The more I read of Barry Lopez the more I come to appreciate his worldview and how it overlaps with the way I would like to be able to relate to landscape and place. He had a long career traveling, writing, and generally investigating the interactions between culture, society, landscape and nature. Lopez (paraphrasing a passage from Robert Macfarlane’s book Landmarks for the next couple lines) is a topographic humanist. He sees landscape not as a static diorama against which human action plays itself out, but rather as an active and shaping force in our imagination our ethics, and our relations with each other and the world. In his work, place invests consciousness and geography is inseparable from morality.

Lopez’s last major work before his death in 2020, Horizon, is the culmination of 30 years of thought on these topics and 5 years of writing. Ostensibly a memoir of some of his travels and his outlook on the future, the book is not nearly that simple. It is a symphonic work, touching on various themes and ideas that intersected in Lopez’s life. He does not offer solutions or easy answers to the world’s problems but does create an expansive space for a reader to dwell on our collective past and future.

Following are a number of quotes I pulled out of the book on different themes. The book leaves me with much to think about.

On the effect that place can have on an individual and its sentience.

But physical places, it is my belief, do shape the attitudes of visitors arriving from distant homelands with an outlanders mindset. The nature of the visited place affects the very tone of a journal entry. It influences the selection of the facts one chooses to jot down about that place. In short, the historian who visits a place writes a different story than the historian who stays home, satisfied to read about a place someone else once visited.

page 60

This quiet landscape, the tundra under my thighs at this moment, indifferent as it might be to the presence of a squatter, is nevertheless heartening. It responds to my inquiring hand, to my scrutinizing eye, my flaneur’s search for nothing in particular.

Or it will, if I demonstrate by my gestures a degree of respect, a capacity for wonder. This, at any rate, is the belief that guides me here. A belief that the physical land – a broadly encompassing term – is sentient and responsive, as informed by its own memory as it is by the weather, and offering withing the obvious, the tenuous

page 133

On maps, coordinates, GPS, and how these things can come up short when one is trying to understand the world. I quite like the comparison of reading a landscape to appreciating an impressionistic painting in the 3rd quote.

Lines of latitude and longitude speak most eloquently to the head. Mastering them can make a person feel confident and smart. In a similar way, committing to memory the myriad of associations among species of animals and plants in a particular locale can make one feel competent when navigating a route over land. The Alsean hunter knew where he was and where he was going in a way different from Cook’s… It seems a person would need both points of view to become fully informed, a knowledge of both the extreme complexity of the local… and the unbounded enormity of the grand view.

page 105

The device [GPS] has no power to determine any further where we are, by noting that the cumulus clouds. with their involuted heads of cauliflower floats, were passing through. Or how the spaciousness of the sky here changed when flocks of birds flew over us in a rush. Or how all this might look if it happened to be raining. The numbers marked a postal, like the address on a house

page 424

After Cook, we were able to locate the coordinates of our position on Earth dependably with sets of numbers – latitudes and longitudes. They give us a sense of precision and irrefutability and they glow on the screens of our handheld GPS units. We no longer define our positions by the contours of the land we stand on, the texture of the soil, the colors and density of the vegetation, the rate of gravity-driven water in sills, books, and rivers. We fully embrace the coordinates Cook gave us, but in everyday use they represent a kind of Esperanto.

page 124

Maps held me in thrall when I was young. They combined, in a single two- dimensional space, bolt the all encompassing reality that a journey makes possible and the particularity of those places along the way that compromise the journey. To behold a map is to imagine, in the same instant, both the arc of a journey and the moments that make it up. This, to make a bit of a leap, is part of the genius behind Monet’s impressionistic representations at Giverny. The unfocused colors of these sketch-like images mimic the sketchiness of ones movement through a particular geography, while at the same time the painting consists of discrete dabs of color. One of Monet’s contemporaries, Camille Pissaro, painted panoramas of Parisian streets that work before the eye in the same way maps do: you appreciate the entirety of the area and, simultaneously, its discrete components.

page 282

On listening to other cultures, musings on what we may have lost by not acknowledging the type of knowledge they developed, and a couple of long passages on the importance of elders.

As time grows short the necessity to listen to foundational stories other than our own becomes imperative… Many cultures are still distinguished today by wisdoms not associated with modern technologies but grounded, instead, in an acute awareness of human foibles, of the traps people tend to set for themselves as they enter the ancient labyrinth of hubris or blindly pursue the appeasement of their appetites.

page 45

This suggests to me that for people in difficult circumstances, the notion of needing help from a centralized authority, especially one living at a remove from the problem, and the notion of fully protecting certain types of economic progress are not much on peoples’ minds. What I see consistently in these situations [disaster zones, war zones, etc] is the emergence of individuals who represent that culture’s sense of competence into positions of authority. They are its wellspring of calmness. They do not disappear with defeat or setbacks. They do not require reassurance in their commitments to such abstractions as justice and reverence. In traditional villages they’re called the elders, the people who carry knowledge of what works, who have the ability to organize chaos into meaning, and who can point recovery in a good direction. Some anthropologists believe that the presence of elders is important as any technologic advancement or material advantage in ensuring that human life continues.

