Award-Winning Nature Writer to Explore 'Road of Human
Cultural Development' in Convocation Lecture Feb. 22 at UCSD

By Jan Jennings I February 14, 2005

Award-Winning Author Barry Lopez

"What does it mean to grow rich?" asks nature and human culture writer Barry Lopez in his award-winning book, Arctic Dreams. "Is it to have red-blooded adventures and to make a fortune?" Or, "Is it to retain a capacity for awe and astonishment in our lives, to continue to hunger after what is genuine and worthy? Is it to live at moral peace with the universe?"

A prolific writer who integrates environmental and humanitarian concerns, Lopez muses of a timeless and nameless wisdom esteemed by all people - "understanding how to live a decent life, how to behave properly toward other people and toward the land."

Lopez will speak on Leaving Lascaux: Shaping Human Nature at 7:30 p.m. Feb. 22 in the Price Center Ballroom at the University of California, San Diego. The event is free and open to the public. Hosted by UCSD's Council of Provosts, Center for the Humanities, and Dean of Physical Sciences, the lecture is the second in the UCSD Convocation Lecture Series 2004-2005 which is dedicated to the memory of Patrick Ledden, John Muir College Provost, 1987-2003.

Described as a "wanderer" by one reviewer, Lopez has visited 50 countries, traveled in remote parts of the world with indigenous guides and worked alongside biologists, anthropologists, and other scientists. In his talk, Lopez will draw on this field experience "to illuminate the long road of human cultural development" and "to show how certain transcendent human qualities give us reason to be hopeful about the human condition."

Lopez is the author of books of short stories, nonfiction, and essays. Arctic Dreams: Imagination and Desire in a Northern Landscape (1986), a humanitarian exploration of northern landscapes, won the National Book Award for nonfiction, and Of Wolves and Men (1978) won the John Burroughs Medal as the best book of natural history that year. His newest book is Resistance (2004), a fictional collection of nine interrelated stories.

The background for Arctic Dreams, for which Lopez is best known, came from his numerous trips with scientists in the Arctic. In one harrowing adventure, wind pushed a large ice floe toward their 20-foot boat, sealing it off from open water and pinning it on four sides. Heroic maneuvers by his mates saved their lives, and in reviewing his own experience and marveling at what must have been the perils of early Arctic explorers, Lopez concluded in Arctic Dreams: "Arctic history became for me, then, a legacy of desire - the desire of individual men to achieve their goals. But it was also the legacy of a kind of desire that transcends heroics and which was privately known to many - the desire for a safe and honorable passage through the world."

Nicholas O'Connell, the author of At the Field's End, writes of Lopez: "Each of his 12 books of fiction and nonfiction represents a search for such a passage. Though he is primarily known as a nature writer, his work always poses large ethical questions: What does it mean to lead a dignified and virtuous life? How are we to treat others, especially the weak and powerless among us? What are our responsibilities toward the nonhuman world."

In a more potent warning than philosophical musing, O'Connell says Lopez argues that "unless our civilization finds some way of coming to terms with the land, we will continue to destroy it and impoverish ourselves as a result. Lopez sees the exploitation of the Arctic as an extension of the exploitation of the entire North American continent."

Lopez was born in 1945 in Port Chester, New York, and when he was three his family moved to northern San Fernando Valley in California where he grew up appreciating the natural landscape. At age 11 came another move, this one to Manhattan where he attended a Jesuit prep school and reveled in the intellectual atmosphere of New York City. He did undergraduate and graduate studies at the University of Notre Dame, considered entering a monastery, and though he decided against it, the austere, contemplative lifestyle stood as an important model for him.

As one reviewer described the nature writer, traveler, adventurer, and landscape photographer: "He is also a quiet, meditative man who values solitude and expresses awe and reverence for the natural world."

Among Lopez's other works are Desert Notes: Reflection in the Eye of a Raven (1976), River Notes: The Dance of Herons (1979), Field Notes: The Grace Note of the Canyon Wren (1994), Giving Birth to Thunder, Sleeping with His Daughter (1977), Winter Count (1981), Crow and Weasel (1990), The Rediscovery of North America (1991), and About This Life (1998).

Always desiring to invite thought, Lopez writes in Arctic Dreams: "No culture has yet solved the dilemma each has faced with the growth of a conscious mind: how to live a moral and compassionate existence when one is fully aware of the blood, the horror inherent in life, when one finds darkness not only in one's own culture but within oneself . There are simply no answers to some of the great pressing questions. You continue to live them out, making your life a worthy expression of leaning into the light."

"Wherever it is we are headed," says Lopez. "I think I come circling back to the same question all the time, and that is: what is it that makes a worthy life?"

As for his own life and future, the author/philosopher, who makes his home in Oregon, says: "I don't have anyplace where I have to get. I feel privileged just to go on working."

For further information on the Lopez lecture, visit the website at http://muir.ucsd.edu/barrylopez/ or contact Nancy Hatch at (858) 534-3589.