(More) Barry Lopez

When you go to another country and you’re dealing with a language you don’t speak, and with customs around the consumption of food that you’re not familiar with, and hours for sleeping and being awake, you can find some other way than your accustomed way. And that kind of experience leads you to what I think is one of the most important parts of international politics now. That is the awareness of, and the accommodation of oneself to, the existence of profoundly different epistemologies that should not be changed. If you want everybody to have the same truth, or to believe in the same things, then you’re talking about the loss of tension and the collapse of the world.

Our trouble seems to be that, you know, our primate heritage, which is apparent in watching the behavior of chimpanzees and bonobos, is that we’re keenly interested in ourselves and opposed to others. That’s deep in our tissues. And with the kind of world we’ve built, that’s not going to work. So, those human beings who have the very strongest residue of the kind of patrolling behavior and violence that troops of chimpanzees have, those people would like the world to be, I think, arranged in a way that suits their habits and their desires. But a lot of people die that way. And we have created a chemical environment that is killing people left and right, quickly or slowly, through cancer, for example.

It just doesn’t make sense anymore to have these ideas about “me” and “mine” and the terrible burden that has been created by so-called advanced nations about the primacy of ownership, the ownership of food. Or, you know, the terrifying thing in the United States, this idea that nothing is exempt from the application of a kind of economics that’s meant for profit. I mean, how can you make the care of another, the professional care of another person’s body, be informed by a profit motive? Even a fifth-grade kid can see there is something that doesn’t really add up here.

So, for me as a writer, I live here and I’m informed by this place. And the way it informs me helps me understand a lot of the things my species does that are suicidal. It’s not up to me to say that they are suicidal, but I would feel like a traitor to my teachers here if I never said a thing, never mentioned it.

Barry Lopez, Syntax of the River