The Magpie #6: Wilderness

Cal Flyn. The Savage Landscape: How We Made the Wilderness. Viking, 2026. $35.00. 448 pp.

The concept of wilderness is almost impossibly rich. “The Wilderness” is something both tactile (it exists, you can go there!) and hidden (for once you can get there, is it really wild anymore?). Wilderness also constantly invites our interest in its provenance. Was the wilderness wild before we said it was so? Once towns encroach on the wilderness, is it wilderness any longer? If a tree falls in the wild forest and no one hears it, is there anyone there to call it wild?

Wilderness, in other words, is in the eye of the beholder. It requires someone to observe and name it. For this reason, the question of wilderness is caught up in a back-and-forth interrogation between the wild landscape and the “wild” in our imagination.

There is a long history of interest in the American wilderness. For this reason there is also a vast literature on the topic. Both Max Oelschlaeger’s The Idea of Wilderness: From Prehistory to the Age of Ecology (1991) and Roderick Nash’s Wilderness and the American Mind (1965) frame the historical question. Karl Jacoby’s Crimes Against Nature (2014) and Caroline Fraser’s Rewilding the World (2010) take colorful examples of poachers and endangered animals and put them in the context of the larger story of conservation. Hundreds of essays stake out more academic views on wilderness and conservation, and the pros and cons of designating something as “wild” and the implications of such designations for policy.

But America’s history with wilderness extends also into the imagination. In fact, you could make an argument that the idea of the open frontier and the possibilities it contains is America’s most significant cultural ideal. 

Personally, I have long loved books set in the American frontier. Beginning with an early affection for the novels of Laura Ingalls Wilder and the eponymous Kirsten books from the American Girl franchise, I moved on to novels from Jane Smiley, Wallace Stegner, Marilynne Robinson, and Kent Haruf. All of these novels, interestingly, set their protagonists against a vast and sometimes unforgiving landscape. The protagonists endure the very human challenges of aging, love, and loss—experiences that are their own unforgiving landscape. Setting stories of human aging and loss against vast prairie and rugged plains has always been a suggestive choice.

Much of our time, after all, is spent plodding, doing the same things over and over again, as if we too were in an endless prairie whose boundaries have no clear sight line. All of a sudden there rises ahead the sight of your great defeat. 

The older I get, the more I think that death always comes as a surprise, even when we know it is on the horizon. I love stories set in the prairie, and in the plains. My own life is at the moment blissfully filled with a glut of ordinary days, but I know a stark disruption will someday be on the horizon.

All of this is to say that there is much to like Cal Flyn’s The Savage Landscape: How We Made the Wilderness. In her book, Flyn tells interesting stories about the wilderness, broadly conceived. She takes her readers to the hunting preserves in Africa, where the high ticket kills of endangered animals funds the project of conservation, and to erupting volcanoes, to examine the idea of the “sublime.” She writes about Ansel Adams and his role in documenting (and thus creating) the idea of the wilderness, and she tells of her experience hiking in Yosemite’s designated wilderness areas. 

She researches “environmental conservation through exclusion” when she visits Uganda’s famed gorillas, and also encounters the human guerillas who make conservation in that area so dangerous and difficult. 

In her chapter on the supernatural character of some landscapes, Flyn writes engagingly of Pungmo, a small village in Nepal where villagers live among the wildlife, including the snow leopard. Her deep respect for this wilderness and its creatures there verges on religious awe. 

Flyn is a keen observer, and aims to argue that the veneration of the land and of wild animals that exists in some cultures is a clear boon to wildlife conservationists. Conservation must accept the values of the people who live in the sites to be conserved; the land and the animals who live there shape the spiritual values of the people. These are straightforward observations but also interesting and rich ones. 

Flyn travels all over the world to encounter the sites she writes about. She clearly has a personal stake in the question, and she gladly enters the stories she tells. This might be a benefit of her wilderness writing, but for me, it also is a real weakness of an otherwise fascinating book. 

The attempt to remove the “third wall” between writer and subject—made famous by the Gonzo journalism of Hunter S. Thompson—has been the distinctive development of nonfiction since the 1970s. Especially in the last twenty years, popular nonfiction appears to contain almost an imperative toward the first person. Self-disclosure can sell an idea. Books like Rebecca Skloot’s The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks benefit from the back-and-forth conversation of the author with the family of Lacks. John McPhee does this well. Janet Malcom’s 1989 The Journalist and the Murderer may be the best example of a book that succeeds when the author enters it as investigator and narrator. As Kristen Martin writes in a 2022 essay for The Atlantic, “When a writer does decide to adhere to fact, they have at their disposal two main subjects—the self and everything outside the self. But even when nonfiction writers plan to turn their gaze outward, what they discover can have a tricky way of bringing them back to themselves.” This can work. Sometimes.

But I’ve read more than a few nonfiction titles lately that have great questions, fantastic titles and cover art, and yet contain an underwhelming treatment of their subject matter. Entering a little bit into the story can grant a piece of nonfiction some color. But increasingly the line seems to be fading between nonfiction and memoir. I have turned down reviews on half a dozen nonfiction titles lately because their treatment of their subject matter is so thin, so insubstantial, compared to the author’s preoccupation with his or her own opinion.

In its weakest points, Cal Flyn’s ambitious book suffers from this confusion. Though she’s isolated the right question about the wilderness and the difficulty of identifying where it starts and ends, she can’t help but put herself in the story to excess.

This leaves the reader wondering what they are supposed to gain from the text. “Landscape: emotions for cowards, perhaps. Or—not cowards, but those of us who like to feel and to be felt, but who don’t like to say it out loud.” Or “The lack of control over one’s emotional weather has often been a source of great frustration to me. Without this cyclone of rapidly fluctuating pressures, would I not be a rational and productive person?” She is also susceptible to overwriting. When describing a volcano, she writes that “rivulets of thickened magma seeped from vents and cracks, as slow and as gelatinous as icing from a cake, a grey skin forming, then cracking to reveal soft, burnt orange in underlayer.” When this overwriting meets easy caricatures, it yields prose like this: “This stylizing of wilderness was a kind of amnesia, an airbrushing of the past. A massaging of fact into myth into visual shorthand. It was simpler that way, and more beautiful.” 

It is hard to miss the irony of a book on the wilderness that is so self-absorbed. Wilderness, after all, should get us outside ourselves so that we contemplate something beyond our own experience. But The Savage Landscape gets bogged down at times in the author’s own head.

It is not completely her fault. This is only one of many recent nonfiction books that seem to suffer from what I think is a very online self-perception. Such books take a large, subtle question and identify in it two “sides.” There is an easy binary setup, perhaps something like “privacy is good” or “information is better”; then the author chips away at the two sides and leaves us with the view that, in the end, both sides are really one and the same. Somehow, whether it is affordable housing or the wilderness or colonialism or dog behavior, the answer, in the end, is really us. We are the ones who are encroaching on the wilderness, or stealing each other’s privacy, or hijacking the economy. The last lines of Flyn’s book really are: “We are all of us moving through the void.”

Many of the books I have picked up and put down of late seem to have been crafted for an audience that is very self-absorbed. Readers seem less interested in the subject matter than in having their own prior opinions endorsed. But what good nonfiction needs is the integrity of an author who knows what she thinks and takes ownership of it. When she does these things, she might very well appear in the book as a collaborator to her argument. But there is nothing good that comes from muddying the distinction between nonfiction and memoir.