I first came across Lopez's writing through Robert Macfarlane, who considers Lopez a 'friend and inspiration', and through buying a copy of Arctic Dreams. Of similar length to Horizon at over 500 pages, it is a beautiful exploration in the Arctic, and any and all life within it. It reads, indeed, like a dream, covering so much territory and offering beautiful, intimate glimpses into this remote world. Lopez was always drawn to the most remote places of the planet, and held a special place in his heart for Arctic landscapes - something that is crystal clear from his writing, whichever page you happen to open Arctic Dreams on.
Horizon is slightly different in that it seems to carry a warning that cannot be ignored. Its deep dive into certain places, peoples or histories all look to the same issue - of climate change and the imminent threats we are facing if we don't change our ways. And yet it still offers respite every now and again through its lyrical, often tongue-in-cheek but always humble descriptions of breath-taking scenery and sights.
I am nowhere near qualified to review, let alone completely understand all the deep ideas and thoughts that have gone into the creation of this book. But I hope I can give you a glimpse, and hope that you come away from reading this piece with at least one reason why you might pick up Horizon.
"To triumph. To win."
In this last message to us, Lopez doesn't circumvent difficult topics. He questions governments, our constant drive towards betterment, our refusal to stop and consider. He asks whether progress really is the only, the ultimate and at the same time unachievable aim for humanity - whether there's not so much more that we should be, and need to be, focusing on. "... are these questions now thought to be anachronistic, questions no longer relevant to our situation?" he asks.
There is often a desperation that comes through his writing, grown out of many years of travelling the world - over 80 countries in his lifetime - getting to know its peoples, and observing first-hand the hand- and footprints that humans are leaving on the environment. Cultures disappearing, knowledge evaporating, and the value of those he refers to as 'elders' no longer taken into account. "History tells us," he writes, "that with every great empire comes great barbarism, that the two are inseparable ... This forces the question of what, really, civilization brings to people that they did not already have. And why is civilization so hard on the people who turn it down?" This is a recurring idea throughout the book, from observing the forced extinction of certain species on the Galápagos Islands to revisiting the prisons of Port Arthur and considering its living history that many would be all to happy to bury and label as 'of the past'. Lopez, on the other hand, makes the connections that are too uncomfortable to point out - those to modern-day concentration camps, of arms sales, of how little we have changed on certain fronts to this day. History, he argues, isn't to be buried. It is - and this, I think is the central plea of the book - to be learnt from.
The humility in his writing is comparable to none, and it inspires reckoning within ourselves too. He is all too conscious, at all times, of his privilege, his outsider status, and tries to handle this with as gentle a hand as possible. He never exempts himself from the philosophy he is exploring. And this connectedness, the idea of us forming part of one large community rather than being islands on our own, cuts especially deep during his time spent camping near the Turkwel River in Kenya, looking for fossils in the ground. Where his team, five Kamba men and himself, meet representatives of the Turkana people, ancestral inhabitants of the land. The clash of the modern and of ancestry come into sharp focus during a short exchange about the team's right to camp. "He [a member of Lopez's team] listens patiently while the other man explains the tenets of traditional hereditary land ownership among the Turkana people ... One senses he and his ancestors have been losing this argument for more than a hundred years now." He finishes the section: "The only ethics I really needed to probe in this situation, anyway, were my own. What were my own reasons for not asking permission? For not having knocked?"
And why don't we, dear reader, tend to knock?
"We are darkness as we are, too, the light."
Besides the philosophy, of course, the scenery is breathtaking. Lopez travels from near his own home at Cape Foulweather to the Canadian High Arctic, to Africa and Australia, to the Arctic circle and the Galápagos. He dives under sea ice, assists in archelogical efforts, visits zircon crystals dated as over 4.27 billion years old, and lays eyes on an immense emperor penguin colony on a polar expedition. These unbelievable sights, sounds and experiences are carefully intertwined with his musings on human history, often taking the examples of well-known explorers - Cook, Amundsen, Scott and Darwin, to mention but a few. His extensive reading and knowledge of these lives gives a deeper shade of colour to the ideas and images presented to us, helping to leave a lasting impression.
A long-term view
"What if the perspective you could imagine for yourself, the foundation for your ethics and your politics, was not the condescending now of right now?" Lopez asks. This is what this book can do for you, what it did for me - it looks forwards and back, it brings the then into the now to give a better perspective on today. Why is the history of our species' development relevant here? How does an encounter with a bear, observed through an indigenous perspective, give us better insight into the knowledge we are losing?
Lopez helps shift our focus and questions the obvious to change our priorities. It's as if he's placing a virtual reality lense on our eyes, giving us sight, sound, experience as if we were in it - and in reality, we're reaching into the void around us, helplessly.
This is a vital call to action, a stark reminder of our place in the universe, written in gorgeous, lyrical language and composed almost like a piece of music.
It is best read slowly.