I’ve not travelled enough, read enough, spoken to enough people to know, but this observation seems almost eerily correct to me. At the heart of the generalized complaint in every advanced or overdeveloped country about the tenor of modern life is the idea that those in political and economic control are self serving and insincere in their promise to be just and respectful. I sat down at my desk once and wrote the qualities I observed in elders I’d met in different cultures, nearly all of them unknown to one another. Elders take life more seriously. Their feelings toward life all around them are more tender, their capacity for empathy greater. They’re more accessible than other adults, able to engage in a conversation with a child that does not patronize or infantize the child, but instead confirms the child in his or her sense of wonder. Finally, the elder is able to disappear into the fabric of ordinary life. Elders are looking neither for audience nor for confirmation. They know who they are, and the people around them know who they are. They do not need to tell you who they are.

To this list I would add one more thing. Elders are more often listeners than speakers. And when they speak, they can talk for a long while without using the word I.

Living in one of the most highly advanced of human cultures, I often wonder, What have modern cultures done with these people? In our search for heroes to admire, did we just run them over? Were we suspicious about the humility, the absence of self promotion, the lack of impressive material wealth and other signs of conventional success? Or were we afraid they would tell us a story we didn’t want to hear? That they would suggest things we didn’t want to do?

page 312

I’ve implied much here. about the ability of elders in traditional societies to guide their people down the perilous roads all societies must travel (and left it to the reader to imagine that some elders, engaging their egos too to great an extent, or seduced or corrupted by the secular world, fail at the work). I should emphasize then that all elders know they’re fallible, that they know these are “no guarantees in life,” and that some dangerous circumstances simply cannot be circumvented. But the thing with them is that they know that once they are chosen, they must never quit out of despair or fear. To do so would be an act of betrayal. And they are chosen because people agree, every day, that this person is the best mind they have. It is not possible to make oneself available to serve as an elder, and I’ve been told that no one really seeks the position anyway, because the responsibility is so great.

With the disintegration of traditional societies the world over, the model they represent of wisdom passed on through a series of elders whose decisions are not questioned is in danger of being lost. The democratic model of governance in the west is based on the idea that everyone’s voice must be heard. Those individual voices are often drowned out and subsumed in the West, however, by charismatics who say, “Follow me! I know the way!” In traditional societies people come to understand who it is who can really hear another person’s voice, so they are comfortable with that person coming up with a plan in conversation with other elders in an emergency, and they feel no loss of autonomy in doing what the elder asks of them. They know the elder is not a” follow me” personality. His guiding thought is that no one is left behind.

page 416

On observing and experiencing nature.

When I was young and just beginning to travel with indigenous people, I imagined that they saw more and heard more than I did, that they were overall simply more aware than I was. They were, and they did see and hear more than I. The absence of spoken conversation whenever I was traveling with them, should have provided me with a clue about why this might be true; it didn’t, not for a while. It’s this: when an observer doesn’t immediately turn what his senses convey into language, into the vocabulary and syntactical framework we all employ when trying to define our experiences, there’s a much greater opportunity for minor details, which might at first seem unimportant, to remain alive in the foreground of an impression, where later they might deepen the meaning of experience.

page 167

As much as I believed I was fully present in the physical worlds through which I was travelling over the years, I understood over time that I was not. More often I was only thinking about the place I was in. Initially awed by an event… I too often moved straight to analysis. On occasion I would become so wedded to my thoughts, to some cascade of ideas, that I actually lost touch with the details my body was still gathering from a place… And so the mind’s knowledge of the place remained superficial.

page 169

Its generally true that traditional people are mostly quiet while traveling, because the syntax and vocabulary of spoken language to often collapses the details of a place into meaning, precluding other interpretations.

page 415

Lastly, on not forgetting our past.

If you never pass through Nagasaki, if you never see the ruins of POW camps in North Vietnam, if you don’t walk the Sashone slaughter ground at Bear River, Idaho, it’s easier to believe that these things are merely historical, or to believe that the era of death camps, penal colonies, and raids on American Indian encampments no longer exists, that these places are now only symbolically important. It is to put forth the idea that autonomous drug cartels in Mexico can be brought to heel by a strong government.

page 246