Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World
In the opening pages of his book Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World: Essays (Random House), Barry Lopez recalls a visit to China in the spring of 1988. With some fellow writers, he booked a trip down the Yangtze River through a “steep-walled canyon.” As their sizable passenger boat “plowed through,” leaving the wooden canoes of local fishermen in their wake, he notes that the air was “ripe with the smells of spoiling fish, fresh vegetables, and human waste.” He continues:
“The scene, a kind of Third World cliché, didn’t fully engage me—until I caught sight, unexpectedly, of great runs of vertical space on the right bank, variegated fields rising straight up, perhaps nine hundred feet, into a blue sky. The terraced slopes were as steep as playground slides, a skein of garden plots and traversing rice paddies, dotted with sheds and houses.”
That description immediately transports me back to scenes from my childhood—spent not on the Yangtze in China, but in our family’s Toyota Hilux, twisting up and down dusty switchbacked roads in Guatemala’s western highlands. Instead of rice paddies, we passed milpas planted with corn. But these too were cultivated on slopes “as steep as playground slides.”
My memories of those drives are mostly of boredom. That, and carsickness. For Lopez, though, “The boldness of the farming ventures made my heart race.”
This story he tells, of being physically and emotionally moved simply by noticing what is easily ignored, says so much about the values and commitments that animated Lopez in his travels and his writing over so many years. (He died on Christmas Day in 2020.)
“Perhaps the first rule of everything we endeavor to do is to pay attention,” Lopez writes, in the closest thing he has to a credo. “Perhaps the second is to be patient. And perhaps a third is to be attentive to what the body knows.”
(I love all the perhapses in there. May our credos be just as gentle.)
Lopez’s recurring preoccupation in these essays—with paying attention and being patient—remind me a bit of Wendell Berry’s body of work. And that third part of the credo, about “what the body knows,” calls to mind the groundbreaking work of Bessel van der Kolk—especially in the passages where Lopez writes about the unspeakable traumas he endured as a boy. Taken together, these emphases form the basis of what others have called his “priestly”vision.
At various points in this collection, Lopez refers to the Sixth Extinction. As he writes of the frightening realities facing our “burning world,” however, it’s to his credit that he never does so flippantly, and he’s careful when it comes to casting blame.
In one essay, we accompany Lopez to rural coastal Alaska, where he visits an indigenous community of subsistence walrus hunters. Yes, an isolated town where people eat walruses in order to survive. He writes about walrus hunting there with nuanced curiosity rather than dogmatic contempt, even though walruses (like so many of earth’s creatures) face an uncertain future, first due to hunting and now because of a loss of habitat.
Lopez seems to understand that to love the world and to be invested in its future doesn’t always mean leaving it untouched. Nor, to be sure, does it mean endlessly consuming without regard for limits and consequences. Lopez inhabits the vast space between the two extremes, and in this book he invites us to join him there.
This may sound like a bleak book, with endangered species and melting ice and childhood trauma accounting for so much real estate. But it’s not bleak. It’s an aching love letter to our beautiful but fragile world, a world worth embracing fearlessly. Even though it hurts. Even when it breaks our hearts.
In a later essay, writing about the changes that have befallen his old stomping grounds in the San Fernando Valley, he concedes that the wildness of that place is not coming back. Still, he insists, there’s more to the story than that:
“The arroyo chubs, three-spined sticklebacks, and crayfish of my youth I suppose are entirely gone, but what I see in the water is not nostalgia or despair. I see the infinite patience we associate with the still ocean. And I see behind me here on the river’s banks the ebb and flow of diverse humanity, engaged, adapting to whatever mean threat or wild beauty may lie in its path.”
And in that, Lopez says, he finds some of the resources we need to resist “the great temptation of our time: to put one’s faith in despair.”
