Arctic Dreams

Description

Drawing on five years of travel and biological fieldwork, Barry Lopez explores the Western Arctic from the Bering Strait to Davis Strait. He attends closely to ice, light, plants, animals, and northern landscapes, but natural history is only one strand of the book. Personal encounters sit beside accounts of exploration expeditions and the histories and knowledge of Indigenous communities, revealing how different cultures have understood and inhabited the region. Lopez also asks why the Arctic has exerted such force on distant imaginations, inspiring fantasies of conquest, purity, emptiness, and spiritual renewal. Patient and meditative, the book presents the North not as a blank wilderness but as a complex living world whose realities challenge the desires visitors project upon it.

Themes