The Savage Landscape by Cal Flyn review: 'raises provocative questions'
In this thoughtful and thought-provoking exploration of the concept of wilderness, Cal Flyn proves herself adept at both nature writing and social anthropology, writes Stuart Kelly
In one of his more dyspeptic moments, the avant-garde novelist and provocateur Michel Houellebecq opined that he grieved more over the cessation of a favourite clothing brand than the extinction of any species of animal. Deliberately jaded though it is, there is a problematic kernel of truth in that Houellebecq is drawing attention to our arbitrary, meaningless and often hypocritical cleaving of “culture” from “nature”. Nowhere is this more evident than in discussions about the idea of wilderness.
When the late Kenneth White was lauding the starkness of the Highlands, more than one critic pointed out this was not an empty landscape, but an emptied one. Cal Flyn is alert to these ambiguities. The USA defined a National Park as “untrammelled by man” – that does not mean women can trammel as much as they want, pace Nan Shepherd and Jane Goddall – “where man himself is a visitor who does not remain”. Yet, it is evident that the idea of the pristine, the Edenic, the untouched is a will-o’-the-wisp, an ignis fatuus over an exceptionally mephitic quagmire. It may well be that no footprints can be found in certain parts of the Antarctic or the Amazon, but the air and light and streams and seas around them are changing. If the Anthropocene has one message it is that humanity does not need to be in a place in person to have an effect upon the environment. It is to Flyn’s credit that she foregrounds the knottiness and paradoxes and stumbling blocks around these discussions.
The book is a series of 11 voyages, both internal and external, and - as the author says - chronological as well as geographical. Each one also takes a thematic approach in order to stress the variable ways in which the meaning of wilderness has been constructed.
Flyn begins in the Sinai Desert, looking at spiritual retreats into the wilderness, and the book is haunted by the ways in which wilderness is figured as ascesis, as inhuman, as preternatural. As Balzac wrote, “In the desert, you see, there is everything, and there is nothing… it is God without men”.
The penultimate voyage, “Gods of the High Ground”, is to a lama in Dolpo, Nepal, and it is concerned with how designating a space as sacred might do more to protect it than a government resolution. With admirable humility, Flyn writes, “University-trained scientists can be leery of the woolly-mindedness of worldviews that rest on a basis of faith, however long-lasting”, whereas “religious leaders” jib at being asked to prove the unprovable, and make concrete the literal. (I was delighted she included the idea that all models are wrong, it is just that some are more useful than others. The map is never the territory, as a cursory glance at the London Underground map ought to prove).
But in a way the book’s natural ending is with, as James T Kirk put it, “the final frontier”. In Chapter 9, “Mare Incognitum”, Flyn moves from the Southern Ocean to outer space. As a child I loved my Usborne Book of the Future, in which one of the few predictions that came nearly true was that Earth would one day have a ring like Saturn, but made up of debris, obsolete satellites and other astronomers’ garbage. At present, as Flyn says, there are 35,000 large pieces of “space junk” in orbit and 130 million pieces of particulate matter. It is not just the sea that’s seething with microplastics.
The other chapters jaunt through Transylvania and the wilderness as the lair of monsters; Mozambique and hunting grounds – from medieval kings to moneyed gun-nuts, and the irony that shooting big game is a way to preserve it; savagery and the Amazon (via the difference between Hobbes and Rousseau); Iceland and the sublime; Yellowstone and the touristification of national parks; the Batwa in Uganda and “fortress conservation” with its concomitant “conservation refugees” (you can’t have “natives” contaminating the secluded wilderness); Antarctica and the problems of mapping wilderness. Having almost immediately made the wilderness a McGuffin at worst, a Grail-quest at best, she still manages to raise a great many provocative questions.
One problem, however, is that the market for wilderness books is as crowded as Loch Lomond on a bank holiday. Leaving aside classics by Barry Lopez, Rachel Carson, Nan Shepherd and Roger Deakin, and contemporary writers credited with a rekindling of interest – Robert Macfarlane, author of The Wild Places, for example, or Helen MacDonald – in Scotland alone we have writers as different as Kathleen Jamie, Alistair McIntosh, Gavin Francis, Esther Woolfson (who is especially good on urban wilderness, like Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts in Edgelands), Madeleine Bunting, Linda Cracknell, Patrick Baker, Amy Liptrot and many others.
Flyn has a range not often found, and is as much an anthropologist as an observer of nature, examining how individuals parse wilderness differently. Some of the writing strives a little for poetic effect (I find lists of colours slightly arch and fey), but it usually has a pleasant clarity. For non-specialist readers – and this goes for the genre as a whole – there is a problem of authentication. For example, Flyn writes that “we know far less about the bottom of the ocean than we know about the surface of Mars”. Yet in her book The Brilliant Abyss, the oceanographer Helen Scales contests this assertion. Who’s correct? Search me. For the armchair reader it seems as if there are still contradictory travellers’ tales emerging from the wilderness (or library).
The Savage Landscape by Cal Flyn, William Collins, £22
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