In Galapagos, as elsewhere, things of the mind, including intellectual ramifications from evolutionary theory, and things of the spirit, like the feeling one gets from a Queen Anne’s lace of stars in the moonless Galapagean sky, struggle toward accommodation with an elementary desire for material comfort…because so many regard this archipelago as preeminently a terrain of the mind and spirit, a locus of biological thought and psychological rejuvenation. The sheer strength of Darwin’s insight into the development of biological life gently urges a visitor to be more than usually observant here- to notice, say, that while the thirteen Galapagean finches are all roughly the same hue, it is possible to separate them according to marked differences in the shapes of their bills and feeding habits.

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.