When talking about his work, Barry Lopez often speaks explicitly of the core issues that drive his prose. Words such as "dignity," "tolerance," "prejudice," and "service" infuse discussions of his literary philosophy and sense of storytelling. Such terms as these may seem tangential to the genre of nature writing, which is too often construed simply as either animal stories, landscape descriptions, or overwrought environmental rhetoric. Lopez's writing, however, challenges such reductive views of nature writing. In a 1985 interview with Trish Todd, Lopez said, "When you write about animals and landscape and wilderness, you write about what appears to be natural history. But my principal interest is in human beings and how we arrive at our ideas. My lifelong commitment is to some kind of elucidation of these ideas--what is prejudice, what is tolerance, and what does it mean to live a dignified life." By exploring these questions Lopez...