Orion was founded in 1982 as the Orion Nature Quarterly, a program of New York's Myrin Institute, and it has published without a single advertisement ever since. For more than four decades, it has operated on subscriptions and donations alone — about 30% from readers, 70% from foundations and individuals — making it one of the purest examples of nonprofit literary publishing in America.
The roster of writers who have passed through its pages reads like a syllabus for the best course in environmental literature you never took: Barry Lopez, Wendell Berry, Bill McKibben, Rebecca Solnit, Sandra Steingraber. The magazine has won a Utne Independent Press Award for General Excellence, a Whiting Literary Magazine Prize in 2023, and its articles regularly appear in The Best American Science and Nature Writing. In the 1990s, Orion organized the Forgotten Language Tour, a national barnstorming tour celebrating nature writing, and co-sponsored a conference at the Library of Congress that drew over 3,000 attendees.
Based in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, and now led by editor-in-chief Sumanth Prabhaker and executive director Amy Brady, Orion has evolved from a pure nature journal into something broader: a quarterly exploration of nature, culture, and place that treats ecological crises not as isolated policy problems but as reflections of deeper cultural failures. Its 200th issue arrived in 2025 with a print redesign, proof that a magazine can survive four decades without ads if the writing is good enough and the mission is clear enough.
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