Travel author and essayist Barry Lopez is the winner of several awards for his considerations of, and commentary on, the relationship between humanity and the natural world. The essays in this particular collection are evidence of his ongoing concern with nature itself and the various ways in which humanity has interacted with it in the past, and continues to interact with it in the present. He is particularly interested in how indigenous peoples (see below), in both the distant past and more immediate present, seem to have established and maintained relationships with nature that have been grounded in respect, while explorers and industrialists of both past and present have viewed nature as an aspect of existence more to be exploited than harmonized with. A particularly interesting aspect of the collection is the sense of discovery, communicated and experienced by the author, associated with several of his experiences. There is the sense that he is on both a personal and professional journey of exploration, drawing connections between what he observes as a writer and chronicler of the nature/human relationships and what he comes to understand about his own experience of that relationship.
