I watched the enormity of the clouds for several minutes. What I wanted to experience in the water, I realized, was how life of the reef was layered and intertwined. I now had many individual pieces at hand: named images, nouns. How were they related? What were the verbs? Which syntaxes were indigenous to the place? I asked a dozen knowledgeable people. No one was inclined to elaborate- or they didn’t know. “Did you see the octopus?” Someone shouted after the dive. Yes, I thought, but who among us knows what it was doing? What else was THERE, just then? WHY?

Lopez along with Peter Matthiessen Terry Tempest Williams and James Galvin was hailed in Mark Tredinnick's The Land's Wild Music (Trinity University Press 2005) in which Tredinnick analyzed how the landscape nouriBarry Lopezd and developed Lopez's writing. Awards
National Book Award
Award in Literature American Academy of Arts and Letters
Lannan Literary Award
Guggenheim Fellowship
John Burroughs Medal
John Hay Medal
Three Pacific Northwest Booksellers Awards
Two Oregon Book Awards
Two Pushcart Prizes
Two Christopher Medals
PEN Syndicated Fiction Award
Five National Science Foundation Antarctica Fellowships
Lannan Residency Fellowship
MacDowell Residency Fellowship
Academy of Television Arts and Sciences Award
Oregon Governor's Award
Elected Fellow of the Explorer's Club. He regularly collaborates with other artists and writers and is active in national and international efforts toward reconciliation.

He won the National Book Award for Nonfiction for Arctic Dreams (1986) and his Of Wolves and Men (1978) was a National Book Award finalist.