Quotes from Barry Lopez

the primary organizing principle for human achievement is stability, not progress, meaning that balance, symmetry, and regularity are more to be valued than change, growth, deviation, and ambition.

The Pacific is twice the size of the Atlantic, a comparison perhaps too incomprehensible to convey meaning. If in a cartoon, Mount Everest were placed on the floor of the Mariana Trench south of Guam, its peak would fall 6,800 feet short of the surface of the Pacific.

We, all of us, look back over our lives, trying to make sense of what happened, to see what enduring threads might be there.

If the real human environment in developed countries today is third-growth monocultured "forests," tar-sand petroleum, cow-burnt grasslands, and smog-like clouds of microplastics floating in oceans where fish once thrived, then human cultures need to distinguish between sentimentality about loss and the imperative to survive. They need to establish a more relevant politics than the competitive politics of nation-states. And to found economies built not on profit but on conservation.

It is, after all, not man but the universe that is subtle.

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.

how are we to tone down the voices of nationalism, or of those in support of profiteering, or religious fanaticism, racial superiority, or cultural exceptionalism? If economic viability trumps human health in systems of governance, and if personal rights trump community obligations at almost every turn, what sort of future can we expect never to see?

As the decades passed for me, I began to think that the path many of us now share, a path of self-realization and self-aggrandizement, might eventually leave us stranded, having arrived at the end of exploitation, but with most of us standing there empty-handed. And what is it that we have found through the injustice of exploitation that these Magdalenians at Altamira did not already possess?

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.

Art's underlying strength is that it does not intend to be literal. It presents a metaphor and leaves the viewer or listener to interpret. It is giving in to art, not trying to divine its meaning, that brings the viewer or listener the deepest measures of satisfaction.

I had a theology professor once," I said to John, "who told us that religion was not about being certain but about living with uncertainty. It was about being comfortable with doubt, and maintaining the continuity of one's reverence for a profound mystery.

The truth, one tends to think, is that all of us, drunk or sober, sedated or not, aggrieved or manic, live consciously or unconsciously within this maelstrom, which no one really wants to risk shutting down.

A clearcut is not the outward sign of a healthy economy but of an indifference to life.

Exposure to an unusually spectacular place in conducive circumstance, the thinking goes, can release one from the prison of one's own ego and initiate a renewed awareness of the wondrous, salutary, and informing nature of the Other, the thing outside of the self.

the sine qua non of a stable human society, they had to understand that this was not possible except in the hands of fully mature people, people, in the modern idiom, who had "gotten over themselves.

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

diversity is an ineluctable component of every successful attempt to establish order.

you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho lies dead by the side of the road. You must see how this could be you, how he too was someone who journeyed through the night with plans…

At some critical point, accommodation and cooperation replace violence and exploitation, or humanity's fate is delivered into the hands of barbarians.

meteoroid had hit with such force it melted the ground around it, making it look like foundry slag. The heat turned quartz intrusions in the bedrock into chunks of colored glass. The Dry Valleys We went on like this for hours, as though there was no being done with the astonishment landscapes might offer us, or to the potential for any seemingly inconsequential thing out there to startle and inform, or

what most of us are looking for is the opportunity to express, without embarrassment or judgment or retaliation, our capacity to love.

The alarming situation here for humanity is that H. sapiens, though it has asserted itself as the dominant species on Earth, is at the same time the potential victim of its domination over virtually all Earth's ecosystems. If H. sapiens were to become extinct, the event would simply be regarded as evolution continuing to unfold, a biological future for life but not one that any longer included humanity.

Sometimes a person needs a story more than food to stay alive... from Crow and Weasel

We must invent overnight, figuratively speaking, another kind of civilization, one more cognizant of limits, less greedy, more compassionate, less bigoted, more inclusive, less exploitive.