Barry Lopez – ‘Apologia’ – a response by Anthony Nanson

One of the more immediately obvious impacts of human action on the natural world is roadkill. It always upsets me to see the flattened and mutilated badgers, muntjacs, rabbits, pheasants. Three weeks ago the impact struck closer to home: our beloved cat, Gwen, just four years old, in perfect health, and with a tremendous zest for life.

We don’t know exactly where Gwen died; she was left on a vet’s doorstep a mile away. But her death on the road put me in mind of a story by Barry Lopez that had a big impact on me. ‘Apologia’ is a short piece about a car journey Lopez made across seven states to visit a friend in Indiana. He notes each of the dead animals and birds he encounters on the road; sometimes he stops to pick up the carcass and bury it in the vegetation on the verge. For Lopez, this is a ‘technique of awareness’, like other practices, such as walking in the river near his home in Oregon, that he describes elsewhere. But the cumulative impact of his precise, unemotive enumeration of the different species of animals he finds dead on the road is emotionally powerful. For me, ‘Apologia’ is a rare instance of a story that’s directly changed my behaviour: I made a decision, after reading it more than 20 years ago, not to drive above 50 mph at night on ordinary roads (60 mph on motorways). My thinking was that at 50 mph I should be able to stop in time despite the reduced visibility at night. I’m convinced that, were it not for this practice, I might have killed quite a number of animals over those years. If the driver who killed Gwen had been obeying the 20 mph limit in our area, maybe she would still be alive.

When I gave ‘Apologia’ to my undergraduates to read, many responded differently from me. They judged the narrator’s conduct to be really weird. Some assumed the story was fiction and speculated he might be a serial killer whose disposal of animal carcasses was some kind of symbolic expiation of his crimes. I may have been remiss in not making clear in advance that the piece was non-fiction – which bespeaks an interesting point about the importance of paratext in framing readers’ interpretation. For some of the students, there may also have been a want of empathy. Not so, though, in the case of one mature student who, to her regret, had mown down many animals on her speedy drives to work.

Wild animals have such reduced habitats these days; it’s desperate for them that they have to contend also with the lethality of roads. At the time I first read ‘Apologia’, the Iberian lynx was down to less than a hundred individuals and the leading cause of death, nudging the species nearer extinction, was road accidents. Thankfully, a committed conservation effort has boosted the Iberian lynx’s numbers to more than 2000 (in 2024). But I do wonder whether environmental campaigning could make more of the tremendous affection people have for their pets, and the grief they feel when their pets are killed, by encouraging an extension of empathy to wild animals. The umwelt, the conscious experience of existence, of a dog or cat must be fairly similar to that of a fox, badger, polecat, lynx, weasel – animals routinely killed on the roads or exterminated as vermin.

There is a pricey chapbook edition of ‘Apologia’ with woodcut illustrations, but the obvious place to read it is in the collection About This Life. Lopez’s writing is so exquisitely good that I can enjoy it no matter what subject he’s writing about. A long piece in About This Life, ‘Flight’, describes his observations, reflections, and conversations on long-haul flights of Boeing 747 freighters, one of whose cargo includes 35 wooden crates containing 175 live penguins. Another essay, ‘Learning to See’, explains Lopez’s decision to give up photography and focus on writing; the critical experience was when, upon seeing a polar bear from an open boat, the need to fiddle with camera settings meant he lost crucial moments of observation that could have informed the precision of his writing. It’s the clarity and concision of Lopez’s prose that make his writing so good, together with the humanity of the man, who thinks such sensitive thoughts he’s then able to clothe so skilfully in words.