In an interview on The Polar Regions

And the Lopez book?

Barry Lopez is an American man and in Arctic Dreams he describes the clarity of the landscape that has such a profound effect on the human spirit. Everyone says it has a profound effect. He’s a proper nature writer and it’s a brilliant book. He wrote it 25 years ago, I think, and it’s very lyrical and uplifting.

What is the effect on the human spirit? I would have thought being so alone would make you depressed.

No, it doesn’t. It takes you outside your normal existence and sets you loose from your spiritual moorings. Everywhere in the Antarctic is like that and in the Arctic you feel it when you get away from the settlements. The Polar regions are very uplifting, a different place, a better place. They are very compelling too. That’s another thing about these places: that people keep going back once they’ve been. I spent seven months in Antarctica and I can’t really keep going back there because it’s so hard to get to, but I do go back to the Arctic.

Antarctica is easily definable, a continent, and it is not owned, which is important, of course. The Arctic is owned and fucked up and the people have been fucked over by successive regimes. Lopez goes to the very north of the Arctic in North America, that is Alaska and Canada, but he’s not a sledge-puller, not one of those. Cherry was a sledge-puller but he turns it into a metaphor. Lopez talks about the flora and fauna and then, when there aren’t any, about the quality of light and of the landscape, about people’s relationship to the landscape and about what we’ve lost by being so disconnected from nature.