[Note: This post has been in development for a long time. I was inspired to finally post it when I finished Lopez’s essays, discussed below, and then by the tragedy that has unfolded in Maui. The devastation of Hawaii’s island gem is just the latest example of the fate that awaits us if global action is not taken promptly to combat climate change. We’ve seen it in California and many other places in the United States and the world over. Time is running out.]
Reading the accomplishments of author/environmentalist Barry Lopez, author of the National Book Award-winning masterpiece, Arctic Dreams, is more than enough to give anyone a deep sense of inadequacy. https://tinyurl.com/4wpfch3a I recently finished his posthumous collection of essays, aptly titled Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World (2022). I was stunned to learn that Lopez had died on Christmas Day 2020, shortly after my wife and I moved back to the Washington DC area (in DC itself for the first time), after having survived the pandemic in New York City.
Lopez wrote Of Wolves and Men a decade earlier than Arctic Dreams. According to Wikipedia, “López is a surname of Spanish origin. It was originally a patronymic, meaning “Son of Lope”, Lope itself being a Spanish given name deriving from Latin lupus, meaning “wolf”. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%B3pez This is an interesting juxtaposition in light of Lopez’s interest in natural history. Of Wolves and Men was a National Book Award finalist. Of that book, Amazon.com accurately says that it,
reveals the uneasy interaction between wolves and civilization over the centuries, and the wolf’s prominence in our thoughts about wild creatures. Drawing on an astonishing array of literature, history, science, and mythology as well as considerable personal experience with captive and free-ranging wolves, Lopez argues for the necessity of the wolf’s preservation and envelops the reader in its sensory world, creating a compelling picture of the wolf both as real animal and as imagined by man. A scientist might perceive the wolf as defined by research data, while an Eskimo hunter sees a family provider much like himself. For many Native Americans the wolf is also a spiritual symbol, a respected animal that can make both the individual and the community stronger. With irresistible charm and elegance, Of Wolves and Men celebrates scientific fieldwork, dispels folklore that has enabled the Western mind to demonize wolves, explains myths, and honors indigenous traditions,
Lopez’s profound ability to think deeply about everything he observed and to connect his observations to larger principles was amazing. And he did it with prose so powerful that you stop to reread sentences and whole paragraphs just to be sure you understood every insight he was recording. Here are a few examples from his 2019 memoir, Horizon:
It is here, with these attempts to separate the fate of the human world from that of the nonhuman world that we come face-to-face with a biological reality that halts us in our tracks: nature will be fine without us. Our question is no longer how to exploit the natural world for human comfort and gain, but how we can cooperate with one another to ensure we will someday have a fitting, not a dominating, place in it.
What cataclysm, I often wonder, or better, what act of imagination will it finally require, for us to be able to speak meaningfully with one another about our cultural fate and about our shared biological fate?
….
The desire to know ourselves better, to understand especially the source and the nature of our dread, looms before us now like a specter in a half-lit world, a weird dawn breaking over a scene of carnage: unbreathable air, human diasporas, the Sixth Extinction, ungovernable political mobs.
And this:
It might have been useful once to identify and denounce enemy cultures, those that were seen as ruthless and exploitive, obsessed with wealth and indifferent to social justice at the highest levels; but … I feel that this time has passed. People in every country today can identify with the very same threats to their lives and to the lives of their progeny. And many know their governments, elected or self-appointed, are too cowardly, too compromised, or too mean-spirited, to help them.
One of Lopez’s great gifts was the ability to view and understand situations through the eyes of multiple cultures. It was as if he had multiple minds in one body. Lopez, ever the brilliant storyteller, related the life of Ranald MacDonald, the product of a mixed marriage – a Chinook mother and a white father – who was born in 1824, a time when, not unlike today in some respects, being of “mixed blood” was a huge obstacle to advancement.
MacDonald traveled and had many jobs, coming to have a deep connection to the indigenous people of the Pacific and believing that the Japanese were related to American Indians. He also thought that Western industrialization was an imminent threat to Japan, that had been virtually sealed off for over a hundred years from Western contact. MacDonald managed to get to Japan and during a brief period of acceptance by the Japanese taught 14 members of the shogun’s court to speak English in the hope that it would help them deal with the Western merchants and military he believed, correctly, were soon coming to Japan. MacDonald died in relative obscurity, but Lopez gave a moving tribute to his life as one of the many people of talent and inspiration who was limited by racist and cultural biases throughout his life.
Then, there is Yuval Noah Harari, the author of Sapiens, A Brief History of Humankind, that I have not read, and the sequel, Homo Deus, A Brief History of Tomorrow, that I am about to describe. As I understand it, the central story line of Sapiens was the emergence of humans as the dominant animal on the planet. These people are us — empowered by superior intelligence, opposable thumbs, tool-making ability, and all the rest — to reshape the earth in ways that were perceived as important to the survival and continued dominance of humankind over all other species on the planet. The supreme irony is that “homo sapiens” refers to the only surviving sub-tribe of Hominina and translates to “wise men.”Deus translates, of course, to “god” or “deity.” I will just leave that there. You get the idea.
