The last book by Barry Lopez, a writer renowned for his work on landscape and our relations with it, will be published in Britain on May 2. Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World, a collection of essays with an introduction by Rebecca Solnit, will appear in paperback under the imprint of Notting Hill Editions, which says it is “at once a cri de coeur and a memoir of both pain and wonder”. Lopez died after a long illness on Christmas Day, 2020. The previous summer, a wildfire had consumed his home in Oregon and the community around it, a reminder of the climate crisis of which he had long been giving warning. 

  Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World was published in the United States in May last year. Reviewing it in The New York Times, Ben Ehrenreich said the essays were “about the redemptive importance of paying attention to the planet and to the other beings with which we share it. Attentiveness works as an antidote not only to distractedness but to the fatal unseriousness of modern life.”