Horizon (2019)
Barry Lopez (1945)
572 pages
During certain periods of uninterrupted vigilance at the edge of the sea, I’ve … had the sense that there is some other way to understand the ethical erosion that engenders our dissatisfactions with modern life – the tendency of ruling bodies, for example, to be lenient with entrenched corruption; the embrace of extrajudicial murder as a legitimate tool of state; the entitlement attitudes of those in power; the compulsion of religious fanatics to urge other humans to embrace the fanatics’ heaven. The pervasiveness of these ethical breaches encourages despair and engenders a kind of social entropy; and their widespread occurrence suggests that these problems are intractable.
I can’t say what this other way of looking at these situations is, how a huge domed space like the daylit ocean, a space almost entirely free of objects and offering a different sense of time passing, might provide a perspective to make banal human failure seem less enduring, less threatening; but taking in this view, I always sense that more room for us to maneuver exists. That what halts us is simply a failure of imagination. (67)
A desire, in part, to overcome the limits of this failure of imagination has driven writer Barry Lopez throughout the world on a lifelong journey of exploration and learning. In Horizon, he offers an engrossing meditation on what he has experienced during this on-going pilgrimage through all manner of geographies and communities of humankind, and what it has taught him about how – to borrow a question that On Being host Krista Tippett routinely asks guests at the conclusion of her interviews – how he would begin to answer the question of what it means to be human.
And as part of addressing that question Lopez doesn’t shy away from discussing its intimate relationship to the existential challenges currently facing the humankind.
Though in some sense the entire work is autobiographical, over the first fifty or so pages of the Introduction Lopez provides a brief timeline of his life, focusing on elements of his childhood that came to trigger his desire to see beyond the horizon, as well as glimpses of transformative moments he has experienced during his travels. The remainder of the book is divided into six sections, each centered on a period he has spent at a particular location, but each also further illuminated through vignettes from others of his trips and from the extensive reading and studying he has done to accompany and inform his travels.
His narrative soars with the wonder with which he views both the natural landscapes he discovers – each with its own intriguing geology and biology – as well as the often forgotten human cultures that once called these places home and have since disappeared or been displaced. And he brings a long-term, comprehensive view to the physical and social environments he encounters. Thus during a sojourn on Skraeling Island in the Canadian arctic he finds himself bewitched by not only the beautiful, natural extremes of the landscape, but also the ruins of pre-Inuit cultures that he encounters – abandoned structures of the ancient Thule built on top of and from the remains of the even more ancient Dorset culture; viewing all this he revels in “the way one century nestled within another here, the verticality of time in this place.” (158)
Later in the book, visiting East African sites rich in “fossil evidence of early Homo Sapiens,” Lopez joins the search for evidence of “any hint of human ancestors.” (272) But his narrative expands beyond the already fascinating details of the anthropological hunt to explore what becoming fully engaged in such work has on his understanding of who we have become today as a species:
Walking the [East African] desert every day, I feel no compunction about imagining [pre-Sapien species such as] australopithecines or early Homo. … I feel no stake in whatever they were. They are like objects to me. After that group leaves the Afar region 55,000 years ago, however, I find I cannot think of them as objects. They are more like relatives, like harbingers, people with whom I share a fate.Here again, as throughout his journeys, Lopez looks back into the often mysterious depths of our species’ past and discovers implications for our modern day world, as well as demands placed on how we choose to create our future. By including such deeply personal reactions to what he experiences and learns, he animates his stories of these places, making clear the shared humanities of far-flung peoples from wildly different environments and epochs.
The australopithecines send a message forward in time with no ominous note in it, no hidden threat. The message we read from the 1,800 generations of humanity that became historical following, possibly, a slight change in the structure of the human brain, a story about cultural achievement and human brilliance impossible adequately to honor, seems to carry within its heart, in contrast, a warning. (302)
But for the all the beauty and wonder he finds as he visits the far corners of our world, he also regularly encounters the destructive impact humans have, and recognizes and acknowledges the profound threats humanity faces from the consequences of our own behaviors. Lopez wears his heart on his sleeve throughout the book, unsparing in his analysis of the ecological damaged being caused and the destructive economic and social constructs he finds to be at the origin of these problems. Early on he laments:
By putting economic growth on an equal footing with the preservation of human health, by promoting a need to possess and to consume that borders on the pathological, and by permitting industries to run roughshod over landscapes in order to create financial profit, the governments of industrialized nations have supported the changes that are primarily responsible for the befouled and poisonous environment that in many places has become our heritage. (84)Reacting to the scale of the destruction he encounters, his writing joins the growing chorus of voices – of economists, scientists, philosophers and others – who have looked out at the social and ecological challenges we face, and begun to question the sustainability of our deeply intertwined economic and political systems.
