The Savage Landscape by Cal Flyn review – into the wild
An awe‑inspiring investigation of the untamed places and inhospitable environments in which life – besides humans – finds a way
Off the coast of California, two miles down, there exist geothermal nurseries: gatherings of tens of thousands of small violet octopuses, each the size of a grapefruit. Known as pearl octopuses (Muusoctopus robustus), they congregate around hydrothermal springs which warm their eggs, allowing them to hatch in less than two years (in cold water it can take 10 years). When I want to calm my mind, I think of these gatherings, this factory of octopuses powered by the Earth’s energy that exists quietly away from our gaze, and might easily never have been discovered. How many more such worlds exist?
The seafloor is just one setting in Cal Flyn’s carnival of a book, The Savage Landscape, a wondrous personal journey to locate and understand wilderness. It’s a work of extraordinary physical and narrative movement that takes us from the depths of the ocean to volcanoes and icebergs, but is also a journey into our own psyches, and the stories we tell ourselves about “wild” landscapes. Above all, it is a reminder that the places we might conceive of as empty or barren are no such thing; that within wildernesses there is abundant life, both human and nonhuman.
As Flyn points out, the fascination with wilderness is widely shared across cultures. The Sumerian epics can be read as “wilderness quests”, with exiled heroes making their way through remote hinterlands while facing danger and trials; similarly, the Toraja people of Indonesia observe an annual ritual whereby they run into the forest at night and “become one with the wilderness”. In her way, Flyn is the latest incarnation of this desire. She’s a keen hill walker, and receives both nourishment and solace from wild places (towards the end of the book she writes about heading to the hills after her father died). While there, she experiences a “thinning of the skin”, “a sense of communing of all that is non-human”.
Like many of us, I share a hankering to seek out wilderness and that thinning of the skin, and am sceptical that mere prose can ever elicit the same intensity of experience. And yet, when I read Flyn’s writing I would often exhale with a sense of wonder. Consider this description of a carcass on the seafloor reconceived as a terrestrial feeding site: “Whale falls simmer with life, like waterholes on the savannah, oases in the desert. Soft cetacean tissues are carved away by sharp-toothed creatures; worms and microbes dissolve the bones; flakes of salted fish drift like snow.”
Of course, the whole notion of untouched wilderness is a fiction, a product of our own fantasies, and Flyn continually pulls the rug from under our assumptions about purity, wildness and isolation. At the Monastery of Saint Paul the Anchorite, in Egypt’s eastern desert, she talks with a coptic monk who has dedicated himself to a life of isolation and prayer, and yet continually checks his smartphone. Aboard a cruise ship in the Southern Ocean, Flyn admires icebergs crashing down, “a silent display of staggering sublimity”, only to reflect on the clutter left behind by tourists and scientific researchers on the Antarctic landmass; according to one group of researchers, only 31% of Antarctica can now be considered “inviolate”.
In Transylvania, home to the largest population of brown bears in Europe, she explores painful stories of people and wildlife in conflict. Bears and wolves fared well in Europe until the destruction of their habitat in the middle ages brought them into direct contact with local populations. These creatures can be savage, and Flyn spares little detail in her evocation of the damage they can wreak to human flesh, but the most terrifying creature in the chapter is not ursine or lupine: it is a local’s sheepdog, a domesticated animal whose snarl is “a white noise of pure violence”.
And yet the idea that wilderness is a region “untrammelled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain”, as the 1964 US Wilderness Act has it, is revealed as a pernicious fallacy. There are few places that could meet this definition, and Flyn details the plight of Indigenous peoples, often dispossessed in the name of lofty ideals of conservation, or by the cynicism of those bent on extracting resources. Early on in the book, she travels to the Brazilian rainforest to visit the Yanomami people, controversially depicted by anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon as “noble savages”. The chapter begins like a Victorian adventure, but soon turns into a fascinating deconstruction of Chagnon’s fantasies, and our own. When Flyn’s translator bargains with the Yanomami to facilitate her access, they initially request the donation of an all too familiar object: a chainsaw.
Perhaps the only true unpopulated wilderness is to be found in a substance which resists any kind of settlement: molten rock. In Iceland Flyn witnesses a volcanic eruption and beautifully evokes both the attractions and terror of lava; she describes “rivulets of thickened magma” which “seeped from vents and cracks, as slow and gelatinous as icing from a cake, a grey skin forming, then cracking to reveal a soft, burnt orange in underlayer”. She digresses to talk about the sublime, citing the Romantics, but for me the chapter evoked not 18th- or 19th-century poetry or painting, but Sara Dosa’s wondrous 2022 documentary, Fire of Love, which tells the story of volcanologists Katia and Maurice Krafft and their passion for volcanoes. Like that film’s subjects, Flyn seems irresistibly drawn to visit a volcano’s crater by foot, though, unlike the Kraffts, she returns to tell the story; perhaps there is something of a death drive in our yearning for wilderness.
In 1937 the anthropologist Tom Harrisson published a book about the New Hebrides (now Vanuatu) a place once considered to embody a kind of primordial wildness, and said to be inhabited by cannibals. Its name, Savage Civilisation, was deliberately provocative. Like Montaigne before him, Harrisson didn’t condemn cannibalism; he viewed the missionaries and European settlers as the problem. Similarly, Flyn’s text is replete with modern examples of civilised savagery in remote places: mining companies mapping the seafloor to extract minerals; conservation groups dispossessing local people in the name of purifying the wilderness; wealthy hunters who will pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to shoot a leopard, rhino or lion. Who, she invites us to ask, are the real savages?
Chainsaws aside, it is to Indigenous cultures that Flyn looks to escape the dead ends sometimes advocated by conservationists or technocrats. She journeys to Nepal to meet the Bon people of Dolpo, who survive in a harsh landscape without abundant natural resources. In their culture, there is little talk of wilderness mapping or scientific management, rather of deities and spirits who reside in springs, forests and boulders, and who must not be offended.
Flyn sees in the Bon a kind of inspiration: “Sacred landscapes of the kind found in Dolpo,” she writes, “effectively comprise the world’s oldest conservation projects, and there is a lot that we can learn from their longevity.” I don’t know how the beliefs and practices of the Dolpo might be applied at the bottom of the sea, but surely Flyn is right: if we are to escape the course of ecological destruction, we will need more stories, like hers, that can reignite a sense of awe and respect for the worlds we know, and others yet undiscovered.
• The Savage Landscape by Cal Flyn is published by William Collins (£20). To support the Guardian order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.