The identification with "place," for writers of both fiction and nonfiction, has diverse linkages. It can be geographic, or physical, or social. It can be pegged to time, or be timeless. This essay is based in part upon a presentation by the author at the Salamanca Writers Festival in Hobart, Tasmania, in March 1996. In it, he reflects upon how the writer, and, indeed, by extension, the reader, can form a relationship with "place."

In the United States in recent years, a kind of writing variously called "nature writing" or "landscape writing" has begun to receive critical attention, leading some to assume that this is a relatively new kind of work. In fact, writing that takes into account the impact nature and place have on culture is one of the oldest -- and perhaps most singular -- threads in American literature.

Herman Melville in Moby Dick, Henry David Thoreau, of course, and novelists such as Willa Cather, John Steinbeck and William Faulkner come quickly to mind, and more recently Peter Matthiessen, Wendell Berry, Wallace Stegner, and the poets W.S. Merwin, Amy Clampitt and Gary Snyder.

If there is anything different in this area of North American writing -- and I believe there is -- it is the hopeful tone it frequently strikes in an era of cynical detachment, and its explicitly dubious view of technological progress, even of capitalism.

The real topic of nature writing, I think, is not nature but the evolving structure of communities from which nature has been removed, often as a consequence of modern economic development. (A recent conference at the Library of Congress in Washington, "Watershed: Writers, Nature and Community," focused on this kind of writing. It was the largest literary conference ever held at the Library. Sponsors, in addition to the Library, were U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Hass and The Orion Society of Great Barrington, Massachusetts.) It is writing concerned, further, with the biological and spiritual fate of those communities. It also assumes that the fate of humanity and nature are inseparable. Nature writing in the United States merges here, I think, with other types of post-colonial writing, particularly in Commonwealth countries. In numerous essays it addresses the problem of spiritual collapse in the West, and like those literatures it is in search of a modern human identity that lies beyond nationalism and material wealth.

This is a huge -- not to say unwieldy -- topic, and different writers approach it in vastly different ways. The classic struggle of writers to separate truth and illusion, to distinguish between roads to heaven and detours to hell, knows only continuance, not ending or solution. But I sense collectively now in writing in the United States the emergence of a concern for the world outside the self. It is as if someone had opened the door to a stuffy and too-much-studied room and shown us a great horizon where once there had been only walls.

I want to concentrate on a single aspect of this phenomenon -- geography -- but in doing so I hope to hew to a larger line of truth. I want to talk about geography as a shaping force, not a subject. Another way critics describe nature writing is to call it "the literature of place." A specific and particular setting for human experience and endeavor is, indeed, central to the work of many nature writers. I would say a sense of place is also critical to the development of a sense of morality and of human identity.

After setting out a few thoughts about place, I'd like to say something about myself as one writer who returns again and again to geography, as the writers of another generation once returned repeatedly to Freud and psychoanalysis.

It is my belief that a human imagination is shaped by the architectures it encounters at an early age. The visual landscape, of course, or the depth, elevation and hues of a cityscape play a part here, as does the way sunlight everywhere etches lines to accentuate forms. But the way we imagine is also affected by streams of scent flowing faint or sharp in the larger oceans of air; by what the composer John Luther Adams calls the sonic landscape; and, say, by an awareness of how temperature and humidity rise and fall in a place over a year.

My imagination was shaped by the exotic nature of water in a dry California valley; by the sound of wind in the crowns of eucalyptus trees, by the tactile sensation of sheened earth, turned in furrows by a gang plow; by banks of saffron, mahogany, and scarlet cloud piled above a field of alfalfa at dusk; by encountering the musk from orange blossoms at the edge of an orchard; by the aftermath of a Pacific storm crashing a hot, flat beach. Added to the nudge of these sensations were an awareness of the height and breadth of the sky, and of the geometry and force of the wind. Both perceptions grew directly out of my efforts to raise pigeons, and from the awe I felt before them as they maneuvered in the air. They gave me permanently a sense of the vertical component of life.

I became intimate with the elements of that particular universe. They fashioned me, and I return to them regularly in essays and stories in order to clarify or explain abstractions or to strike contrasts. I find the myriad relationships in that universe comforting, forming a "coherence" of which I once was a part.

If I were to try to explain the process of becoming a writer I could begin by saying that the comforting intimacy I knew in that California valley erected in me a kind of story I wanted to tell, a pattern I wanted to invoke -- in countless ways. And I would add to this the two things that were most profoundly magical to me as a boy: animals and language. It's easy to see why animals might seem magical. Spiders and birds are bound differently than we are by gravity. Many wild creatures travel unerringly through the dark. And animals regularly respond to what we, even at our most attentive, cannot discern.

It's harder to say why language seemed magical, but I can be precise about this. The first book I read was The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. I still have the book. Underlined in it in pen are the first words I could recognize: the, a, stop, to go, to see. I can pick up the book today and recall my first feelings like a slow, silent detonation: words I heard people speak I was now able to perceive as marks on a page. I, myself, was learning to make these same marks on ruled paper. It seemed as glorious and mysterious as a swift flock of tumbler pigeons exploiting the invisible wind.

I can see my life prefigured in those two kinds of magic, the uncanny lives of creatures different from me (and, later, of cultures different from my own); and the twinned desires to go, to see. I became a writer who travels and one who focuses mostly, to be succinct, on what logical positivists sweep aside.

