On Christmas morning 2020, the writer Barry Lopez died in Eugene, Oregon, surrounded by his family, after a long battle with prostate cancer. Widely honored as one of our greatest writers about the natural world—in nonfiction classics such as Of Wolves and Men, Arctic Dreams, and Horizon—for half a century Barry traveled the globe—High Arctic to Antarctica, Oregon to Kenya—bringing back stories etched in luminous prose that explored our profound connections to the diverse, fragile planet we inhabit.

Two weeks before his death, Barry received the first Sun Valley Writers’ Conference Writer in the World Prize, given to a writer whose work expresses that rare combination of literary talent and moral imagination, helping us to better understand the world and our place in it. This episode revisits Lopez’s 2019 talk at the Sun Valley Writers’ Conference and his true dedication to telling the stories of our world.