Cal Flyn traveled tens of thousands of miles around the world to research her book, “The Savage Landscape: How We Made the Wilderness,” journeying to remote areas in Africa, Antarctica and the Amazon and encountering AK-47-toting men, isolated Indigenous communities, big game hunters, turbulent seas, wild animals and an erupting volcano along the way.
Oh, and that time the ground gave way beneath her, and she fell into an ice cavern.
“Some of the situations I got myself into were inherently risky,” says Flyn via Zoom from her home in Scotland. “That’s part of what a wilderness is; it’s something that we perceive to be wild, that we perceive to be threatening.”
“The Savage Landscape,” however, isn’t the diary of an adrenaline junky; it’s a work of intrepid nonfiction research and reporting, even if sometimes your palms may start sweating as Flyn describes the situation.
Map: 100 Southern California independent bookstores to visit in 2026
A writer and journalist with the calm, thoughtful demeanor of an academic, Flyn is also the author of the 2021 book, “Islands of Abandonment: Nature Rebounding in the Post-Human Landscape,” a vivid look at places damaged by war, climate change, industry and people, from the radioactive land around Chernobyl and the “biological desert” of a World War I battlefield to a remote Scottish island overrun with feral cattle, the descendants of creatures left behind when the last human inhabitants abandoned the place in the 1970s.
“To be alone in that way is very unusual and very unsettling,” she says of her time on the isle of Swona, a haunted, haunting place. “I was having sort of waking nightmares, imagining threats where there were none. That is actually kind of a natural reaction to a strange situation.”
“I think maybe that’s what I’ve always had in my mind,” she says, “writing about these places that make us fearful.”
Into the wild
While the previous book explored landscapes after catastrophe, “The Savage Landscape” finds her heading downriver into Brazil’s Yanomami Indigenous Territory, trekking under guard into the Congo Basin and sneaking past barriers to approach a volcano spewing bathtub-sized globs of lava in Iceland. She investigates preservation efforts, the treatment of Indigenous communities and the most effective ways to achieve stated environmental goals.
Describing the book as a history of wilderness told through 10 journeys, Flyn combines reporting with her own reflections. She takes a hard look at the choices humans are making about maintaining a livable earth, which, for her, means moving beyond fixating on pristine or untouched landscapes.
“Finding places that were wholly unimpacted by humans was almost impossible,” says Flyn. “It’s like the idea of ‘perfect nature’ doesn’t really exist.”
How Robert Macfarlane’s book ‘Is a River Alive?’ delivers a call to action
While questioning current policies and strategies for preservation, it’s clear she’s not suggesting that we do less to safeguard the environment.
“We do need protections. We do need limitations on how we use and exploit the natural world,” she says. “I think that’s pretty inarguable.”
As well, the research for her previous book opened her eyes to the possibility that land once considered ruined or irredeemable might have as-yet unknown potential.
“I’d written quite a lot, as you know, on ‘posthuman landscapes,’ as I describe them,” she says. “I saw there that many of those landscapes could, in fact, be extremely valuable.”
That value may come from studying how ecosystems can respond and possibly rebound from human-generated stressors. Flyn also pushes back against the idea of declaring some places beyond hope.
“This idea of the pristine environment is something that is increasingly being picked apart, that maybe nothing really is pristine,” she says. “That’s a big conversation we’ve been having around climate change.”
“You can reason yourself into thinking that, Oh, there’s no point in saving this, because it’s already damaged,” she says. “If that’s the majority of the world, which it almost certainly is, where does that leave you?”
Sacred spaces
In the book, Flyn writes about sacred natural sites, locations that have been cared for and protected by Indigenous cultures. Often, this stewardship has a spiritual or religious element.
“When we look at landscapes populated by Indigenous groups, by that I mean people who have remained in place for long periods of time, the culture of the people who live there is intertwined very deeply with the landscape itself,” she says.
7 books about eels, mushrooms, moths and monsters that bring the outdoors to you
While not established expressly as conservation sites, these sites, also known as sacred groves, often end up serving that function.
“India, for example, is absolutely packed with sacred groves,” she says. “There are hundreds of thousands of them, and what you tend to find is that these will be the last remaining old-growth forests, or they’ll be the last undisturbed versions of a riverine ecosystem, or they will be full of species that no longer exist in other parts of the nearby landscape.
“It’s because they’ve been held under protection of some kind for a really, really, really long time, and the result is that religion serves to create a nature sanctuary,” she says. “Here, it’s a kind of fear or reverence for a landscape that saves it. Fear of a wrathful god can be more powerful than simply building a fence.”
Flyn says she thinks a similar reverence for landscape exists even in more secular cultures.
“The way that people talk about hiking, for example, often does echo the language of the sacred. Or people talk about epiphanies or transcendence in nature,” she says. “You see this all the time on Instagram. This is the way that people do relate to the landscape around them, even if it’s not necessarily within some kind of larger religious system.”
“I think it might be baked into the way that we think about nature and … of being part of something greater than ourselves,” she says.
World outside your door
Flyn says she wrestled with the need to travel so much, but ultimately felt that writing about a global issue, along with the specific cultural circumstances of a particular area, meant traveling to these locales to do her own reporting and research.
“I felt that I needed to go and see things playing out,” she says. “I do have a background as a news reporter, and my news editor was always sort of kicking into me the need to go and see things and meet people.
How ‘Cool Machine’ pulls Colson Whitehead back in for one last heist
Over the course of the book, she gets into some challenging situations, which raises the question of whether it was prudent to be traveling alone, as she often was.
“It would primarily be myself, and then in some places, for example, like a fixer or a guide,” she says, citing the efforts of her guide in the Amazon as essential. “Without him, it would have been hopeless.”
But she also explored the possibilities that come from embracing the strangeness of a place on her own, such as her attempts to get up close to that erupting volcano.
“In Iceland, when I was primarily traveling alone and hiking alone into the exclusion zone, that was part of the experience I really wanted to lean into because I think when a lot of people think about wilderness, they think about that solitary aspect and this idea of feeling lost and alone,” she says. “And so I was trying to work with the logistical questions … and keep some of that element of the aloneness alive.”
But all of this travel shifted something within her, too.
“It seems maybe perverse that I needed to travel the world to come to the conclusion that maybe traveling is not the solution,” she says. “I think I needed to do it to research and to learn about wilderness preservation. But do I need to travel to get the feeling that I’m looking for? No.”
Sign up for our free newsletter about books, authors, reading and more
These days, she says she’s been seeking out interactions with nature closer to home.
“I can sit very still, and a bird will come and hop over my feet,” she says. “That’s a kind of wilderness interaction, but it’s also a very feasible, reachable, accessible interaction with nature that blows my mind.”
“And that’s on my doorstep.”