The Last Frontier or a Return to Walden Pond? : A Reevaluation of Barry Lopez’s Arctic Dreams

The essay deals with one of the most important literary genre Henry David Thoreau fathered, modern nature writing, whose relevance has increased from the Seventies onward due to the new ecological awareness and the interest in US domestic tourism towards the less inhabited areas of the continent, and Alaska in particular. The essay examines Barry Lopez’ Artic Dreams (1986), a text that has been pivotal in the shift from the depiction of Alaska as the “Last Frontier” towards the representation of the region as a socially and culturally constructed entity. The paper argues that Lopez decentres the Eurocentric vision of space through the use (and the limits) of maps, one of the most powerful instruments of Western expansion, and through the re-inscription of Alaska in transnational circuits that call into question the dynamics affecting the environment and its politics on the global scale.