Creative Nonfiction (Course Guide / Lisa Heise)

“Pay attention to small things,” Barry Lopez reminds himself. And so often, he does. He stares at rocks. At model ships and silver coins. At dead animals and live ones. And after paying attention to these small things, he thinks about big ones: about empire and capitalism. About the genocides of indigenous peoples and the destruction of their cultures. About cruelty and despair — but also about beauty, kindness and hope. | Oregon Public Broadcasting (Website)

As a writer of both fiction and nonfiction, Barry Lopez incorporated elements of imagination, science, and history to create a means of reporting that many readers find more accurate than work written within the confines of a single discipline. | from American Environmental Leaders | Credo Reference (Library Database)

The longest flight I ever made--the metaphysical distance between points, not the hours aloft--was from Christchurch, New Zealand, to McMurdo Station, Antarctica. It was aboard a four-engine, propeller-driven cargo plane called a C-130, flown by the Royal New Zealand Air Force. It took eight hours to broach the Pacific with two dozen passengers and a full load of freight. | Whole Earth. Spring2000, Issue 100, p50. 3p | MasterFILE Complete (EBSCO) (Library Database)

"It was night, but not the color of sky you might expect. The sun was up in the north, a few fingers above the horizon, and the air itself was bluer than it had been that afternoon, when the light was yellower. A friend and I were sitting atop a knoll in the Brooks Range in northern Alaska on a June "evening." We had our spotting scopes trained on a herd of several hundred barren-ground caribou browsing three miles away in the broad, treeless, U-shaped valley of the Anaktuvuk River. The herd drifted in silence across an immensity of space." | American Scholar. Autumn2009, Vol. 78 Issue 4, p43-49 | MasterFILE Complete (EBSCO) (Library Database)

"Otherworldly beautiful, the lands of perpetually frozen earth reveal the delicate rhythms of the planet. But will permafrost stay permanent?" | National Geographic. Dec2007, Vol. 212 Issue 6, p136-155. | MasterFILE Complete (EBSCO) (Library Dataase)

"The question now is no longer about the old polarity between nature and culture. The effects of nature and culture on us are intertwined. Each lends something to the other; together they sustain us. The better question is: Where from here? How do we react so smartly to the complex social and natural threats before us that a stranger to our planet, looking back at our history, will be moved to call us a just, courageous, and reverent people?" | O, The Oprah Magazine. Apr2009, Vol. 10 Issue 4, p154-156. 3p | MasterFILE Complete (EBSCO) (Library Database)