Barry Lopez died on December 25th

ON ONE OF his evening walks across the Arctic tundra, Barry Lopez found himself bowing. Not an extravagant thing, but from the waist, with his hands still in his pockets. He bowed to the horned lark he encountered on her ground nest, who returned his gaze with a stare as resolute as iron. He bowed to the golden plovers he surprised crying from their eggs, and to the eggs themselves, touched with a glow as soft and pure as in the paintings of Vermeer. When he came to a shred of musk-ox wool caught in the lavender flowers of saxifrage, he bowed to that, too.

By doing so, he surprised himself a little. But he kept the habit going. It was a gesture of respect for fecundity and beauty, for the mystery of these lives in a place that seemed barren. It was prompted, too, by the astonishing serenity and clarity of the Arctic light, a breathing light, pure as first-water diamonds. He felt wonder, and not only for small, close things. When he raised his field glasses he could see the true differentiated colours of the tundra, the bloom of glittering spray around caribou as they shook themselves, the several shades of grey in an iceberg, dove-grey and pearl and smoke, and the cobalt gleam of distant melt-ponds that held at their centres a core of aquamarine ice, like the heart of winter.

He went to the Arctic—as to the Antarctic, the Pacific north-west, Australia, the Galapagos, Africa—with the mental preparation of a scientist. Though he had not been trained as one, he had read widely, and could deploy anthropology, geology, biology and physics as they were needed. But he also deployed the eye of the boy who had wandered the creeks and rocks of the San Fernando Valley, and whose greatest joy had been to watch his pigeons flying. The book that resulted from his trip, “Arctic Dreams” (1986), carefully analysed the crystalline structure of rocks and ice, the habits of seals and the thermodynamic function of the hair of polar bears, but delighted equally in the still-mysterious: the life of the narwhal, less known than the rings of Saturn, or the migration of snow geese, which made him feel transcendent when he camped among them. Rationalism, charts and data sets could go only so far. They could not answer his abiding questions: how landscape shaped the people who lived in it, their ethics and imaginations, and how people’s aspirations, in turn, affected landscape, until they were as much a part of it as the creatures were, or as the wind was. Science could not explain how some landscapes bestowed grace on the beholder, and called out goodness.

These concerns took him incessantly away, to more than 80 countries. The horizon had always beckoned, urging him to see what the skyline cordoned off, to leave the comfort zone of his white, middle-class upbringing and his conventional ideas. For a while the Catholic priesthood had tempted him, but he found even the life of a Trappist monk too easy. He was drawn instead to places, especially the polar regions, where in white-out blizzards the sense of time and space disappeared, and where sometimes the indifferent, unnamed, unmeasured wilderness seemed, in a strange way, to hold him safe. Gathering meteorites once with a scientific team in the Transantarctic Mountains, he was entranced not only by those stones from beyond the Earth but also by the terrestrial rocks he clambered over, each with distinct colours and angularities and each, to him, subliminally alive.

The mysterious worlds of wild animals drew him, too. For two years in Alaska he lived alongside wolves, observing but also personalising them, in an effort to correct human cruelty and false imaginings. Wolves, too, were part of the landscape they moved in, exactly fitted to it, and considered by the native tribes to be as various as clouds. Invading profiteers upset such subtle balances by drilling for oil, and dumping waste, in regions they assumed were just static dioramas and did not begin to understand.

At least the peoples of the Arctic still lived, to some degree, in harmony with their landscape. There was wisdom to be tapped, if he could get to it. In his writing he excoriated those who dismissed indigenous knowledge and storytelling, reminding them, again, how much they did not know. In a way he was an elder in his own place, the McKenzie river valley on the west slope of the Cascades in Oregon, simply by virtue of living there for 50 years. He knew the spawning places of the Chinook salmon, the haunts of ospreys, the favourite routes of bear and deer. However much he travelled, he kept those ties to his natural home, his native or hunter’s eye. If he was blocked in his writing he would walk the banks to pick up a beaver stick, notched by the busy teeth of creatures who had no idea what angst was. If he needed wilderness again, where humans had never set foot, he could find it within a few steep miles.

Whether home or abroad, he saw himself as a man on the edge. The edge of tribal gatherings from which, like an ivory gull, he picked out whatever scraps he could; the edge of the United States; and the edge of the climate-change debate, from which he kept calling, hoping to be heard. The planet was in dire straits. In September the horror came right to his door, when a wildfire caused by years of drought roared along the river bank, destroying the shed that was his archive and, worse for him, 25 acres of mature temperate rainforest. But his message survived, in many forms. It was not angry, desperate though he felt sometimes; he wanted to elevate the conversation, unsettle the selfish, then offer comfort and help. As a writer, teacher and speaker, he saw that as his moral duty.

He fulfilled it by telling audiences what he had discovered on his journeys over the horizon: the proper balance, achieved by indigenous people, between community and autonomy; the wisdom of shamans and elders; the imperative to connect communities to their landscapes, the need to be ever-vigilant. It might be too late to apply this message in many places, but it could prompt, at least, a different perspective, a way to spark solutions that were not imagined yet. Above all he sought to foster a sense of awe before reality, a rekindling of amazement, and recognition of how much was still unknown; to treat its every wonder with respect and humility, as he had bowed to the horned lark. ■