Barry Lopez

Just been writing an article for a new e-magazine which is going to be launched in January 2007 called "The Global Geographer", and I've found myself referring back frequently to the work of an American author called Barry Lopez. I've been following his work for well over 20 years !
He is most famous for a book called "Arctic Dreams", which mentions Svalbard along the way, but is more concerned with time spent in the North American Arctic: an EXTREME ENVIRONMENT. In a book called "Crossing Open Ground", in a piece called "Landscape and Narrative" he talks about the idea of MY PLACE, and ends "the shape of the individual mind is affected by land as it is by genes"

His most recent project is one called HOME GROUND.
I've also found an article which I clipped out when it was published by another great author I mention: Robert MacFarlane, who produced a piece for the Guardian on Barry Lopez.

It ends with this fabulous paragraph:
Global warming is now depleting Arctic summer sea ice at a rate of 10% per annum. A plausible consequence of this depletion is that polar bears, about which Lopez writes with such rapt wonder, will be extinct 20 years from now. Arctic Dreams , composed as a celebration of the polar landscape, might well turn into its elegy. Seen in such a light, Lopez's gracious spiritualism, his drive to reconnect the cultural and the natural, comes to look less like piety and more like an alarm call.

The article has links to other pieces in a series called COMMON GROUND, and also mentions another author in my article: Jonathan Raban. Check these pieces of writing out ! Extend yourselves!

Update: Magazine launched delayed until April