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2021.01.08 Remembering Nature Writer Barry Lopez

• ...I have been dealing with a problem that was very difficult for me, and that is trying to understand the hunting behavior of my host, these men I was traveling with from St. Lawrence Island. We were hunting walrus. And this is a kind of conclusion to some of those troubling thoughts that I had. (Reading) No culture has yet solved the dilemma each has faced with the growth of a conscious mind, how to live a moral and compassionate existence when one is fully aware of the blood, the horror, inherent in all life, when one finds darkness not only in one's own culture, but within oneself. If there is a stage at which an individual life becomes truly adult, it must be when one grasps the irony in its unfolding and accepts responsibility for a life lived in the midst of such paradox. One must live in the middle of contradiction, because if all contradiction were eliminated at once, life would collapse. There are simply no answers to some of the great persistent questions. You continue to live them out, making your life a worthy expression of a leaning into the light.
• ...when I was a child, I spent a lot of time around animals and in the woods. And something I could never have articulated or even understood as a child was my sense that it was all right to feel that you fit there, that these things weren't exotic, they weren't the things of childhood, and that you dropped them, and then became an adult. And as I grew older and as I guess I became, in a formal sense, a writer, I - that distance between myself as an individual and what we call the natural world - it never widened.
• I know this, that when I was so compromised as a child, that there was no zone of safety for me. No place was safe. And especially adults weren't safe for me. The thing that felt safe in the sense that I felt that surge toward lyricism - when I saw something outside myself, the world beyond the self, and I was - I felt the surge of lyrical pleasure in the way the wind sounded, for example, in eucalyptus trees, I knew that I could carry that with me. I could carry it as a memory, and I could carry it as a structure to help me build a safe place in the world. So I had this strange insight. And that is that I hadn't - the end of it wasn't that I had been brutalized. The end of it, really, was that I'd been given a gift. And I now - as I grew into adulthood, I had to find some way to take this darkness and turn it inside out. My desire in my life - I mean, the great metaphors for me have been the metaphors of the natural world. And the natural world in Southern California was the only thing I think, really, that kept me sane as a child. I did not trust the adult world. It was of no help to me. But my embrace of elements of the natural world - the weather, the appearance of wild animals in the regions where I lived - that was all grace for me and kept me from falling further into that abyss. So when I - you know, in my late teens and early 20s, when I really started writing with a purpose, my effort was to understand what it means to be tolerant. What is it that human beings mean when they speak of justice? And, you know, beyond Aristotle, if you will, what is beauty all about, and why do we crave it, and why do some of us destroy it? But you can't just talk about abstractions like that if you're not a philosopher, as a writer. You have to find a context that allows the reader to move into the landscape that you've created and say, oh, yes, I know that, or, oh, that's interesting. And my effort, I think, as a writer, for all of my adult life, is, I have no interest in being the writer - or the reader's authority about anything. I hope, in nonfiction, to write in an authoritative way and to earn the trust and respect of a reader. But mostly what I'm interested in is being the reader's companion. I want a reader to feel that there is room for them, for their intellect and for their imagination, in the prose that I try to craft on a page. And in the end, the only thing I can do - I, Barry, can do - I am not a therapist. I am not an activist. I'm just a writer. And the only thing I can do is what I did on these pages and in Harper's, which is to say, this happened to me. I know many of you have experienced this. Here's what I'd been thinking. What do you think? And so when I stood in front of something that was terrifying or I stood in front of something that was beautiful, there was no separation in my mind about what human beings are. I recognized, in the natural world, the quintessence of human life. They weren't separated.

2020.10.15 Filmmaker Finds An Unlikely Underwater Friend In 'My Octopus Teacher'

• It seems that by developing a habit of swimming without wet suit or oxygen, he became that much more in contact with the sea world, as when the octopus reached out to touch him.

2020.06.17 Amid Confusion About Reopening, An Expert Explains How To Assess COVID-19 Risk

Fresh Air Weekend: The 'New Science' Of Breathing; The Biology Behind Migration

2020.04.16 Long Before COVID-19, Dr. Anthony Fauci 'Changed Medicine In America Forever'

2020.03.03 A Father Recounts His Search For The Son Who Vanished In Costa Rican Wilderness

2019.07.29 Bugged By Insects? 'Buzz, Sting, Bite' Makes The Case For 6-Legged Friends

2019.06.14 Essayist Breaks Free From Conventional Relationships In 'Because I Love You'

2019.04.24 'Mind Fixers' Documents The 'Troubled Search' For Mental Illness Medication

2019.04.05 'High Life' Is A Stunning Space Odyssey — With A Baby On Board

2019.02.14 BBC's 'Dynasties' Captures The Complicated Social Lives Of 5 Different Species

2019.02.12 A Neuroscientist Explores The Biology Of Addiction In 'Never Enough'

2019.02.06 Environmental Photographer Focuses On Protecting The Climate — And Its People

2019.01.21 Historian Henry Louis Gates Jr. On DNA Testing And Finding His Own Roots

2018.11.12 Counting The Bugs And Bacteria, You're 'Never Home Alone' (And That's OK)

2018.08.30 Comic W. Kamau Bell On The 'Shades Of America' And Not Feeling 'Black Enough'

Scientists Are 'Spying On Whales' To Learn How They Eat, Talk And ... Walked?

2018.07.20 Sleep Scientist Warns Against Walking Through Life 'In An Underslept State'