Harari opens Homo Deus with the assertion that the primary historical scourges of mankind – famine, plague and war – have largely been conquered. As a result, he predicts man will now turn his main attentions to “a serious bid for immortality,” the arguably logical extension of the struggle against famine and disease. The first 70 pages of Homo Deus lay the foundation for what is to come. He argues that it was not the larger brains as such, with attendant superior (to other animals) intelligence, that enabled the planetary domination by humans. Instead, he says, it was the ability of homo sapiens to cooperate with strangers that was the key to it all.
Harari’s opening argument is obviously a very big idea and likely some people will take issue with it. So be it. The point is that these are “frontier concepts,” things most of us likely have not often thought about in depth but that have a lot to do with the future of our species. They were certainly subjects of little or no interest to Trump and his cabinet of policy makers and grifters. But Harari has thought about these issues profoundly. I won’t be around to see if he’s right but I am powerfully interested in understanding his provocative thinking.
His writing will not appeal to evangelical Christians or others similarly inclined. Harari leaves no doubt that he does not believe in the existence of souls, human or otherwise, pointing to, among other things, the absence of evidence. Above all else, Harari, a historian by trade, is an evidence guy. If no evidence appears after extensive investigation, the “thing” most likely does not exist and never did. Me too.
There is another aspect to this, one that I have touched on before. See, for example, the post entitled The Larger Meaning of “Hidden Figures.” https://shiningseausa.com/?s=hidden+figures We have in these two people – Lopez and Harari — examples of humans who, in slightly different circumstances, might well have been ostracized and prevented from reaching their potential as students and later as teachers for the rest of us. Lopez was as American as apple pie, but he bore a family name of Spanish origin. It is not hard to imagine that the Trump administration saw him as a target, because of his name and because he was a truth-teller who wrote and lectured about environmental policies that are anathema to Trump and the Republican Party. Imagine what will happen if Trump, armed with years of new grievances, regains power.
Harari is an even easier target. He was born and grew up in a secular Jewish family with Lebanese and Eastern European roots. That might not have been a problem for the Trump administration, given its attachment to the right-wing leadership of Israel, but there is more: Harari is openly gay and married to a man (in a civil ceremony in Toronto – those Canadians again!). They live in a kind of cooperative agricultural community of individual farms, some might call it a commune. Or socialism! OMG! People working together for the common good. Outrageous.
Reading the challenging and awe-inspiring ideas of these two people, I am reminded yet again of all the other “non-white” men and women whose race-based suppression has deprived all of us of the untold benefits of people capable of seeing things more deeply and thinking in frontier concepts that open our minds to new possibilities.
And to what end? What coherent mental process leads people like Stephen Miller and Donald Trump to the conclusion that some people, solely because of their ethnic heritage, are a danger to American society and should be removed from it? How does Miller rationalize his strident opposition to immigration in light of his mother’s Jewish parents having come here from Belarus in 1903?
We will never know but the point is that suppression of the “other” risks the loss for everyone of life-enhancing contributions to the improvement of society. We will never be able to “know” what we have lost, but it is certain that the loss has happened and continues. If, as is often speculated, this suppression is based on fear of displacement by the unknown, the leaders of the suppression should look at what is known. THAT is what they should be afraid of, the “scene of carnage” described by Lopez.
Some of Lopez’s last words in print are compelling:
Evidence of the failure to love is everywhere around us. To contemplate what it is to love today brings us up against reefs of darkness and walls of despair. If we are to manage the havoc – ocean acidification, corporate malfeasance and government corruption, endless war – we have to reimagine what it means to live lives that matter, or we will only continue to push on with the unwarranted hope that things will work out. We need to step into a deeper conversation about enchantment and agape, and to actively explore a greater capacity to love other humans. The old ideas – the crushing immorality of maintaining the nation-state, the life destroying belief that to care for others is to be weak and that to be generous is foolish – can have no future with us….
Only an ignoramus can imagine now that pollinating insects, migratory birds, and pelagic fish can depart our company and that we will survive because we know how to make tools. Only the misled can insist that heaven awaits the righteous while they watch the fires on Earth consume the only heaven we have ever known….
In this trembling moment, with light armor under several flags rolling across northern Syria, with civilians beaten to death in the streets of Occupied Palestine, with fires roaring across the vineyards of California and forests being felled to ensure more space for development, with student loans from profiteers breaking the backs of the young, and with Niagaras of water falling into the oceans from every sector of Greenland, in this moment, is it still possible to face the gathering darkness and say to the physical Earth, and to all its creatures, including ourselves, fiercely and without embarrassment, I love you, and to embrace fearlessly the burning world?….
Change is coming fast, though, on multiple fronts. Most of us begin the day now uncertain of exactly where we are. Once, we banked on knowing how to respond to all the important questions. Once, we assumed we’d be able to pass on to the next generation the skill of staying poised in worrying times. To survive what’s headed our way – global climate disruption, a new pandemic, additional authoritarian governments – and to endure, we will have to stretch our imaginations. We will need to trust each other, because today, it’s as if every safe place has melted into the sameness of water. We are searching for the boats we forgot to build.
Rest in peace, Barry Lopez.
SHINING SEA 