Barry Lopez

Barry Lopez is a corresponding editor with Manoa, a book-length literary journal published twice a year by the University of Hawai'i Press and edited by Frank Stewart. A recent issue, Where the Rivers Meet: New Writing from Australia, was guest edited by Australians Larissa Behrendt, a novelist, lawyer, and member of the Eualayai and Kammillaroi nations of northwest New South Wales, and Mark Tredinnick, a poet, essayist, and writing teacher living in Sydney, and by BL and Frank Stewart. The 184-page issue of essays, fiction, and poetry features photographs by Aboriginal photographer Ricky Maynard. Stewart and Lopez are currently editing two volumes of the journal on the theme of reconciliation. The first issue, with original work by South American, South African, eastern European, Indian, and Chinese authors, is due out in February 2008, the second in June 2008.
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Author Mike Newell has recently published No Bottom, a book about BL's fiction. The 152-page book includes a 41-page interview with BL by Newell and photographs of the author, BL, and the setting of the interview.
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Following the publication of Home Ground, edited by BL and Debra Gwartney, BL began work with Sandra Phillips, Curator of Photography at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, on an exhibit featuring the images of American landscape photographers. Entries from Home Ground will accompany many of the photographs. The show is scheduled to open in 2010.
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BL serves on the advisory boards of a diverse group of organizations. Among them are Theater Grottesco in Santa Fe, New Mexico; The Mountain Lion Foundation; The Orion Society; and Reader-to-Reader, which sends books, free of charge, to the nation's neediest libraries. He recently joined the advisory board of The North American Network of Cities of Refuge.
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On January 26, 2007, BL received the Rev. Robert J. Griffin Award, presented to a Notre Dame graduate who has made a significant contribution to literature. He received a B.A. degree from the University in 1966.
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BL with Desmond Tutu in Indonesia, May 2006. Wilford Welch, who invited both of them to work with him in Ubud, Bali, at Quest for Global Healing, is at center. The gathering brought together 500 people from 40 countries for presentations and workshops. Welch, BL, and Susan O'Connor are currently working with Pualani Kanahele and a small group of native Hawaiian practitioners and with other spiritual and secular advisors to design a sequel to Quest for Global Healing, scheduled to take place at Hawai'i Volcanoes National Park on the Big Island in June 2009.
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Reconciliation Ceremony

  On September 9, 2007, the President, Provost, and Vice-Provost of Texas Tech University, together with a small group of representatives from the Texas Tech University community, including Barry Lopez and artist Richard Rowland, made a formal offer of reconciliation between the University and the Comanche Nation before representatives of the Comanche people. The unprecedented ceremony

  Projects already underway include: 1) exchange programs for faculty and students, developed according to the provisions of a Memorandum of Understanding between Comanche National College and the University; 2) a long-term oral history field project, intended to establish an historical record of post-contact events from a Comanche point of view; 3) an ethnomusicology project designed to record, collect, and archive modern and traditional Comanche music, for deposit at both the Comanche Nation Museum and at the Southwest Collection at the University; and

acted as co-masters of ceremony. Comanche drummers, singers, and dancers purified the ceremonial grounds prior to opening remarks from Chairman Coffey and by President Jon Whitmore and Vice-Provost Jim Brink. Following a statement about uniting in a common cause with the Comanche Nation, delivered by BL on behalf of the University, each of four members of the Comanche Indian Veterans Association was asked by Chairman Coffey to select an empty clay pot from a ceremonial table and to take up a position at one of the ceremonial grounds’ four cardinal points. BL asked four University representatives, each one holding a similar clay pitcher full of local groundwater, to join the veterans at the cardinal points.

Global Climate Change

  In the austral spring of 1988, I camped for a month in West Antarctica with a field party of four glacial chemists, on Newell Glacier in the Transantarctic Mountains. After several weeks of surveying, the scientists pinpointed a promising site at the head of the glacier where they could drill to retrieve an ice core. Two drillers were flown in and, with some of us dressed in sterile gear to handle sections of the ice core, we began work. On November 17, 1988, Al Gore flew out to our camp from McMurdo Station, the main American base in Antarctica. He was eager to learn first-hand how ice cores, which preserve a record of the Earth’s atmospheric history, were being retrieved and how they might be used to clarify growing concerns about global climate change. Gore impressed us as someone unusually well-informed about the scientific questions involved, and he struck us as the model of a public servant. He was smart, courteous, a determined questioner, and a keen listener. It was -5° F and he'd had to hike a half-mile uphill to the drill site from the spot where the helicopter set him down. He didn’t complain and never struck a pose. He was a man on a mission. Gore refers to this visit to our Newell Glacier camp in his documentary, An Inconvenient Truth. In that film, the difference between the public servant and what you might call the corporate servant among America’s political leadership becomes profoundly and sickeningly clear. In a relentless and devastating way, the film dismantles the claptrap that characterizes efforts by the Bush White House and American energy corporations to misrepresent and refute global warming. Willfully uneducated, greedy, and arrogant, this small consortium of wealthy men in business and government represents one of the greatest examples of political cowardice and irresponsibility in the history of the Republic. Given what is at stake, and the number of voters who remain “unconvinced” about the importance of global climate change, they constitute a dangerous and malicious group of people. Please see the film, if you haven’t already. And thank Gore for the constancy of his citizenship.
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Wolf Research

  I was midway in my research for Of Wolves and Men when Bob Stephenson—walking behind us here—invited me to join him in the field, to learn about this kind of scientific research. I was initially drawn to Stephenson’s work because, in order to learn about these animals, he’d apprenticed himself to a group of Nunamiut Eskimo living at Anaktuvuk Pass in the Brooks Range. He had identified the wolf in the photo from the survey helicopter as “a female, an older one.” I kidded him at the time, saying nobody could be that discerning about a wild wolf, not from a distance. “Well,” he said, unassumingly, “it’s one of the things the Nunamiut taught me to do.” Indeed, during the week we spent radio collaring and tracking wolves in Nelchina Basin, Bob's ability to age and sex wolves from a distance was unerringly correct.

  One thing the wolf in this photo taught me was that, despite her age (apparent from the condition of her teeth), she had impressive fat reserves for late winter. This says a lot about community. She might not have been able actively to help in the later stages of a successful moose or caribou hunt, but she knew where to point the other wolves in her pack in pursuit of food, into which of the many valleys in this mountainous country she should direct them.

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Contact the author
All correspondence regarding permission to reprint and other rights, or regarding public appearances, must be directed to the appropriate address or link.

Readers may direct personal letters to the following address:

Barry Lopez
PO Box 389
Blue River OR 97413

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Contents © 1966
to current, by
Barry Holstun Lopez.
All Rights Reserved.

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