Barry Lopez, Arctic Dreams

Barry Lopez is an active writer who has produced 14 books in the past 20 years (see the reviews for Arctic Dreams), half of them essays on places or environmental issues, half of them "eco-fables" that draw on indigenous narrative traditions to entertain and instruct children (some of these could be useful to you teachers out there). His readers form a mixed bag: some are drawn to his lyrical and descriptive wisdom, while others find him too pious and New-Age misterioso. For examples, see the personal Web pages maintained at The Lunar Archives (look under "deep in the archives" and The River's Banks. On the other hand, Lopez is well-regarded by academic critics and often appears to teach or lecture: see his Three Rivers Lecture series, delivered for the Carnegie Centennial last year. See also a link I referred you to earlier, on the literature of place. 

After exploring some of the links above, consider one of the following questions:

1.  If you had to put Lopez on a continuum of prescritpive to descriptive, with Abbey and McPhee also on there, where would you put him?  Explain your answer based on your reading so far.

2.  Abbey and Lopez seem to have different attitudes toward their readers.   Do you agree?  How do they differ?  Also, there seems to be a fundamental difference between Abbey and Lopez about human knowledge.  Do you agree (why or why not)?

3.  The close cousin of nature writing is travel writing.  Such writing often "orientalizes" (exoticizes) the place the observer encounters, by recording his/her impressions (usually according to the worldview of the traveler/readers back home).  Is this a process at work so far in Arctic Dreams?

4.  Like the landscapes it attempts to describe, nature writing is not monolithic.   It is a rich, vital genre--an eclectic mix of other ones.  What genres overlap so far in Arctic Dreams? See the EB article on nonfictional prose for help.