Humans intrude, but rather as interlopers in nature's wealth of life.
Lopez is at pains to point out how little we know about the physical landscape, the mystery of wild creatures, even as unspoiled areas steadily recede. It is to such untrammeled areas that Lopez has gone during decades of travel, thus finding his voice as a writer. In this collection of essays and stories it is the memoried past that emerges, further informed by the author's deepening beliefs about what he has seen. Beyond such surface areas, Lopez's journeys have taken him into two more realms of less frequent human trespass, via underwater explorations off Bonaire in the Netherlands Antilles, and in a series of 40 flights aboard cargo planes hurtling around the world. This esoteric process may for some be rather like trying to work up enthusiasm for, say, Henry David Thoreau's bookkeeping system.