Barry Lopez is a difficult writer to categorize. Essayist, naturalist, traveler, environmentalist, novelist – Lopez did it all. I’m a newcomer to his work, so my assessment of him is inevitably shaped by this set of essays collected and published posthumously, but he reminds me of one of those itinerant evangelists who draw us towards a greater understanding of our world and our experiences of it not just by what they preach and write but also by how they choose to live. (Rebecca Solnit, in her introduction to this collection, talks about “something priestly” about Lopez’s presence). Lopez traveled extensively, not as a tourist travels, but as someone seeking to live as fully as possibly in the wonders of the world. He was drawn to remote places and the people who live and work in them – Alaska and Antarctica, for example – and also to every corner of the United States. His particular brilliance, it seems to me, was his ability to communicate a sense of place with remarkable vividness, to relate what specific places meant to him, and, by extension, to explain why they ought to matter to us.

He saw very clearly, and much earlier than most of us, the terrible destructive impact we are having on our planet, on its species and habitats, and on the human communities who live in the remaining wildernesses. He wanted to warn us, but most of all he wanted us to pay attention and to learn. “Perhaps attention is what we owe one another and the world first, and this writer wandered about, paying it out lavishly, and writing down what he learned as an exhortation to others to likewise pay attention“.