Temperate people
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In 2021, Barry Lopez’s Arctic Dreams is timelier than ever.
Review by Collin Slowey
In Arctic Dreams, nature writer Barry Lopez recounts how impressed 19th-century whalers were by the splendor of their northern hunting grounds. Towering glaciers crashing into the ocean, misty winds tearing through the air, walruses swimming through glistening waters: sailors writing of these sights considered them visions of “loveliness and grandeur.”
And yet, these same men willingly wreaked death and destruction upon the landscape—to an almost incomprehensible degree. One ship captain’s log describes an encounter with “the dead bodies of hundreds of flinched whales,” the numbers of which “were ever increasing,” and whose stench infected “the air for miles around.”
How is it possible to treat something one understands to be profoundly beautiful with such ruthless violence? For Lopez, the key to answering this question lies in the connection between the human imagination and the natural world. Today, when our society struggles perhaps more than ever to achieve a sustainable relationship with the environment, this insightful and perceptive work is urgently relevant.
Barry Lopez, who died only six months ago at the age of 75, is arguably the greatest nature writer of the last century, drawing comparisons to Henry David Thoreau and John Muir. Over the course of his career, he explored wilderness locations as far-flung as the Galápagos Islands, the Kenyan Uplands, and the Queen Maud Mountains of Antarctica, documenting them all with his characteristic mixture of scientific acumen and mystical philosophy.
Lopez is best known, however, for his writings on the far north, where he traveled for five years as a field biologist, braving harsh conditions and learning about the land from researchers, industry workers, and indigenous tribes. Arctic Dreams, a collection of essays on the region that won the 1986 National Book Award, is his magnum opus.
A tour de force of popular scientific writing, the book is notable for its poetic descriptions of the landscape. When he recounts a scene of icebergs “moving inexorably south, wreathed in gray silence, inchoate in the cold air,” or likens the chill of the northern winter to the “feeling of stone crushed beneath iron,” Lopez does not simply catalog the region’s sights and sounds. Instead, he invites us into the Arctic experience, which he declares “inexplicably coherent,” “transcendent in meaning,” and “imbued with the power to elevate a consideration of human life.”
What people make of observations and data depends on their perspectives: what they desire, what they deem valuable, and what they do not.
Yet for all its beautiful imagery, Arctic Dreams is more than an evocation of the Arctic environment; above all, it is a profound investigation into the relationship between the human mind and our species’ experience with the natural world. His conclusion is that the story of the West’s encounter with the Arctic, and its subsequent fallout, is ultimately one of clashing imaginations. Westerners, steeped in a Cartesian worldview, tend to envision nature as an object of manipulation. This means, consciously or not, we often treat it as simply a tool to be turned to human uses or a resource to be mined for profit.
This was certainly true of the Arctic pioneers. The whalers whose fleets plundered the Arctic Ocean for decades, killing thousands of whales and thoroughly disrupting the northern ecosystem, saw the environment merely as a resource to be exploited. They were not cartoon villains, simplistically greedy and cruel. As Lopez points out, individual whalers “likely had no thought at all of how utterly devastating their way of life would prove to the Eskimo and [the whale population].” Rather, they were simply incapable of imagining the Arctic environment as something with its own needs and deserts.
This is where the indigenous paradigm sharply diverges from the Western. Lopez recounts how during the 19th century, the Tununirmiut people told the whalers at Pond’s Bay that what it meant to grow rich was not to have adventures or material wealth, but rather “to have a good family life and to be imbued with a far-reaching and intimate knowledge of one’s homeland.” For these men and women, who had lived in this harsh and seemingly empty land for generations, an essential aspect of the good life was establishing a respectful, reciprocal relationship with the world around them: “achieving congruence with a reality that is already given.”
Decades later, the limitations of the Western imagination remain a source of conflict. “What happened… in the heyday of arctic whaling represents in microcosm the large-scale advance of Western culture into the Arctic,” posits Lopez. Furthermore, “the modern industries—oil, gas, and mineral extraction—might be embarked on a course as disastrously short-lived as was that of the whaling industry.”
In Arctic Dreams, Lopez is hopeful that Westerners can achieve a sustainable relationship with the earth, but he is adamant that this will never take place without a revision of the Western imagination. The book contains a gentle criticism of environmentalists who believe scientific studies and data analysis alone will prevent industry from continuing its present course. Raw information, writes Lopez, “is assembled differently by each individual, according to his cultural predispositions and his personality.” In other words, what people make of observations and data depends on their perspectives: what they desire, what they deem valuable, and what they do not.
What the average Westerner lacks is not information, but rather the Arctic native’s understanding of the land as inherently valuable. How does one achieve such a paradigm shift? Lopez believes Westerners do not naturally value the far north because we have no ancestral ties to it. “As a temperate-zone people, we have long been ill-disposed toward deserts and expanses of tundra and ice.” Though we may long for an easier solution to this problem, there is no remedy outside of a more intentional engagement and familiarization with the Arctic landscape. “I would draw you,” writes Lopez, “back to the concrete dimensions of the land and to what they precipitate; simply to walk across the tundra; to watch the wind stirring a little in the leaves of dwarf birch and willows; to hear the hoof-clacket of migrating caribou.”
For most people, a trip to the Arctic of the kind Lopez seems to propose is either prohibitively expensive, prohibitively dangerous, or both. But this does not mean we cannot encounter it, albeit in a limited capacity, through the first-hand accounts of explorers, scientists, and writers: accounts like Arctic Dreams. The year 2021 finds Westerners more environmentally aware than perhaps ever before, but still caught in the same precarious relationship with the Arctic environment as the early Western explorers and whalers. In such a world, Arctic Dreams is an even timelier read than it was when originally published.
Collin Slowey is an independent writer whose work on politics, culture, and religion has been featured in The American Conservative, The Dallas Morning News, and Public Discourse, among other outlets. He is also a Fall 2021 Fellow with the John Jay Institute.
Arctic Dreams was published by Vintage Books in 2001. You can purchase a copy on their website here.
