What I’m Reading: ‘Arctic Dreams’

College of the Atlantic

The first time I read Arctic Dreams, by Barry Lopez, I was a freshman at the College of the Atlantic. Reading it again 28 years later, in anticipation of Mr. Lopez’s appearance on the campus for the college’s commencement, in June, I could appreciate even more the brilliance and clarity of his writing, emerging from decades of patient, focused observation of arctic environs. Such observation is the beating heart of natural history, an approach to knowing that is too often dismissed as a hobby of 19th-century dilettantes.

In fact, that careful observation of the world around us — practiced by the likes of Aristotle, Darwin, and Alexander von Humboldt as well as Annie Dillard, Rachel Carson, and Mr. Lopez — was the driving force behind a shift from simply naming individual elements of the world to something much larger: understanding the relationships of those things and the inner workings of life itself.

Higher education desperately needs a natural-history renaissance. For the psychological, spiritual, and intellectual development of minds, and for the pragmatic needs of an Earth in crisis, natural history offers tremendous promise.