Lopez, a prize-winning writer, environmentalist, traveler, and human being, died in 2020, and this book posthumously collects essays from publications issued from 1996 to 2020 along with four previously unpublished essays.  He “was deeply engaged in imagining and planning his final collection of nonfiction essays in the months before he died” according to the Acknowledgements section written by his wife in which she also thanked friends (including the wonderful poet, Jane Hirshfield), collaborators, and editors.

I’d been aware of Lopez’s work for many years and own two of his books, including the National Book Award winning ‘Arctic Dreams’ and his penultimate book, ‘Horizon’, but had not read his work before.  This volume, with a superb introduction by Rebecca Solnit, was a fine introduction to his work.  Though some of the essays were quite out of date, even those showed how perceptive and forward-thinking Lopez was in his warnings about climate change, the ozone layer, and mass extinctions.

The book contained a long essay about his traumatic experience with a family friend who repeatedly raped him between the ages of 10 and 16, an experience that he eventually came to terms with through years of therapy.  Coming upon that essay amidst the beautiful prose about the Antarctic, the Oregon woods, and the Alaskan wilderness was a somewhat jarring juxtaposition, and didn’t work for me, but the rest of the book was quite wonderful.  He writes with an intimacy and an immediacy that is compelling as he travels to more than 80 countries seeking to understand the nature of the place and the lives of the people who inhabit it.  As he writes in an essay about his home in rural Oregon, “I do not recall a single day of attentiveness outdoors, in fact, when something unknown, something new hasn’t flared up before me.”  It is this continuous amazement and curiosity that makes Lopez such a wonderful observer and commentator and qualifies him to be worried about the planet’s future.  He goes on to say that the “Existential loneliness and a sense that one’s life is inconsequential, both of which are hallmarks of modern civilizations, seem to me to derive in part from our abandoning a belief in the therapeutic dimensions of a relationship with place.”

There is much that is beautiful in this volume though uneven in parts,  no doubt a reflection of the inability of the author to finish it before he died.  I am eager to read other work by him. The earth is made poorer by his death.