Arctic Dreams

"You’re absolutely right that this book doesn’t directly address climate change. That’s one of the things I love about it. We so often hear about the Arctic in the context of threats: it’s disappearing, it’s changing, we’ll never see it again. I think it’s useful, though, to stop thinking of the Arctic only as a symbol of climate change and to remember it’s a real place. If we appreciate the Arctic for itself, maybe that makes it harder to write it off as an inevitable casualty of climate change. “It’s useful to stop thinking of the Arctic only as a symbol of climate change and to remember it’s a real place – that makes it harder to write it off as an inevitable casualty of climate change” I included Arctic Dreams on my list because it’s the only ‘science’ book I’ve read that’s really got close to my experience of doing science. It’s meandering and there’s no real structure; there are seriously pages and pages describing how ice melts in great detail. And then a meditation on musk oxen, and then some more ice melting. It’s all a bit of a mess, but there’s a real sense of wonder and gratitude and beauty that permeate the book. Most science books don’t resonate with my experience because they aim to present the science and explain why we know what we know. And in my own scientific papers, I try to write clear stories: X leads to Y which implies Z. But I feel like scientific papers are a kind of fiction. It’s not that they’re lies, but they’re not exact records of what happened. The real scientific process is more like “I tried X for four months and was confused and gave up, but then I realized that Z and Y were related and read some papers and drank some coffee and finally figured out how X fits in to all this”. There are obvious reasons why research papers and science books don’t exactly reflect this process – they’d all be unreadable and we’d never learn anything. But sometimes it’s nice to read something that evokes how it actually feels to try to find things out."

"This book changed my life and really made me become a writer, if any one book did. I remember finding a very battered secondhand copy of it in a bookshop in Vancouver while I was out climbing in the Rockies, in my early twenties. Put most simply, the book is an account of the Arctic’s anthropological, cultural and natural histories. But it’s also, like all the books on my list, an investigation into how we imagine place, and the more complicated question of how place imagines us – how we are brought to think in certain ways by certain landscapes. It was a bestseller in the 1980s in America, and is still a legendary book for many people. It was part of a surge of extraordinary writing about landscape that occurred in America between the late 1970s and early 1990s. Lopez is as at ease in explaining the migration paths of narwhals or the spiritual history of early Celtic Christianity as he is with writing in the pristine moment. That combination of an etched sharpness to his imagery – it’s modernist prose-poetry really – with a deep knowledge born of reading and being out in the environment, was utterly inspiring to me. I saw that non-fiction could be as creative and beautiful as any fiction. This is one of the big problems with landscape writing – landscape doesn’t really do plots and it doesn’t really do suspense. Lopez keeps us reading largely through style. He changes focus a great deal. He moves around in time. Time will suddenly deepen – an arrowhead found on the tundra will lead him back into pre-history, and from pre-history we will race forwards to the instant of a caribou seen across open ground, or a whale surfacing, or a bird of prey stooping. I find that rapidity and variety of movement in time and across space exhilarating. Momentum in Lopez’s work is all about the quality of the writing and thinking. There’s an extraordinary chapter which he begins by standing at a point on the shore where the total tidal range is about an inch. He stands there for hours, while the tide comes in its full inch and then recedes. Only Lopez could make page-turning prose out of that incident. That’s a very good question, and an important one to ask of any book about nature – how deep is its green? When Lopez is talking about narrow impetuosity of human schedules, he is talking about a hectic, Western, late-modern, capitalist time. He’s not talking about the kinds of time experienced and practiced by some of the native inhabitants of the region. Unlike John Muir, one of the founding fathers of the American conservation movement, Lopez is alert to the people who have lived and continue to live in these landscapes. He doesn’t write them out at all, though there are books which do. He’s suspicious of certain ways of being human, and very approving of others."

"Barry Lopez is an American man and in Arctic Dreams he describes the clarity of the landscape that has such a profound effect on the human spirit. Everyone says it has a profound effect. He’s a proper nature writer and it’s a brilliant book. He wrote it 25 years ago, I think, and it’s very lyrical and uplifting. No, it doesn’t. It takes you outside your normal existence and sets you loose from your spiritual moorings. Everywhere in the Antarctic is like that and in the Arctic you feel it when you get away from the settlements. The Polar regions are very uplifting, a different place, a better place. They are very compelling too. That’s another thing about these places: that people keep going back once they’ve been. I spent seven months in Antarctica and I can’t really keep going back there because it’s so hard to get to, but I do go back to the Arctic. Antarctica is easily definable, a continent, and it is not owned, which is important, of course. The Arctic is owned and fucked up and the people have been fucked over by successive regimes. Lopez goes to the very north of the Arctic in North America, that is Alaska and Canada, but he’s not a sledge-puller, not one of those. Cherry was a sledge-puller but he turns it into a metaphor. Lopez talks about the flora and fauna and then, when there aren’t any, about the quality of light and of the landscape, about people’s relationship to the landscape and about what we’ve lost by being so disconnected from nature."