THE SAVAGE LANDSCAPE: How We Made the Wilderness, poetic and beautiful subject and discussion

THE SAVAGE LANDSCAPE: How We Made the Wilderness
CAL FLYN
Viking Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$18.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A lyrical exploration of the world’s wildest, most forbiddingly remote places—and the humans who have always been there, by an award-winning and critically acclaimed writer

From the blacksand beaches of Iceland, to river crossings deep in the Amazon jungle, to the barren beauty of Antarctica, wilderness is a powerful, ancient concept, lying at the intersection of landscape, philosophy, and ecology. And for thousands of years, people have sought out uncontrolled, unknown, or uncharted nature in search of religious epiphany, self-actualization, and an escape from modern life. More recently these “pristine” places have been seen as the subject of a last effort to repair a planet imperiled by humans.

But as award-winning writer Cal Flyn traverses the most forbidding, untamed and inhospitable wild lands—the supposedly uninhabited wilds of the world—she finds that such truly untouched lands don't Nearly every wilderness has been or is actively inhabited by humans. Here we meet ascetics in search of theophany in the desert; lonely shepherds running off wolves under the stars; missionaries preaching from shacks deep in the jungle; wise lamas meditating under lofty mountain peaks.

The Savage Landscape takes us into these breathtaking wilds—deep into dark forests, to the tops of mountains, and into the hearts of deserts—asking provocative questions about the nature of wilderness, its preservation, and its meaning.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Travel writing in the poetic mode:

Wolves, bears, the wild beasts of all kinds: those that frighten us, thrill us, go bump in the night. It's what's missing, they say, from the tight-leashed land: those lamplight eyes in the dark. Without them, without that element of fear, however faint or unformed, our relationship with the land is incomplete.

"If wildlife is removed," the environmental historian Roderick Nash has argued, "although everything else remains visibly the same, the intensity of the sense of wilderness is diminished!"

In other words: the fear is a part of it.

In the course of seeking out wilderness, Author Flyn makes the not-new case that "wilderness" is a societal construcy, it's about defining who gets to go where in the end..."wilderness" is reserved, apart from daily use for the great mass of people.

It's beautifully written...see quote above...but peculiarly impersonal. It's her musings, it's entirely about her responses to and thoughts about places the majority can never access. And, as the world shrinks and we humans use more and more of it for ourselves, a privileged subset of us have decided to define pieces of the world as "wild" thus off limits to the likes of you. You happen to live there? Move. This is wilderness now. I didn't see a lot of depth in her presentation of the responses to these diktats from indigenous people, but those stories are huge, deep, and outside this impressionist work's scope. I was sent off to look for the displaced's voices elsewhere—and a salutary reminder it was.

Auhor Flyn goes deep enough to present the inevitable, fundamentally irresolvable tension between the needs of humanity and the requirements of the planet's flora and animalia. It's not the first time I've read this story...Annie Dillard was my own first encounter with poetic prose telling nature's side of the story...but it is very well-made indeed.

Anyone who rethinks the relationship of human and nature has taken on an immense task, one that can't be finished, or even really grasped, in one book. Or one lifetime. We're always in need of people who look over the edges, across the horizons, under the fences, and tell us about what they saw and what they think it means. It's a perspective check...it's never possible for one person to see through all the other eyes there are looking at the world, perceiving it as we don't, even can't. It's the ultimate purpose of reading, acquiring those other perspectives in the best (albeit necessarily incomplete and skewed) way we can.

You know the lore of the woods in the 21st century, you most likely consume the stories about the denizens of the wild places on your TV. You most likely are watching vampire and werewolf media all the time. That mode of seeing these spaces has roots. Let Author Flyn show them to you, describe their planting and limn their growth for you; it will likely change how, even what, you see.

That's the point of reading, after all.