Not sure where I first found Orion Magazine - read a blurb somewhere and subscribed. Branding itself as “Amerca’s Finest Environmental Magazine” I’d have to say it lives up to that billing quite well. It’s also a terrific legacy project (more on that below), that’s right up my alley since my legacy interests are focused on environmental preservation, conservation, sustainability and clean renewable energy technologies. But that’s why a particular article caught my attention recently. It’s by biologist Sandra Steingraber, entitled “The Whole Fracking Enchilada”, and I it hope catches the attention of many people in generations currently alive and able (and willing) to respond – for the sake of future ones.
Here’s an excerpt from Barbara’s article – hopefully you’ll see why it got my attention:
“THE ENVIRONMENTAL CRISIS can be viewed as a tree with two trunks. One trunk represents what we are doing to the planet through atmospheric accumulation of heat-trapping gasses. Follow this trunk along and you find droughts, floods, acidification of oceans, dissolving coral reefs, and species extinctions.
The other trunk represents what we are doing to ourselves and other animals through the chemical adulteration of the planet with inherently toxic synthetic pollutants. Follow this trunk along and you find asthma, infertility, cancer, and male fish in the Potomac River whose testicles have eggs inside them.
At the base of both these trunks is an economic dependency on fossil fuels, primarily coal (plant fossils) and petroleum (animal fossils). When we light them on fire, we threaten the global ecosystem. When we use them as feedstocks for making stuff, we create substances—pesticides, solvents, plastics—that can tinker with our subcellular machinery and the various signaling pathways that make it run.”
It seems there is much to be done if we are to shift this planet and its people (not to mention other species) to a truly healthy, life-enhancing environment. We must move away from our dependency on fossil fuels, and the products of the petrochemical industy and era. Many legacy level projects could contribute to that end, from the successful women and men of the planet looking for what’s next and ready to give back in some way – large or small – and who are looking for a subject to wrap that ambition around.
As for the legacy that is the magazine, it started as the Orion Nature Quarterly in June 1982 as a program of the Myrin Institute, a private operating foundation based in New York. Later, the magazine operation move to The Orion Society, an independent nonprofit, which also conducted additional programming, moved the operation to Massachusetts and obtained 501(c)3 designation for its ongoing work. The magazine has lots of great topics, no advertising, an easily accessible online version and a very reasonable subscription price. They basically want people to read the content.
The publication’s first Editor-in-Chief, George Russell clearly illuminated Orion’s underlying values, which stand today: “It is Orion’s fundamental conviction that humans are morally responsible for the world in which we live, and that the individual comes to sense this responsibility as he or she develops a personal bond with nature.”
Hear, hear. Almost 30 years later, his words couldn’t ring any truer. Seems we need to go another direction … very soon. Will you be one of the enlightened leaders who helps turn this bus, and all of us bozos on it, toward a better destination?
I hope so. All the best to you, Dolly
There is much to do and many ways to set a course for good in this world! And 
Last year, journalists called it “the most widespread day of political action in the planet’s history”! Citizens in over 180 nations staged actions on International Day of Climate Action to demand a quicker response to climate change. The New York Times covered it on the front page. In Times Square people watched images of this movement flood in from every corner of the world on jumbo-tron screens. More than 5200 separate events were held around the globe. “These are the kinds of crowds that turn out for rock stars or charismatic politicians, but instead they are rallying around a scientific data point, they’re asking our leaders to lead — to pay attention to scientific reality, not political convenience” said founder, Bill McKibben. He has grown his legacy through a book, and 
Husband and wife team, Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn created a legacy in the form of 
They say good things come in small packages. Great legacies often start small … and young. Emily Goldstein was a senior at Atherton High School in Louisville, Kentucky, when she and her partner Brandie Farkas were chosen among 16 teens from around the world to study polar bears in the Arctic. She and her partner, Brandie Farkas, both volunteers at the Louisville Zoo, entered the 
No effort is too small, no one is too young or too old to start their Legacy Project! From a local community project to a global enterprise, the difference is only a matter of scale built on your unique desires and circumstances. It all starts small, an empassioned idea coupled with action— and even tiny first steps can grow to planetary dimensions.
