#547: Horizon

Horizon was Barry Lopez' penultimate book, and a substantial piece of work which showed his particular love of the world, and his way of describing it. 

There is a review of the book here, by Robert MacFarlane.

MacFarlane met Barry a number of times, and has written about this, and there are videos available on YouTube of them discussing Barry's life and work.

Horizon remains one of the finest descriptions of the slow change that has taken place within the life times of those of us over the age of 50. Communicating the likely changes that will take place in the next 50 years while remaining positive is the difficult thing...

#538: Barry Lopez - external and internal landscapes

From the classic 'Crossing Open Ground'

“I think of two landscapes- one outside the self, the other within. 

The external landscape is the one we see-not only the line and color of the land and its shading at different times of the day, but also its plants and animals in season, its weather, its geology… If you walk up, say, a dry arroyo in the Sonoran Desert you will feel a mounding and rolling of sand and silt beneath your foot that is distinctive. You will anticipate the crumbling of the sedimentary earth in the arroyo bank as your hand reaches out, and in that tangible evidence you will sense the history of water in the region. Perhaps a black-throated sparrow lands in a paloverde bush… the smell of the creosote bush….all elements of the land, and what I mean by “the landscape.”

The second landscape I think of is an interior one, a kind of projection within a person of a part of the exterior landscape. Relationships in the exterior landscape include those that are named and discernible, such as the nitrogen cycle, or a vertical sequence of Ordovician limestone, and others that are uncodified or ineffable, such as winter light falling on a particular kind of granite, or the effect of humidity on the frequency of a blackpoll warbler’s burst of song….the shape and character of these relationships in a person’s thinking, I believe, are deeply influenced by where on this earth one goes, what one touches, the patterns one observes in nature- the intricate history of one’s life in the land, even a life in the city, where wind, the chirp of birds, the line of a falling leaf, are known. These thoughts are arranged, further, according to the thread of one’s moral, intellectual, and spiritual development. The interior landscape responds to the character and subtlety of an exterior landscape; the shape of the individual mind is affected by land as it is by genes."

I have this same edition.

#125: Natural History Reading List #9: 'Home Ground'

Home Ground has an American focus, but would provide a rather fine basis for producing an illustrated glossary of UK specific Natural History terms in the same vein.

I am sure that many of the terms are also relevant to the UK's diverse landscapes.

The book was compiled and edited by the late great Barry Lopez and his partner Debra Gwartney.

Around 100 pages of the book can be read on Google Books here.

The book has definitions of landscape terms - some of which will perhaps be unfamiliar to non-geographers, and not all of which can be found in the UK.

This is a rather wonderful book.
It is a 'dictionary' of features which make up the landscape of the United States.

Many of the landscape terms are illustrated and accompanied by short essays from a range of contributors along with quotes. This is much better than the typical A-Z because of the eclectic nature of the articles and essays and the quality of the writing and illustrations.

Published in America, but available from Amazon.

My copy was published by Trinity University Press in 2006
Hardback, 450pp
ISBN: 1 - 59534 - 024 - 6

Contributors include: Jeffery Renard Allen, Kim Barnes, Conger Beasley, Jr., Franklin Burroughs, Lan Samantha Chang, Michael Collier, Elizabeth Cox, John Daniel, Jan DeBlieu, William deBuys, Gretel Ehrlich, Charles Frazier, Pamela Frierson, Patricia Hampl, Robert Hass, Emily Hiestand, Linda Hogan, Stephen Graham Jones, John Keeble, Barbara Kingsolver, William Kittredge, Jon Krakauer, Gretchen Legler, Arturo Longoria, Bill McKibben, Ellen Meloy, Robert Morgan, Susan Brind Morrow, Antonya Nelson, Robert Michael Pyle, Pattiann Rogers, Scott Russell Sanders, Eva Saulitis, Donna Seaman, Carolyn Servid, Kim Stafford, Mary Swander, Arthur Sze, Mike Tidwell, Luis Alberto Urrea, Luis Verano, D. J. Waldie, Joy Williams, Terry Tempest Williams, and Larry Woiwode.

#41: Remembering Barry Lopez

One of the proposed 'benefits' of the new specification is that it will introduce students to nature writing (along with other media such as paintings and literature...)

I hope that one of them is Barry Lopez. 

He is described in this piece as an author who tied people to place.

He deserves to be on any official reading list. We'll be suggesting our own Reading List as part of our proposed resources for those teaching the new specification.

Barry passed away in December 2020.

Thanks to Point Reyes Books for organising this webinar.

A special tribute to Barry Lopez (1945-2020), featuring John Luther Adams, Bathsheba Demuth, Jane Hirshfield, Robert Macfarlane, Colum McCann, and Rebecca Solnit, along with Barry’s wife Debra Gwartney. John Freeman served as moderate the conversation. 

This event was presented by Point Reyes Books, in partnership with Elliott Bay Book Company, Emergence Magazine, and Orion Magazine. 

This recording has been edited due to copyright issues. In the original, John Luther Adams' tribute was followed by a recording of "Sky With Four Suns." The event concluded with an excerpt from "Horizons," Jeremy Seifert's film about Barry Lopez, which can be found on the Emergence Magazine website. See later in the post.

I've read Barry's final collection of essays which came out over the summer 2022, and it is really rather wonderful and memorable, and shocking... and it will make you cry.

Get yourself a copy...

Here's Horizons:

Horizons from Emergence Magazine on Vimeo.