Summer reads – The wilderness myth w/Cal Flyn

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Kathleen: This is Living Planet. I’m Kathleen Schuster, and this is episode three of our four-part summer reading series. This year, our team has read a lot of interesting books on the environment, so we decided to interview some of the authors of our favorite picks. You can already find all four episodes in our podcast feed. Feel free to listen to them in any order you like, and be sure to share them with friends and family when you’re done.

Before we get started with this episode, a quick reminder that we want to hear from you. Let us know what you’ve been reading this summer, when it comes to nature and the environment, that is. You can leave us a voice note at dw.com/livingplanet. There’s no need to download or sign up for anything, just hit record. That’s dw.com/livingplanet. Thanks. We can’t wait to hear from you. Now over to Living Planet’s Charli Shield.

Charli: My staff pick for this summer reading series is The Savage Landscape: How We Made the Wilderness by award-winning Scottish author Cal Flyn. I chose this book because it grapples with some provocative questions that have long intrigued me. Questions that are also very relevant for the modern environmental movement. Like, what do we really mean when we talk about wilderness nowadays? And how much of this idea is built on an illusion?

In this book, Cal takes us on a fascinating, absorbing journey through time and across the world to some of its most remote places. And along the way, she prods at our ever-evolving idea of wilderness, asking what counts as wild? To whom? How have humans at different points in history answered this question? And why does this thing that’s hard to define have such a powerful hold on us?

Throughout this journey, she also challenges one of the wilderness conservation movement’s most cherished ideals: that protecting wild places invariably means keeping people out. It’s beautifully written and it really makes you think. The first couple of pages of her book set the scene for this winding journey. So when we spoke recently, I asked her to begin by reading them to us.

Cal Flyn: High in the Colorado Rockies, several days’ ride from the nearest town, I came across a signpost in the woods. On this lonely track, far from anywhere, it stood, still and strange as some Narnian lamppost. Welcome, it declared, to the holy cross wilderness. Beyond the sign came more of the same, endless stands of spruce shivering in the breeze, the rocky bones of the land showing through its skin. The dung of an unidentified mammal lay scattered at its base. Overhead, clouds scudded across the sky. One passed over the sun, momentarily casting us in a midday darkness. Behind us, a thunderstorm swept down the valley like a veil, moving fast. It would be on us soon. We halted, dismounted, the horses shifted their weight and swiveled their ears, uneasy. The base of the sign held an unmarked metal drawer. I opened it with some trepidation. Inside was a creased and weathered register, inviting us to sign in.

It was a surreal experience, my first brush with the bureaucracy of wilderness. In the United States, what looks like wild land is overlaid with a patchwork of different access rights and ownerships. That a Holy Cross wilderness existed on a map, I knew, but I had not anticipated such a status to be so boldly and unambiguously announced. To my eyes, the sign’s presence served to negate the phenomenon it had been built to protect. In one glance my sense of freedom and self sufficiency, which had been building in me all through the previous days as we fled ever further from street lights and tarred roads slipped away. To have scaled and climbed and overcome obstacles only to meet with what was essentially a street sign, called into question, in my mind at least, the entire pursuit.

One might understand the function of such a sign: Past this point, no motors or engines of any kind, no chainsaws, no dirt bikes, and welcome it, while still grieving its existence. The very attempt to define wilderness, itemize it, delineate it on a map, seemed to make it slip from my grasp. I had stumbled upon the central paradox at the heart of the wilderness preservation movement, the problem of translating a subjective response to landscape into real terms.

Charli: That’s Cal Flyn reading a passage from her book, The Savage Landscape. And Cal, you go on to explore this central paradox at the heart of the wilderness preservation movement throughout the book. Can we… just begin by establishing what is so contradictory about trying to define wilderness and attempting to protect it?

Cal: Well, wilderness as a word has come to mean a number of different things depending on who you’re speaking to. And in many senses it’s a kind of shape-shifting definition. So it’s it’s defined by the absence of people to some people, it’s defined as a foreign place to other people, it’s defined as a place off the edge of the map to others. And so it partly depends on on what mode of thinking that you’re using, whether you’re thinking of wilderness as some kind of spiritual or emotional subjective experience, or whether you are more of a geographer and you would like to pin it down to an exact place so that you might try to conserve or preserve it. Moving from this subjective response to landscape to something more solid, which is what has been so useful for policymakers and conservationists, has actually been something that’s really controversial and has caused quite a lot of problems, especially when we look at the twentieth century conservation movement when we started fencing off wildernesses and trying to police this unpeopled nature of them. Because it turns out whenever you look for wildernesses around the world, you always seem to stumble across people. And that might be indigenous people who live there. It might be people who have some kind of business there. They’re very, very, very rarely completely unpeopled. And and that definition that sort of arose and is now beginning to disperse has caused a lot of problems in terms of human rights.

Charli: And we’re going to dig into some of those more problematic, controversial aspects a bit later in this conversation. There is a lot there. But first I’m curious, did you grow up near a so called wild place or very much the opposite?