My travel is often to remote places -- Antarctica, the Tanami Desert in central Australia, northern Kenya. In these places I depend on my own wits and resources, but heavily and just as often on the knowledge of interpreters -- archaeologists, field scientists, anthropologists. Eminent among such helpers are indigenous people, and I can quickly give you three reasons for my dependence on their insights. As a rule, indigenous people pay much closer attention to nuance in the physical world. They see more, and from a paucity of evidence, thoroughly observed, they can deduce more. Second, their history in a place, both tribal and personal, is typically deep. These histories create a temporal dimension in what is otherwise only a spatial landscape. Third, indigenous people tend to occupy the same moral universe as the landscape they sense.

Over time I have come to think of these three qualities -- intimate attention; a storied relationship to place rather than a solely sensory awareness of it; and living in some sort of ethical unity with a place -- I have come to think of these things as a fundamental human defense against loneliness. If you're intimate with a place, a place with whose history you're familiar, and you establish an ethical conversation with it, the implication that follows is this: the place knows you're there. It feels you. You will not be forgotten, cut off, abandoned.

As a writer I want to ask myself: How can you obtain this? How can you occupy a place and also have it occupy you? How can you find such a reciprocity?

The key, I think, is to become vulnerable to a place. If you open yourself up you can build intimacy. Out of such intimacy will come a sense of belonging, a sense of not being isolated in the universe.

My question -- how to secure this -- is not idle. I want to be concrete about this, about how, actually, to enter a local geography. (We often daydream, I think, about entering childhood landscapes that dispel our anxiety. We court these feelings for a few moments in a park sometimes or during an afternoon in the woods.) Keeping this simple and practical, my first suggestion would be to be silent. Put aside the bird book, an analytic frame of mind, any compulsion to identify, and sit still. Concentrate instead on feeling a place, on using the sense of proprioception. Where in this volume of space are you situated? What is spread out behind you is as important as what you see before you. What lies beneath you is as relevant as what stands on the horizon. Actively use your ears to imagine the acoustical space you occupy. How does birdsong ramify here? Through what air is it moving? Concentrate on smells in the belief that you can smell water and stone. Use your hands to get the heft and texture of a place -- the tensile strength in a willow branch, the moisture in a pinch of soil, the different nap of leaves. Open the vertical line of this place by consciously referring the color and form of the sky to what you see across the ground. Look away from what you want to scrutinize to gain a sense of its scale and proportion. Be wary of any obvious explanation for the existence of a color, a movement. Cultivate a sense of complexity, the sense that another landscape exists beyond the one you can subject to analysis.

The purpose of such attentiveness is to gain intimacy, to rid yourself of assumption. It should be like a conversation with someone you're attracted to, a person you don't want to send away by making too much of yourself. Such conversations, of course, can take place simultaneously on several levels. And they may easily be driven by more than simple curiosity. The compelling desire, as in human conversation, may be for a sustaining or informing relationship.

A succinct way to describe the frame of mind one should bring to a landscape is to say it rests on the distinction between imposing and proposing one's views. With a sincere proposal you hope to achieve an intimate, reciprocal relationship that will feed you in some way. To impose your views from the start is to truncate such a possibility, to preclude understanding.

Many of us, I think, long to become the companion of a place, not its authority, not its owner. And this brings me to a closing point. Perhaps you wonder, as I do, why over the last few decades people in Western countries have become so anxious about the fate of undeveloped land, and concerned about losing the intelligence of people who've kept intimate relationships with those places. I don't know where your thinking has led you, but I believe this curiosity about good relations with a particular stretch of land is directly related to speculation that it may be more important to human survival now to be in love than to be in a position of power. It may be more important now to enter into an ethical and reciprocal relationship with everything around us than to continue to work toward the sort of control of the physical world that, until recently, we aspired to.

The simple issue of our biological plausibility, our chance for biological survival, has become so precarious, so basic a question, that finding a way out of the predicament -- if one is to be had -- is imperative. It calls on our collective imaginations with an urgency we've never known before. We are in need not just of another kind of logic, another way of knowing, but of a radically different philosophical sensibility.

When I was a boy, running through orange groves in southern California, watching wind swirl in a grove of blue gum, and swimming ecstatically in the foam of Pacific breakers, I had no such thoughts as these imperatives. I was content to watch a brace of pigeons fly across an azure sky, rotating on an axis that to this day I don't think I could draw. My comfort, my sense of inclusion in the small universe I inhabited, came from an appreciation of, a participation in, all that I saw, smelled, tasted and heard. That sense of inclusion not only assuaged my sense of loneliness as a child, it confirmed my imagination. And it is that single thing, the power of the human imagination to extrapolate from an odd handful of things -- faint movement in a copse of trees, a wingbeat, the damp cold of field stones at night -- to make from all this a pattern -- the human ability to make a story, that fixed in me a sense of hope.

We keep each other alive with our stories. We need to share them as much as food. We also need good companions. One of the most extraordinary things about the land is that it knows this, and it compels language from some of us so that, as a community, we may actually speak of it.

Barry Lopez is a writer and essayist specializing in natural history writing. He is the author of several volumes of short fiction, including the Desert Notes/River Notes/Field Notes trilogy, as well as such works of nonfiction as Of Wolves and Men and National Book Award winner Arctic Dreams. He lives along a river in a rural sector of Oregon.

Copyright (c) 1996 Barry Lopez. This article is for official use by the United States Information Agency and the non-English-speaking press outside the United States. No further use is permitted without the express consent of the author.