Informed by the diversity of cultures he has encountered in his travels and readings, he also asks whether the solutions to the crises humanity currently faces – from climate change, ecological destruction and the sixth extinction to economic inequality – could more readily be found by broadening the discussion beyond the leaders and populations of the few nations with power. Instead, he argues that we could perhaps benefit in our search for solutions to these seemingly intractable issues by including in our conversations peoples from many different cultural and geographical backgrounds. He notes that, in his experience, each culture develops an understanding about its local geography and biology that informs its particular world view, and that each such alternative world view could provide an element contributing to the understanding needed to escape our present “failure of imagination."
With that thought in mind he laments the many cultures lost to history, having either died out, or been overrun in conflicts with more powerful outside societies – a process that has accelerated since what Charles C. Mann referred to in his book 1493 as the “great unification” (24, 1493, review linked to at right) that followed the voyage of Christopher Columbus in 1492. With the disappearance of these cultures he wonders if a singular opportunity to benefit from their particular wisdom has been irrevocably lost to us.Even as he returns again and again, however, to the ecological and social destruction he has encountered, he makes clear his complex feelings about and relationship to this new reality we live in – and continue to create – out of our world. He questions, for example, whether it really makes sense to try to return a particular ecosystem to some imagined previous pristine state, or, if it is instead better to accept it as the given present, and instead look forward:
I’ve often thought my long-standing aversion to clearcuts is no longer really warranted. … it might be viewed [that] the throttled Earth – the scalped, the mined, the industrially farmed, the drilled, polluted, and suctioned land, endlessly manipulated for further development and profit – is now our home. We know the wounds. We have come to accept them. And we ask, many of us, What will the next step be? (65)
He seems to conclude that we must both accept the world we have inherited – its beauty as well as its ugliness – but at the same time not capitulate to the entrenched social, economic and political forces that fight to convince us that no other path forward but the current one exists, that the resulting destruction is the unavoidable price of progress. In this way the cumulative story here is an autobiography of a person traveling and reading widely as he tries to grapple with the fundamental question of the human condition, someone who refuses to give in to simplistic conclusions or believe that there are simple solutions, but who will also not release us from our individual obligation to understand our world better, and engage actively in its future direction.
Ultimately this complexity is the thread that runs throughout Horizon, a gorgeous story of discovery and understanding of the incredible variety of our world, but also its many scars. On the one hand, Lopez exalts in the beauty he sees:
For as far back as I can remember, a feeling of affection toward what the poet Adam Zagajewski calls “the mutilated world” has welled up in me when I’ve listened to [Beethoven’s] Ninth Symphony, to Mahler’s Second Symphony, to Bach’s Passion According to St. John, or to the contemporary music of the Estonian composer Arvo Párt. In my experience, a change in the quality of light falling on a hillside or a single choreographed movement by a ballerina might as easily release in someone else similar feelings of tenderness toward the wounded world, and feed the hope that these wounds might somehow be healed. (192)But on the other he refuses to ignore those “wounds,” and the clear and present dangers he finds them to signify, and so calls on us to stand up to these challenges – the future of humanity hanging in the balance:
I sat … wondering where the path to safety lies in our time. Wondering about the fate of those who, uneasy, are increasingly raising their voices. Wondering, considering the many apparent threats we can see on the horizon, whether what is to emerge for us is an unimaginable darkness of social disorder and ecological disaster or the fully imagined landscape of a second, a very different, Enlightenment. (179)
Other reviews / information:
Lopez includes helpful maps of the main areas he discusses; both comprehensive area maps at the back of the book, and more detailed versions spread throughout the text.
Though some might not find it necessary, it doesn’t hurt to have dictionary handy as you read Horizon: Lopez brings a precision to his writing, both in terms of the flora and fauna he describes, as well as his descriptions of human and natural geography, that never allows him to pick the more common word for something when a perhaps more precise – though some might argue more esoteric – word exists for it.
Barry Lopez’s website here.
More quotes from this book
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