Arctic Dreams
by Barry Lopez
Summary
Arctic Dreams is Barry Lopez's account of five years traveling the far north of Alaska and Canada, with field biologists, with Inuit hunters, and alone, and it is one of the great works of American nature writing, a book about a landscape that becomes a book about desire, which is what the subtitle promises. Lopez builds it as a series of long interlocking essays. Muskoxen stand their ground as they have since the Pleistocene; polar bears hunt through a chapter that treats them as minds rather than emblems; narwhals move under the ice trailing their unexplained tusks; snow geese rise off Wrangel Island in numbers that stagger arithmetic. Between the animals come the phenomena, the months of low light and the whiteouts that erase the horizon, the behavior of ice in its dozens of named kinds, the mirages that hung phantom mountain ranges in front of a century of explorers. And through it all runs the human record: the Thule and Dorset peoples, the Inuit whose knowledge Lopez treats as science earned over millennia, and the parade of European seekers, Frobisher to Peary, whose dreams of wealth and priority the Arctic absorbed and mostly punished, including the expedition photographs' cruelty to the people already there. Lopez's sentences are unhurried and exact, and his argument is quiet but total: a landscape this large requires of us what he calls dignity of attention, and what we imagine a place to be determines what we do to it. The book won the 1986 National Book Award for Nonfiction and made its author, in Robert Macfarlane's later words, the most important living writer about wilderness.
Historical Context & Significance
Lopez wrote Arctic Dreams as oil development at Prudhoe Bay was industrializing the American Arctic, and the book's meditation on how imagination licenses use was pointed at its moment; it has only grown more so as the region warmed faster than almost anywhere else on earth, its ice and animals now archival in a way the author lived to grieve. The 1986 National Book Award put nature writing at the center of American letters in a way little seen since Carson, and the book, with Of Wolves and Men before it, made Lopez the conscience of the genre. Writers from Robert Macfarlane onward name it as the standard, and readers now open it the way Lopez read the explorers, as a record of a country that no longer quite exists.