Something, most certainly, happens to a diver’s emotions underwater. It is not merely a side effect of the pleasing, vaguely erotic sensation of water pressure on the body. Nor is it alone the peculiar sense of weightlessness, which permits a diver to hang motionless in open water, observing sea life large as whales around him; not the ability of a diver, descending in that condition, to slowly tumble and rotate in all three spatial planes. It is not the exhilaration from disorientation that comes when one’s point of view starts to lose its “lefts” and “down” and gains instead something else, a unique perception that grows out of the ease of movement in three dimensions. It is not from the diminishment of gravity to a force little more emphatic than a suggestion. It is not solely exposure to an unfamiliar intensity of life. It is not a state of rapture with the bottomless blue world beneath one’s feet…it is some complicated mix of these emotions, together with the constant proximity of real terror.

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.