We who inhabit the northern parts of the world, should maybe make it our duty to visit the Arctic. We are its closest neighbors, yet I’ve met few countrymen who have taken the trip to the arctic regions. We may take it for granted, and consider it uninteresting or mundane. Which it most certainly is not – a fact that Barry Lopez‘ book Arctic Dreams very convincingly demonstrates.
Lopez is a naturalist, environmentalist, adventurer and essayist all rolled into one. He has written a nine chapter book about the Arctic region, based on his extensive research and wide travels. Each chapter centers around a theme, like Polar bears, Inuit culture, narwhals, monks, explorers.
Arctic Dreams is often mentioned as one of the greatest examples of “nature writing” there is. Barry Lopez, who wrote the book, is a fascinating person – an American environmentalist/adventurer who has traveled the Earth and chronicled the natural world, with a sort of dual perspective, both scientific and cultural. I was curious about what “nature writing” really referred to, which is why I was drawn to pick up this book. I have read stuff in the past that should qualify, like Peter Wohlleben‘s book about trees, or Annie Dillard‘s essays on nature. I’ve perused Thoreau’s Walden and noted names like Edward Way Teale, or Loren Eiseley as naturalists to read. I like the genre of travel writing a lot, which “nature writing” is closely related to, but where travel writing is a lot about moving in culture, nature writing is about moving in nature. Both are journeys, though, and the essayistic eye is common to both genres. Some books, like Redmond O’Hanlon‘s Trawler from 2003 where he recounts three weeks on a fish trawler from the Shetland Islands up to Greenland, are probably just as much travel writing as nature writing. Others get into this whole spiritual at-one-with-nature vibe, which seems to attract a lot of people. An example would be hiking alone for weeks through the Grand Canyon, as did Colin Fletcher and wrote a popular book about it in 1968. Man and nature, connection to the Earth. Something many of us feel we are lacking, and therefore might want to read about.
It goes back to Darwin’s journey on the Beagle, or the notes of Linneus and Humboldt. Lopez is quite classificatory, but he combines phylum and philosophy, and throws in a good measure of cultural history too. There probably are a number of factors which participants of nature writing score high or low on – and I could name a few. Scientific or impression-based? spiritual or materialist? environmental concerns or no? adventure or solitude/calm? Being in nature is a sort of religion, argues David Thurfjall, Swedish scholar of religiosity.
Reading about nature is, arguably, not as good as being in nature for real. But it can reveal different things than can firsthand experience. I sense there is something about our relationship to nature that is a bit off. And this may be slightly corrected by hiking, reading “nature writing” och the recent rebrand “forest bathing”.
Arctic Dreams reminds me of my time in Iceland (which is just about sub-arctic, though). It’s the closest Ive come to the arctic I think (barring a week in Lapland 2018). I learned a bit about inuits (some of whom who want to be called eskimos). They have an interesting term, a shaman-like role in their culture, which is called isumataq: “the person who creates the atmosphere in which wisdom reveals itself”.
The book contains many beautiful and interesting descriptions of natural phenomenon, like ice, snow, light and darkness.
“The evening I spoke with Haycock, I came across, in my notes about light, the words of a prisoner remembering life in solitary confinement. He wrote that the only light he experienced was “the vivid burst of brilliance” that came when he shut his eyes tight. That light, which came to him in a darkness that “was like being in ink” was “like fireworks”. He wrote, “my eyes hungered for light, for color…” You cannot look at Western painting, let alone the work of the luminists, without sensing that hunger. Western civilization, I think, longs for light as it longs for blessing, or for peace or God.”
Lopez makes a cogent argument that deep-rooted ideas about seasons, time, space, distance, and light are not applicable to the Arctic, and that different ways of thinking about these concepts are needed.
Kinship of all Species 