DEAR FRIENDS AND READERS,

As I look back on a topsy-turvy 2025, while testing out my new year’s mantra – radical optimism – I’m grateful for the chance to share with you, our community, some personal thoughts and exciting updates on the state of things here at Orion as we roll into 2026.

When I joined Orion last March, it capped more than a year of searching — not just for a job, but a place to feel useful, challenged, and engaged at a time of political and environmental turmoil. The 2024 election assured that more chaos would ensue, and I craved the kind of work that mattered in that moment. Indeed, within weeks of landing at Orion we got the dreaded letter from Washington: our National Endowment for the Arts grant has been “terminated.” In the months since, Orion has confronted the ripple effects of this administration’s assault on the arts, the environment, and diversity. While some people have shared with me their hesitance to support issues at odds with the current administration, I’ve also witnessed inspiring collaborations and activation among our nonprofit peers, our writers, and our readers.

One example: In September I got to share a stage at the Brooklyn Book Festival with Orion writers Emily Raboteau, Eric Dean Wilson, and Leslie Jamison. (You can watch it here on C-Span.) Near the end of our panel discussion, Emily described a research trip to Alaska where she asked an Indigenous elder how he sustained hope and shunned anger as melting permafrost and rising sea levels threatened his community and his family’s way of life.

“That’s easy,” the man told Emily. “We take care of each other.”

I was reminded of that sentiment when longtime Orion contributor and advisor Jane Goodall died a week later. Buried in a Google Drive I found a video interview with Jane, conducted in 2022 when we created the Orion Jane Goodall Award, in which Jane remarked on the alignment of her goals and Orion’s: “We all strive to ensure that in every generation there are more and more people working to protect the wonder and beauty of the natural world.”

Which brings me to the New Year. The world can be wondrous and monstrous, as our Editor in Chief Tajja Isen notes in the editorial of our new Winter issue, Cryptids: On The Trail Of Bigfoot And Other Improbable Beasts. It’s what propels our writers and editors to continually seek “new ways to view our most pressing social questions through the lens of the natural world.”

I truly believe that work – picture Emily Raboteau standing on the melting shore of an Alaskan village (which she wrote about in her 2024 story “Gutbucket”) – matters more than ever. Amid increasing risks to the planet and back-sliding climate policies, at Orion we’ll continue to do our part with small acts of resistance in our pages and online, through our workshops and events.

Orion has undergone some notable changes over the past year, and we’re heading into 2026 with energy and optimism, turning a corner and building momentum.

This fall, we received significant grant support from Bloomberg Philanthropies to digitize forty-three years of archived stories by such luminous writers and thinkers as Jane Goodall, Barry Lopez, Joy Harjo, Wendell Berry, Rebecca Solnit, Bill McKibben, Ross Gay, and more. Making these stories newly accessible does more than revisit history; they’ll serve as guidance for the future. We began sharing pieces from the archive this fall, with more to come in 2026.

Orion is also investing more deeply in field reporting and climate journalism. You’ll start to see this reflected in our upcoming issues – Working the Land: Lessons in Labor and Collective Action (Spring 2026) and an expanded special Summer 2026 issue, The Deep Dive: Exploring the Oceans with the World’s Largest Mammals.

Also upcoming: keep an eye out for a reader survey in the weeks ahead (we want to hear from you!), which will inform the new Strategic Plan we’ll develop in 2026. We’re also reviewing our printing, distribution, and subscription models to ensure the magazine’s long-term sustainability. Beyond the magazine, Orion’s workshops and events, led by world-class writers and educators, continue to flourish. These programs help nurture the next generation of environmental storytellers – a powerful contribution toward building climate resiliency.

To support these and other efforts, to grow our audience and reach more readers, we launched the Horizon Fund last fall – a $400,000 investment campaign designed to strengthen Orion’s foundation and carry our work into 2026 and beyond. Thanks to early leadership gifts, we’re two-thirds of the way to our goal and will continue to seek donations in the weeks ahead.

The driving engine behind all this work is Orion’s talented staff. I’m deeply grateful to get to work with Tajja, Tara, Katie, Ananda, Tracie, Karen, Ricky, Kim, Rachel, Ella, Donovan, and others, as well as our writers, artists, and contributors, plus our supportive board.

As a reader-powered nonprofit, we couldn’t survive without our devoted subscribers and donors. Thank you for being part of this community. Thanks to the 82-year-old who told us she was “blown away” by our Autumn issue, glad to see us elevating Black artists. Thanks to the mom who gifts Orion to her incarcerated son and credits Orion for opening up his world and “helping my son break free.” Thanks to long-time Orion writer and workshop instructor Alison Hawthorne Deming, who shared: “I am thrilled to see such a new jolt of energy and reflection on your pages.” Thanks to everyone who sustains Orion as a place where writers, artists, and thinkers help us understand our relationship to the natural world – and our responsibility to it.

From all of us at Orion: welcome to 2026. Let’s hope it’s a year of less mayhem and cruelty, more compassion and caring; less insensitivity to the environment, more devotion. We’re in this together. We’re here for you, and with you. We can take care of each other.

With gratitude,

Neal Thompson, Publisher and Executive Director