launched a new column in Orion magazine, Upping the Stakes, and its first installment, “World at Gunpoint,” has set off a tempest on Orion’s website, landing 174 comments on 22 web pages when we last checked.

What did Jensen do to spark this upwelling? He suggested that mere “green living” lifestyle choices aren’t going to save our asses, and that much bolder actions are necessary to confront environmental devastation, which he likens to a gunslinging murderer:

If someone were rampaging through your home, killing those you love one by one (and, for that matter, en masse), would the question burning a hole in your heart be: how should I live my life right now? I can’t speak for you, but the question I’d be asking is this: how do I disarm or dispatch these psychopaths? How do I stop them using any means necessary?

Not all the respondents take issue with Jensen: Some hail his line of thinking, and others admit to deeply conflicted feelings. Which to me means that he’s asking important and necessary questions, taking the dialogue to a deeper lever. I eagerly await his next column, which will be online July 7.

Source: Orion

In tough economic times, financial tips can feel like spiritual guidance. The first noble truth of the Buddha—that existence is suffering—sounds like good advice for someone trying to cut back on expenses.

Whether or not she knows it, financial guru Suze Orman doles out such spiritual-financial teachings on her CNBC show, according to John Tarrant writing for Shambhala Sun. Orman helps people understand that the origin of their suffering lies in craving—the second noble truth—firmly but lovingly pushing them away from financial lust and excess. She also teaches the third noble truth, that “a change of heart is possible,” believing in her clients ability to be reborn.

The implicit message of Orman’s show is “you are not alone,” Sandra Steingraber writes for Orion. By showing the financial information of other people anonymously, Orman’s show provides a kind of catharsis and therapy to the viewers. It also gets beyond a taboo people feel when talking about expenses or salary with their friends. This is important, according to Steingraber, due to the fact, “to borrow a phrase from the adoptee rights movement, that secrecy breeds fear. And shame. “

Neither Tarrant nor Steingraber endorse Orman’s specific financial advice. In fact, Steingraber describes her retirement plan as “to be found stiff and cold at my writing desk.” The articles are aimed at illuminating a link between people’s money and their spiritual life, and the way that Orman, according to Tarrant, “is filling a necessary role in our culture as we wake out of a dream.”

Sources: Shambhala Sun (excerpt only), Orion (excerpt only)

“My retirement plan is to be found stiff and cold at my writing desk.”

—Sandra Steingraber, “Sounds Like a Lot to Me,” from Orion

“Avoid internalizing society’s sexism, racism, ageism—pick an ism, any ism. See things from others’ points of view. Watch less TV. Sing and dance more.”

—Paul Krassner (interviewed by David Kupfer), “In the Jester’s Court,” from the Sun

“Why have we allowed carny barkers to run away with the Right?”

—John Derbyshire, “How Radio Wrecks the Right,” from the American Conservative 

“…We face the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. Shit is real.”

—Andre Torres, editor’s note, from Wax Poetics (not available online)

  Sources: Orion, The American Conservative, The Sun, Wax Poetics

There’s an ironic tragedy involved in eating at a Red Lobster in the Gulf Coast: Patrons, just a short distance from some of the best fishing grounds in the world, are likely eating imported shrimp from China, Indonesia, or South America. This situation hurts local fishermen and destroys the environment, but still, many people do it.

Just one acre of shrimp farm can produce from 6,000 to 18,000 pounds of shrimp in 3 to 6 months, according to Jim Carrier in Orion. That extreme output drives down the price of seafood, making it more difficult for local fishermen to make a living. Mangroves and local environments are destroyed to make way for the farms, which are heavily treated with antibiotics and chemicals to keep that many animals alive in the same place.

“If you get cheap shrimp now, it's from a turbid, pesticide-infested pond somewhere in the developing world,” Taras Grescoe told Salon.com last year, “and it's guaranteed you're contributing to the misery of all humans by buying that stuff.” Grescoe, whose book Bottomfeeder was excerpted in Utne Reader, still believes that ethical seafood is possible. For tips on how to find seafood that’s both ethical and sustainable, visit Utne Reader’s sustainable seafood project.

Image by  Robert Simmons , licensed under  Creative Commons .

One of the most influential actors in the mainstream environmental movement has taken a radical turn in his views on the subject. James Gustave “Gus” Speth—whose contributions to environmental causes include cofounding the Natural Resources Defense Council, serving as a policy advisor to the Carter administration, and founding the environmental think tank World Resources Institute—is now pushing for a take-to-the-streets approach to the environmental crisis.

