You are a human animal. You are a very special breed, or you are the only animal, who can think, who can reason, who can read.

Hello and welcome to Bookworm.

My name is Michael Silverblatt.

My guest today is Barry Lopez.

This show is the beginning of a special six-part series,

Writers, Nature, and Community,

taped in part at the NPR studios in Washington, D.C.

The series was inspired by the Watershed Conference, which took place at the Library of Congress by invitation of Robert Haas, the U.S. Poet Laureate. The Watershed

Conference was sponsored by the Orion Society. It brought together hundreds of poets, writers,

educators, ecologists, and activists.

Now, it's my belief that it's impossible to be a writer and ignore the world.

Attentiveness to the world is the essence of good writing.

Writers, nature, and community provides a focus on the acts of attention that writers pay to our environment.

Barry Lopez is one of the nation's premier writers.

I wouldn't call it nature writing, but writing of evolved consciousness,

maybe ecological transcendentalism.

Barry Lopez will read an excerpt from the introduction of his most recent book, Field Notes,

published in paperback by Avon. It's from a chapter called Within Birds Hearing. This is Barry Lopez. My one salvation, a gift I can't reason through, has been the unceasing kindness of animals.

Once when I was truly lost when the grey spider hills and the black sparrow hills were entirely confused in a labyrinth of memory,

I saw a small coyote sitting between two creosote bushes just a few yards away, she was eyeing me

quizzically, whistling me up with that look. I followed behind her without question into

country that eventually made sense to me, or which I eventually remembered. Another time the eighth day

...