What is a wilderness, really? Here in the US we think of it as undeveloped land, put aside to appreciate its beauty and remoteness. In other lands and cultures, wilderness is a powerful, ancient concept, at the intersection of landscape, philosophy, and ecology. For thousands of years, people have sought out uncontrolled, unknown, or uncharted nature in search of religious epiphany, self-actualization, and an escape from normal life. More recently these “pristine” places have been seen as the subject of a last effort to repair a planet imperiled by humans. In her new book The Savage Wilderness, award-winning writer Cal Flyn traverses many of these wild lands—the supposedly uninhabited wilds of the world—and finds that such truly untouched lands don’t exist: Nearly every wilderness has been or is actively inhabited by humans. Here are ascetics in search of God in the desert; lonely shepherds tending their sheep under the stars; missionaries preaching from shacks deep in the jungle; lamas meditating under lofty mountain peaks. Cal is the current Distinguished Writer-in-Residence at Wesleyan University, and has written for publications including The Guardian, National Geographic, and The Wall Street Journal. She was named a 2022 Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year, is the winner of the E. M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, of the British Academy Book Prize, the Ondaatje Prize, and the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction. And as will hear, she speaks and writes articulately and passionately about the meaning of wilderness and why we should value it.

Executive Producer: Beth Bennett
Show Producer: Beth Bennett
Engineer: Abby O’Brien

Listen to the Show:

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 28:00 — 23.1MB)

Subscribe: RSS