Skip to main content
Up to that point, Lopez had a small, loyal following for his fiction, essays and journalism, mostly about the natural world. But when Arctic Dreams won the 1986 National Book Award for Nonfiction, Lopez found himself in demand to speak out as a sage philosopher about the fate of the planet.
For years, he resisted the call, preferring to let the writings he issued from his hermitage along Oregon's McKenzie River speak for him.
Lopez—author of 17 books—also explores topics such as justice, consumerism and, in a first-person account, the experience of childhood sexual abuse. Lopez, as Bill Moyers once put it, goes "out into the world to discover what is beyond and within us."
Lopez will talk about his work in Portland on Feb. 5 as part of the Think & Drink series organized by Oregon Humanities. (WW is a sponsor of the event.)
He spoke to WW about the shift in his public profile, how his earlier work resonates today, and how he remains hopeful when many of the things he writes about are often so bleak.
When Arctic Dreams came out, global warming was not as widely discussed as it is now. Have you gone back to places you wrote about to see how they've changed?
Yes, many times. I think of Peel Sound in the Canadian High Arctic. It's near where [British explorer John] Franklin got lost in 1845 with two ships. When people went searching for them, Peel Sound was a place nobody ever went to look because there's no way they could have even gotten in there because of the ice. Now in the summer, there's not a bit of ice in it.
For many of us who read it, your book created the white-blue landscape that we imagine we are now losing.
The surfaces have changed. The composition of the human communities and the animal communities has changed. But it's still the High Arctic. The place is too massive and too overpowering and too staggering to behold to be marginalized by our concerns about global climate change. The landscape is its own essence.
Still, it fills me with grief. We're doing things that will compromise all the efforts we make to create just environments across the world. What you're seeing unfold across the Arctic and anywhere else in the world is injustice.
In your 1978 book, Of Wolves and Men, you documented how the demonization of wolves nearly drove the species to extinction. Wolves are returning—so is the demonizing. What do you make of that?
It's such a default position to be righteous and judgmental, but when you do that you show no compassion for the incredible difficulty we have just to be a full-blown human being—there's nothing more complicated in the world than that.
Nobody can stand apart and condemn others. Not on the large-scale issues. We've got to do the best we can to change these circumstances, and if were not successful, we come to an end. And the history of life on earth is littered with dead ends. I don't want to be part of one.
So many of the big issues you've tackled can seem hopeless. How do you avoid a sense of cynicism?
As a writer, my ethical obligation is to just keep these fires burning that we lit in the Enlightenment in Western culture. I've never been much of an activist. I'm not a person who stood out somewhere in a public square with a sign. I've always thought that what I'm supposed to do is provide groundwork for illuminating discussions. When you read a book like Arctic Dreams, it excites emotional and intellectual impulses. I'm perfectly happy with whatever people do with those impulses.
If your work does not advocate, then what do you hope it will do?
A choreographer makes patterns. A painter makes patterns. A sculpture makes a pattern in space, occupied and unoccupied, empty volume and full volume. Writers work in the most literal of the arts, and you can convince yourself that what you are saying is something that needs to be known. In the end, all you're doing is making a pattern out of language.
I expose myself to the world, listen to what people say and turn that experience into language. People read the work and might come away with ideas—I hope they do—but also the sense of being psychologically reorganized. You close the book, and you may forget the writer, but you're reconstructed as a person.
You've made the choice to be more a public figure than you have in the past.
When I was writing about wolves or the Arctic or any exotic subject, I was always looking for people who explain something about complex processes readers would find engaging. The shift over 40 years is that I now find myself in that position. People think of me in a way that's not just a writer but as a person who's actively thinking about international concerns, and I have made an effort to see a lot of the world, of both its underbelly and its glories.
Your work on issues of reconciliation has put you out there, not just as an activist of sorts but as someone who presumes his presence can make a difference.
I've known a lot of very well-known people, and every single one of them has scar tissue that comes from choosing to or being forced to become a public person. And all of those encounters for me have been warnings: You are not bright enough or qualified to lead anybody. But a community is. You have to figure out a way to make that community work better.
You've written that your love for the natural world developed while you faced sexual abuse as a child, an experience you wrote about in a 2013 essay in Harper's.
Yes—when you're in the middle of a traumatic experience, you're always looking for a way to manage it. My way was to go to places without people. I felt safe in the open—in the wind, among the eucalyptus trees, standing with sunlight shining directly into my face. I see now that I had found symbolic depth in the natural world.
I'm wondering if these themes of reconciliation surface from your experience.
You know, your guess is as good as mine. My wife, Debra Gwartney, teaches memoir at Pacific University. She taught me memoir requires taking responsibility for what happened, and not seeing yourself as a victim, and that became a key idea for me.
You can read the piece and say this is about this fellow and what he went through as a child. The real reading of the piece is, this is what we do to each other. We do it in the office. We do it in our homes. We do it in Congress. We abuse the responsibilities that we have, and we create an environment in which people are frightened and look the other way.
If you aren't careful, the trauma you go through early in your life becomes an explanation for everything else that goes wrong in your life. I am at ease with what happened to me, but I wouldn't call it full reconciliation. My own struggle as a human being is to feel the kind of compassion that I want to feel toward everybody. I can't get there.
Would that be true even toward your abuser?
Yeah, I don't think I can get there. I understand anger. I've been angry in moments of injustice in my life where foolishly I stood up and got punched in the face.
I understand much better now at this point in my life how to create an atmosphere of mutual regard and compassion and respect. There's not a lot of water and food left, and our children are suffering, and we've have to be there for them. And in order to do that, we can't afford these fights. So let's go work on it.
And if I flatter myself to think I can write about it, it's because I have these storms in myself that rise up periodically about things like my childhood. At least I've gotten to the point where I recognize it's a teaching experience, I can turn it into something useful, and stop whining.
GO: Barry Lopez will speak at Alberta Rose Theatre, 3000 NE Alberta St., on Thursday, Feb. 5. 6:30 pm. $10. Under 21 permitted with guardian.
WWeek 2015