A dean at Yale University is not the most likely of candidates to call for civic upheaval, but Speth’s passion for the environment and his unyielding desire to save our planet from destruction leads him to a conclusion that is slowly becoming more prevalent in the mainstream movement. In an interview with Jeff Goodell in the Sept.-Oct. Orion (not yet available online), Speth shared his vision for a citizen-led movement that reimagines our current economy and state of mind in favor of environmental sustainability. This vision is spelled out in his new book, The Bridge at the Edge of the World (Yale University Press, 2008).

“The fundamental thing that’s happened is that our efforts to clean up the environment are being overwhelmed by the sheer increase in the size of the economy,” Speth tells Goodell. “And there’s no reason to think that won’t continue. So we have to ask, what is it about our society that puts such an extraordinary premium on growth? Is it justified? Why is that growth so destructive? And what do we do about it?

“Capitalism is a growth machine. What it really cares about is earning a profit and reinvesting a large share of that and growing continually … . And so all of these things combine to produce a type of capitalism that really doesn’t care about the environment, and doesn’t really care about people much either. What it really cares about is profits and growth, and the rest is more or less incidental. And until we change that system, my conclusion is that it will continue to be fundamentally destructive.”

Speth proposes we look for a “nonsocialist alternative” to capitalism. This revised capitalist system would require a series of transformations:

“The first would be a transformation in the market. There would be a real revolution in pricing. Things that are environmentally destructive would be—if they were really destructive—almost out of reach, prohibitively expensive.

“A second would be a transformation to a postgrowth society where what you really want is to grow very specific things that are desperately needed in a very targeted way—you know, care for the mentally ill, health-care accessibility, high-tech green-collar industries.

“A third would be a move to a wider variety of ownership patterns in the private sector. More co-ops, more employee ownership plans, and less rigid lines between the profit and the not-for-profit sectors.”

To get there, though, requires more than just policy orchestrated by the people on the top. Beyond his call for a serious bottom-up grassroots effort that “shakes up people’s consciousness and forces us to rethink what’s really important,” Speth also believes that a fundamental shift both in environmental groups’ focus and in our society’s values are crucial to saving the planet.

“I think that the environmental community needs to see political reform as central to its agenda, and it doesn’t now…the other thing that needs to happen is that there needs to be some fundamental challenge to our dominant values. It’s been addressed by religious organizations and psychologists and philosophers and countless others for a long time. But until we reconnect in a more profound way with ourselves and our communities and the natural world, it seems unlikely that we will deal successfully with our problems.”

Image by scottfeldstein, licensed under Creative Commons.

This fall the Olympics will bring us the spectacle “of the human body at the height of health, beauty, discipline, power, and grace,” writes Rebecca Solnit for Orion (article not available online). In her elegant essay, "Looking Away from Beauty," Solnit points to the frail connection those bodies have to the nations they represent—“as though this feat of balance really had something to do with Austria, that burst of power really represented Japan.”

Of utmost importance, Solnit writes, is to consider the way those pristine bodies, those symbols of national pride, exist in conflict with bodies less revered, less public:

It serves the nations of the world to support the exquisitely trained Olympian bodies, and it often serves their more urgent political and economic agendas to subject other bodies to torture, mutilation, and violent death, as well as to look away from quieter deaths from deprivation and pollution. . . . The celebrated athletic bodies exist in some sort of tension with the bodies that are being treated as worthless and disposable. . . . But the associations between the two are crucial to our sense of compassion, and of what it means to be part of a global community.

How much ebullient advertising jargon can you stand? The folks over at Orion, armed with a sassy excerpt from the new book, The Fruit Hunters, offer us an opportunity to sample some of the marketing wizardry that goes into defining who, precisely, desires what particular fruits, not to mention the analytics involved in deciding what makes certain fruits desirable. Important sentence: “Hugeness, once thought to be a key goal, has proven undesirable.” People don’t want to be crushed by a giant banana anymore? Where have I been?

After years of toiling as a deliveryman, Susumu Hashimoto of Japan was finally able to fulfill a lifelong dream: he bought land for farming and began practicing natural agriculture. "I believe the farmer is the closest servant to God," Hashimoto told Lisa M. Hamilton of Orion.

The natural agriculture that Hashimoto practices is based on the philosophies of Mokichi Okada, who believed that healing the world begins with "relearning how to respect life." Natural agriculturists achieve this by creating a strong bond between farmer, land, and consumer. The labor is a mutual responsibility between farmer and consumer in which consumers support the farmers any way they can, from collecting payments to picking weeds.

Followers of this practice trust that the Earth will provide, and they, in turn, surrender to their environment. The food produced on this land is not only a means of sustenance, but also a shared sacrament. –Cara Binder