Now comes the resounding voice of Barry Lopez, with a passage from within the conversational riffles of his  Syntax of the River: The Pattern Which Connects.

Our trouble seems to be that, you know, our primate heritage, which is apparent in watching the behavior of chimpanzees and bonobos, is that we’re keenly interested in ourselves and opposed to others. That’s deep in our tissues. And with the kind of world we’ve built, that’s not going to work. So, those human beings who have the very strongest residue of the kind of patrolling behavior and violence that troops of chimpanzees have, those people would like the world to be, I think, arranged in a way that suits their habits and their desires. But a lot of people die that way. And we have created a chemical environment that is killing people left and right, quickly or slowly, through cancer, for example.

It just doesn’t make sense anymore to have these ideas about “me” and “mine” and the terrible burden that has been created by so-called advanced nations about the primacy of ownership, the ownership of food. Or, you know, the terrifying thing in the United States, this idea that nothing is exempt from the application of a kind of economics that’s meant for profit. I mean, how can you make the care of another, the professional care of another person’s body, be informed by a profit motive? Even a fifth-grade kid can see there is something that doesn’t really add up here.

So, for me as a writer, I live here and I’m informed by this [river]. And the way it informs me helps me understand a lot of the things my species does that are suicidal. It’s not up to me to say that they are suicidal, but I would feel like a traitor to my teachers here if I never said a thing, never mentioned it.

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