For decades, Barry Lopez has been lauded for the sheer beauty and sensory precision of his writing, which has been used by environmentalists to advance the cause of preservation of wild and culturally significant places.

Lopez won the National Book Award in 1986 for "Arctic Dreams," in which the landscape of the far north speaks and glimmers through his transparent prose. He recounts a summer’s twilight walk on the tundra, where golden plovers were "artfully feigning a broken wing to distract me from the woven grass cups that couched their pale, darkly speckled eggs (which) glowed with a soft, pure light."

If Lopez were to have an aumakua, it could be that golden plover, or kolea, which migrates between Alaska and Hawaii. The islands, too, hold a special place in his heart.

While his many works of nonfiction and fiction, including "Men and Wolves," "Field Notes" and "Outside," can be read just for pleasure, Lopez, 70, is a writer on a mission. For 49-plus years he has been seeking ways in which we can truly experience, understand and heal the natural world, ourselves and others.

Integral to that mission are the place names and stories of a region’s original people, Lopez wrote in the 2006 anthology "Home Ground: A Guide to the American Landscape," which he edited with his wife, Debra Gwartney. In it, writers provide a glossary of natural features, and Lopez describes being struck by the contrast between two identical topographical maps of a valley in Alaska. One map was marked with more than 100 place names in the indigenous Deni’ina language. The other sported fewer than a dozen "arbitrarily chosen" names in English. The Deni’ina names "had grown up over many centuries, out of the natural convergence of human culture with a particular place," Lopez wrote.

Throughout his travels to 97 countries, he has apprenticed himself to the elders of indigenous peoples in order to learn about their ancestral places and cultural traditions. He has listened to local people in places scarred by devastation and conflict such as Af­ghani­stan, Bulgaria, Somalia, northern Sumatra after the 2004 tsunami and Native American lands.

"My question for my own people (mainstream America) is, Why aren’t we listening to others and, when you consider how battered traditional cultures have been, how are they still here?" Lopez asked, speaking by phone this month from Texas Tech University in Lubbock, where he visits every year and has facilitated a reconciliation process between the university and the Comanche Nation.

He believes writers have a social and ethical responsibility to community, with this caveat: "The community needs the story but they don’t need you."

Lopez will be the keynote speaker May 3 at the Hawai’i Book & Music Festival, now in its 10th year and the recipient of a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. Talks, readings, book signings and panels featuring national and local authors of fiction, nonfiction and poetry will be held Saturday and May 3 from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. each day at the Frank F. Fasi Civic Grounds.

The synchronicity between Lopez’s values and those of Hawaiian cultural leaders who will be speaking at the festival brings particular joy to Roger Jellinek, founder and organizer of the event.

"We probably do Hawaiian culture in more depth than any other single event," Jellinek said. "Lopez’s vision is extraordinarily relevant right now for Hawaii as we enter another surge of development."

Although Jellinek’s mission is that the festival provide something to attract every reader — from children to fans of the best-selling mystery and self-help authors — local and Hawaiian culture and writers predominate.

Lopez has visited Hawaii several times. In 2007 he edited a special issue of the journal Manoa on the theme of reconciliation. In 2008 he helped to organize a conference on "global issues, cooperation and compassion" at the Ala Kukui retreat center in Hana, Maui, with the Hawaiian cultural practitioner Luana Busby-Neff.

Lopez said he first met Busby-Neff at a conference in Bali on global healing that was also attended by human rights activist and Nobel Prize winner Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa. But "the first person I met that woke me up to Hawaii was Emmet Aluli in 1981 at a conference at Mills College in Oakland," he remembered. As it happens, Aluli and Busby-Neff are both founding members of the Protect Kaho‘olawe Ohana, which began occupying the small island off Maui in 1976 to protest its use as a bombing range by the U.S. military. The island, considered a sacred place by Native Hawaiians, was returned to the state in 1994 and is being restored.

Another PKO member is Davianna McGregor, author of "Na Kua‘aina: Living Hawaiian Culture" and professor of ethnic studies at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. She will participate in panels on the Hawaiian sense of place and "a new Hawaiian history" at the book and music festival.

"In Hawaii there’s a tradition of histories and a sense of origin in places. All these natural forces are spiritual deities that are honored, so nature and place are elevated," McGregor, 64, said by phone, having just returned from Kahoolawe where she and others are working to restore an ala loa, an around-the-island trail.

As other cultures came to dominate Hawaii, places were renamed, indicating "how disconnected and distanced we’ve become from the natural world, privileging human society over it," she said. Reaching back to understand landscapes is crucial to narrating a new Hawaiian history, according to McGregor.

"If we lose our place names, then we’re losing our identity as a people."

In a similar vein, Hawaiian-language newspapers and other documents published from 1835 to 1920 will be discussed in a panel at the festival. Panelists include Kamana Beamer, author of "No Makou ka Mana: Liberating the Nation," recipient of the 2015 Samuel M. Kamakau Book of the Year Award from the Hawai‘i Book Publishers Association. He is executive director of Hawaii island’s Kohala Center, whose mission includes environmental education and stewardship of such natural areas as the Puu Pili rainforest in Kohala.

"The depth and intimacy of Hawaiian people’s understanding of their natural environment is amazing, filled with names you’ll never see on maps produced today," said Beamer, 37, of boundary commission testimonies and reports from the period. "People memorized a particular topographical feature, boundaries marked, say, by a swale that went up to a particular tree."

A student of the traditional mauka-to-makai ahupuaa system of land management, Beamer urges that "we bring our social system and structures back in alignment with this system created by Hawaiians of old in a remarkable union of culture and ecosystem."

While here with his family, Lopez will also be helping to choose the first recipient of a new fellowship administered by the University of Hawaii at Manoa. The Barry Lopez Visiting Writer in Ethics and Community was funded by Gwartney and the couple’s friend Frank Stewart, editor of Manoa, through a Kickstarter campaign.

It was a recent surprise from his wife.

"Deborah told me about it on my birthday, Jan. 6, and I was literally speechless, there in the kitchen," said Lopez, who lives in rural Oregon. Asked about favorite spots in the islands, "I love driving all the way around the Maui coast coming either way to Hana," the writer said. He also remembered standing transfixed in the Koo­lau mountain mist. Of Hawaii in its entirety, he said, "You’d have to be blind to not see it as a holy place, and you can’t mask that with the buildings at Wai­kiki."

Abandoned in childhood by his father, Lopez’s journeys began when his mother remarried and the family moved away from Southern Cali­for­nia, where he had felt a "great attachment to landscapes like the Mojave Desert, a sense of landscape being animated, alive, luminous — that it had a spiritual dimension." As a writer, perhaps, he is still trying to get back to that original sense of being safe and at home, even or especially with wild animals. He is, he said, "trying to create a pattern so a reader will feel a sense of wholeness about their own thoughts and emotions."

After graduating from a Jesuit high school in New York, Notre Dame University and the University of Oregon, Lopez moved into the house where he and Gwartney still live, sharing the habitat of "bears, elk, mountain lion on the west side of the Cascades." And he set forth on his lifelong journey of writing and apprenticeship.

"What does reconciliation within the self look like, or in the family, the war in the kitchen? And at an international scale?" Lopez asked. "I feel of all the states Hawaii has made the most progress."

He reflected on the privilege of traveling to places such as the interior vastness of Antarctica where few people can go. "When I’m in a place like that, I’m always thinking, ‘You’ve got to pay attention and bring something back.’ It’s like holding hands … maybe it’s a little naive."

That may be, but as Lopez’s writing shows, a little naivete can open our eyes and hearts to the world in time.