Arctic Dreams

Arctic Dreams: Imagination and Desire in a Northern Landscape is a 1986 non-fiction book by American author Barry Lopez. Both a travel memoir and nature writing, Arctic Dreams recounts the author’s experiences during four years’ of travel between the Davis and Bering Straits. Lopez hunts with Eskimos, accompanies scientists on field expeditions, and makes his own trips to study the wildlife of the Arctic. The narrative of Lopez’s own experience is interwoven with the geological, biological, and human history of the Arctic. The book makes a passionate plea for the Arctic region to be better understood.

The first-person narrative of Lopez’s travels in the Arctic cover several trips over four years, by powerboat, canoe, sled, plane, snowmobile, and foot, as well as an extended period of research at the Arctic Institute of North America in Calgary, Alberta. He paints a vivid picture of the region and its biodiversity. The ecosystem of the Arctic is only ten thousand years old, making it Earth’s youngest ecosystem (by comparison, the history of bipedal hominids is more than four times longer). While the region is often depicted as barren and lifeless, Lopez encourages us to think otherwise. In loving detail, he explains how the process of freezing and thawing affects the soil of the Arctic. Another section discusses ice: how it forms and changes over several years; how it breaks up again; icebergs, pack ice, and field ice.

The bulk of Lopez’s writing in the first part of the book is devoted to the animals of the Arctic, which he describes with ecstatic, mystical devotion. He shows us the birds “wheeling and hovering in weightless acrobatics,” and then fills us in on the migrations of terns that have flown from the Antarctic, and wheatears that have come from Saudi Arabia. He narrates the duel of two male narwhals with their ten-foot horns, explaining why these horns have a spiral shape. He follows a polar bear and her cubs over ten months, watching the adult personalities of the young bears emerge.



During the course of his explorations, Lopez is tested by the harshness of the conditions, coming close to death when his clothes are soaked through and frozen: “I began to recognize in the enduring steadiness another kind of calmness, or relief. The distance between my body and my thoughts slowly became elongated, and muffled like a dark, carpeted corridor…I knew I had to get to dry clothes, to get them on. But desire could not move my legs or arms. They were too far away. I was staring at someone, then moving; the soaked clothes were coming off. I could not make a word in my mouth.”

Lopez also discusses the Eskimos who live in the Arctic regions. Like the animal species they depend on, the Eskimos are struggling to survive in the industrial era. Lopez cites extensive research to argue that as much as 90 percent of the Arctic’s indigenous population may have died from disease alone, as Europeans and Americans brought pneumonia, tuberculosis, smallpox, diphtheria, and poliomyelitis to the North during the nineteen and twentieth centuries.

With admiration, Lopez analyzes the ways Eskimos have adapted to live in the harsh conditions of the Arctic. He explains how an Eskimo can survive with almost no possessions, rebuilding their lives from scratch if the things they own are destroyed or have to be abandoned. He touches, too, on the psychological hardships of life in the Arctic Circle, describing the troubling carvings of the Dorset peoples who lived in the Arctic between one and three thousand years ago. They are “grotesque and bizarre…tortured and psychotic,” revealing the psychic impact of the struggle to survive.



Lopez also tells the story of Arctic exploration, beginning with the semi-legendary voyage of Irish monk St. Brendan. He admires the daring and bravery of explorers, both adventurers and scientists, who first mapped the Arctic, and celebrates contemporary voyagers including Wilfred Thesiger and Rockwell Kent.

In the written records left by nineteenth-century explorers, Lopez uncovers the beginning of a trend, which troubles him. He argues that these accounts demonstrate the explorers’ dissociation from the landscape: they saw the Arctic as an adversary to be bested. Their goal was to map and label the land so it could be put to use. This attitude, Lopez suggests, persists today. He closes his book with a call for emotional and imaginative approaches to the Arctic to take their place alongside the scientific and economic approaches that have done so much damage.

Arctic Dreams argues for a less human-centric approach to the landscape and its wildlife. However, Lopez does not wade into political arguments about development in the Arctic. Rather, he creates a sense of the Arctic as a living place with its own character and value. Arctic Dreams won the National Book Award for Non-fiction in 1986 and was hailed by reviewers as “one of the finest books ever written about the Far North” (Publishers’ Weekly).