Shapiro: When I heard you speak in 2001, you mentioned that you’d had meetings with an oil-company president.

Lopez: Yes, the president of Arco called me and said he’d been reading my work for ten years and really wanted to talk to me about civilization and oil and, as he put it, “where the hell we’re going.” I thought this was a strange request, but we’re living in strange times, so I said yes. We flew up to the North Slope of Alaska and walked around for a couple of days. This man was really serious and deeply concerned. He was looking for solutions.

Through him, I began to meet a number of executives who were profoundly embarrassed by the Enron fiasco, and by the arrogance with which the tobacco industry had testified before Congress, and by a certain kind of ruthlessness in American corporate culture. Being businesspeople, however, such men and women have very few outlets for frankly expressing their concerns. They can’t speak about them at a stockholders’ meeting; they can’t address these issues at a board of directors’ meeting; they can’t even speak openly among other executives without drawing suspicion. I want to get these savvy, ethical, powerful businesspeople together to talk. Often they don’t even know of one another. They’ve been politically isolated by our polarizing society.

Shapiro: And by laws that require them to try to earn the greatest profit for shareholders. These people are legally prevented from acting first in an ethical and moral way.

Lopez: They are. So I’ve been trying to create venues where they can talk to each other. I’m interested in how the citizenry can address issues such as the availability of fresh water without involving government and business. Businesses are interested in solving problems to their advantage. Nothing against them — that’s what they do. And government is interested in solving domestic problems in a way that helps the economy, which may not be what citizens want.

Part of what has happened to me recently is that, like so many others, I’ve become acutely aware of the political danger the country is in. The champions of material wealth, the acolytes of technology, and the religious extremists are so loud, so bellicose, so uncompromising. Who will rein them in? Who’s not afraid to criticize their notions of “progress”? The hallmark of their progress now in Third World countries is not further stratification into the haves and have-nots; it’s social disintegration. The social cohesion that defines a village; that provides healthcare, insurance, love — everything that’s been turned into a product or an industry in our culture — is threatened by the indifference of corporate capitalism.

As a writer, I have a responsibility, as I see it, to society. I want to be careful, however, not to take up a position of thinking that I actually know something, that I have answers. The only thing I know as a writer is how to tell a story. I sit at the typewriter and make a pattern, a story about how my culture works or behaves. Do you know that essay “Flight”?

Shapiro: Yes, in About This Life.

Lopez: I had this question: Why are air freighters flying all over the planet every day with all these products? What’s behind this? “Flight” is a piece of journalism, a reporter experiencing a set of events and then writing about them in such a way that you can grasp something as abstract as high-speed consumption. I don’t have any particular skill with economic data.

Shapiro: But the reader probably would not be drawn in by the economics. I was interested in that essay because it’s personal: you’re on the phone with your wife saying, “I’m just so disoriented,” and she says, “That’s because you’re not going anywhere; you’re just going.” That human story is compelling.

Lopez: I feel the same way. I think the writer should serve that function in society. The writer should be a person who sojourns in that chaos and comes back to write something cogent and coherent. That’s one’s service to society, and that’s the relationship I want with the reader. I want to say, “This is what I saw — what do you think?”

Shapiro: Most of your nonfiction involves travel to remote places.

Lopez: I think my compulsion to leave town is based on a belief that it is only by leaving the security of the familiar that I can learn whether my particular metaphors can continue to ground the reader in something trustworthy. If I put myself, say, at a social and cultural disadvantage in an Eskimo village, where nobody wants to talk to me, and I go through all of that self-doubt about whether or not I should be there, totally confused — if I have those thoughts, I think, Good, I’m in the right place. Now I just have to hold on in that windstorm.

When I come back from these places and tell readers something utterly remarkable about those people, the last thing I want them to think is: I want to go live in that village. You can posit that many traditional societies have basically solved the problems of maintaining stable social organization: holding a family together around sexual infidelity, spiritual infidelity, economic infidelity. But they can’t solve our problems for us. We have to fend for ourselves to straighten out the social chaos we’ve created; our families have been torn apart by the pressure of consumption and having to get and keep jobs.

Here’s something disturbing: We can’t survive economically in this country without a high rate of divorce. Social disintegration is required for the economy to work. The family has got to be broken down into independent consumer units. In divorced families, kids often have two homes, two sets of clothes, two sets of toys, two of this, two of that. Unless you undermine stable extended families, unless you regularly change the “answer” to filling a wide range of individual human needs and constantly subdivide those needs, you can’t keep the American consumer juggernaut going.

So if I go to Australia and visit with Warlpiri people, what can I learn from them about long-term social stability? They don’t have the latest cars or clothes, or this pervasive, hyperkinetic milieu of distraction in which we live. But they have to deal with the same basic social problems. And perhaps we can learn from them.

My writerly responsibility is to try to be discerning — even when camped in the Transantarctic Mountains — about how these circumstances I’ve put myself in relate to readers who are just trying to hold a family together, stay employed, deal with dying parents, and change the baby’s diapers when they haven’t slept in twenty-four hours. How can I help? The one thing I know how to do, I think, is turn a pattern I see into language. I like to go a long ways away, try to recognize a human pattern there, and then put it in an accessible form for people at home, so they might recognize the outline of what’s been troubling them and figure out what to do about it.

Shapiro: I remember as a child reading Loren Eiseley. He wrote about fields being plowed over for shopping malls and wondered what would happen to the rabbits and the mice and the other creatures who’d made that piece of land their home. And I thought, Finally, somebody feels the same way I do. I think that’s one of the greatest services a writer can provide, to say, “You’re not alone in these feelings.”

Lopez: One of the things you have to do when you edit your work is make sure that when you use the first person, it’s about more than just you. We need the story of us. If I feel compelled to share something about my private life, I say to myself, This had better be good. When I put About This Life together, I decided, for the first time, that I’d include something about my private life, hoping my experiences would be easy for people to identify with.

A Good Deal. A Great Gift. Give The Sun as a holiday gift and save up to 30%.

PRINT

E-MAIL

SHARE

PDF

WRITE TO THE EDITOR

SUBSCRIBE