Barry Lopez, an award-winning American writer who tried to strengthen ties between people and the place by describing the landscapes he saw in 50 years of travel, died. He was 75 years old.
Lopez died in Eugene, Oregon, on Friday, after a years-long struggle with prostate cancer, his family said.
Longtime friend Kim Stafford, a former Oregon poet, said that Lopez’s books “are milestones that define a region, a time, a cause. It also exemplifies a life of devotion to the craft and learning, to be humble in the face of wisdom of all kinds. “
Author of almost 20 books on natural history studies, along with collections of essays and short stories, Lopez was awarded the National Book Award in 1986 for Arctic Dreams: Imagination and Desire in a Northern Landscape. It was the result of almost five years traveling through the Arctic.
His final work was Horizon, an autobiography that recalls a lifetime of travel in more than 70 countries.
Born in 1945 in Port Chester, New York, Lopez grew up in the San Fernando Valley in California and, after his mother remarried, in New York City. At Horizon, he wrote that in those formative years, he developed “a desire simply to leave. To find out what the horizon has isolated. “
His last years were spent with his wife, Debra Gwartney, in a wooded area along the McKenzie River, east of Eugene. After years of writing about the natural world and the effect of humans on climate change, he deplored the loss of hectares of wood, not to mention personal papers, in the September fire at Holiday Farm.
In a statement on Saturday, his family encouraged financial support for the McKenzie River Trust, with which Lopez had worked on conservation efforts.