The World We Still Have

Fred Bahnson’s interview with Barry Lopez [“The World We Still Have,” December 2019] was one of the most in-depth I’ve ever read. My efforts to reimagine my life and the world — and to become an “adult” in my community, in the way of the indigenous elders Lopez described — will forever be enhanced by this interview. I immediately obtained Lopez’s book Horizon and look forward to reading his others.

I was moved by Barry Lopez’s regard for animals and his acknowledgment of the sometimes ugly realities of nature [“The World We Still Have,” interview by Fred Bahnson, December 2019]. His respect for indigenous people and concern regarding the climate of our planet also touched me.

My favorite part of the interview, however, was Lopez’s affinity for open spaces and broad horizons. I live in the East, where the trees and valleys are beautiful, but when I visit the desert, I feel an expansion of my spirit. I am revived.

There are enough important ideas in Fred Bahnson’s interview with Barry Lopez to think about for the rest of your life. The current environmental situation is indeed, as Lopez says, paraphrasing indigenous people, “something that has to be dreamed again.” Lindsay Langhals’s accompanying photo of a backlit buffalo was beautiful.

I would only add something from David Day’s The Doomsday Book of Animals: A Natural History of Vanished Species: “In virtually every professional hunter and trapper I have known, I have encountered extraordinary sentiments and a process of transformation. . . . I have met cougar and bear hunters who, in old age, have turned bitterly away from mankind, have totally identified with the animals they once hunted, and have come, almost physically, to resemble those animals.”