One of my essays was published by Orion magazine!

I’ve been reading Orion magazine since I was a senior in college. I can pinpoint the year because I still have the Spring 2000 issue that my employer gave me because she thought I’d like it. (Between Chemical Oceanography and Ichthyology I dug holes to reposition the laurels in the landscapes of the Hamptons summer homes of the wealthy). 

She was right, I did love Orion magazine, I’ve been reading it ever since while wishing that I could one day write an essay for Orion. That first issue held an essay by one of my heroes, Jane Goodall, and it also contained an essay by someone who would become my hero, Wendell Berry.

I went back and re-read Wendell Berry’s essay in that spring 2000 issue to remember what I connected with and why I decided I’d spend the next quarter century working toward being a part of this wonderful magazine. It was easy to see what had landed for me. The farmer/writer I have grown huge respect for over the intervening years wrote in that essay about the reductionist language of science, about how we defend what we love, and about how categories can run at cross-purposes to conservation. He said, “for things cannot survive in categories but only as individual creatures living uniquely where they live.”

This essay of mine is about individual whales and women, how they are endangered, and how science sometimes contributes to that endangerment. I’m pretty proud of it and I hope you’ll give it a read. I also hope it nods toward the “particularizing language” Wendell prescribed for how we go about saving what we love.