Cal: I grew up in the Highlands of Scotland, I’d say about a mile outside of a village. I’m not sure I would describe it as a wilderness. You know, it was a farming region. We had what you would call rough pasture around us, so some sheep sometimes, sometimes it would be cattle, sometimes it would be horses, and we were on the edge of I guess the highlands that you might see on postcards. So if you just walked up to the top of the hill, you could see the mountains, you could see the moorlands sort of stretching out. There were lochs, there were open spaces, and some plantation forestry as well. So it’s it definitely a kind of mixed landscape. It’s a really incredible space and it’s a sort of to me it’s always like my dream space. This is what wildland looks like. But on a global scale, this is not anywhere near what you would describe a wilderness. I think because the size of it is not enormous, we tend to have small roads cutting through these areas. It’s very rural, but it’s not a wilderness. These are grazing lands.

Charli: Yeah, that is interesting because it’s not a particularly large country or a large space, but it does have this very kind of expansive quality to it.

Cal: Absolutely. And a a lot of that is due to sort of happy alignments of certain aesthetic qualities. So the mountains are not particularly high in Scotland, but we have a lot of them and they’re various altitudes, meaning you can often climb a relatively small hill and then see loads and loads of hills off into the distance. So you can see across essentially the whole country. And so it gives you that sense of expansiveness. It gives you that sense of freedom. Even if you keep walking, you’ll probably bang into a a four by four track quite quickly, you know, that it it is quite interlaced with with use, but nevertheless the aesthetics of it encourage this sense of of freedom and and mental space and and so it’s become associated with wildness, with wilderness, even if geographers wouldn’t agree that this is a wilderness of any kind.

Charli: And so for this book, you journeyed to a whole bunch of different places in the world, the Amazon, Nepal, Antarctica, to explore different aspects of how we think about wilderness and how we set it apart from other places in the world. How did you choose these locations? How did you pick where to go to explore one particular thing?

Cal: So the Savage Landscape, the book as a whole, has a big arc holding it together, which is that it is a kind of history of the ideal wilderness told through ten journeys. And so I started to initially map out a places that I knew I I should include. You know, if I’m writing about wilderness at a global level, I I really need to talk about and and go to the Amazon. I really need to talk about and go to the Antarctic and I need to talk about and probably go to the open seas. And so I had these locations jumped out immediately. And then what other historical aspects do I need to address? And so I wanted to begin with the ancient roots of wilderness. And so that seemed to me to be a fairly clear step that I would go to Mount Sinai because I grew up with these stories of exiles, epiphanies in the desert through the Bible. But these stories are common to all the Abrahamic religions. And that by sort of journeying to Mount Sinai and talking about those stories, it would also help me get a a a view across some other cultures links to the the idea of the wilderness trial or the wilderness quest. I could bring those all together in one chapter.

Charli: Mount Sinai, by the way, is located in Egypt on the Sinai Peninsula in the country’s east.

Cal: And then I started looking for different key aspects of of how this wilderness idea had evolved. And for example, a lot of what we call wilderness today, some of our best preserved and longest preserved wildernesses, are former hunting reserves or are even still hunting reserves. And so I knew I wanted to look into that history. And so I needed to find a a present-day example that I could go to and experience. And so that ended up being a chapter about trophy hunting in Mozambique and this incredible reserve called the Nyassa Special Reserve. It’s about the size of Switzerland, part of which is managed as a pure nature reserve, and a large part of which is managed as a kind of hunting reserve. You can go trophy hunting there.

I wanted to talk about the sublime and romantic notions of landscape. And so for that I was like, What what’s a sublime? I need to experience the sublime for myself. And so I’d go and I’d stand under waterfalls and think, is this a sublime? I don’t know. You know that if you look at Edmund Burke, for example, writing in the 18th century, he talks about the different categories of sublime experience. And one of them was like to to stand under a huge waterfall. So I went and stood under a huge waterfall and I was like… maybe I’ve seen too many waterfalls in my life? I don’t feel this is sublime enough! And so, it’s like keep pushing, keep pushing, keep pushing. And then that became… ultimately I sort of chased it right to the edge of a Icelandic volcano and and sort of blew through the sublime and into a kind of pure fear. because it was meant to be this complex emotion.

And so that’s what I was thinking about when I was putting together these ten places, that it should be places that you think about when you think about the word wilderness, and it should also be places where there are sort of conflicts or tensions that allow me to really dig down into the complexity of these arguments. You know, what has happened to this idea of wilderness? Why is it so powerful?

But also why has it become problematic? Why is this something that is now very controversial? You know, a lot of the time when I would approach people to talk to me for this book, I would say I’m I’m writing a book about the history of wilderness and people would say, you know, I don’t really like to use that word. And to begin with, that surprised me a little bit. It’s not a huge discussion in the UK, but I was familiar with some of the fighting that’s gone on about the Wilderness Act in the United States. And then I found that it was not only in the US and the Wilderness Act, but also it was a big issue among large environmental NGOs that have often actually banned use of this term wilderness because it’s become so problematic, especially when they’re dealing with indigenous groups. And so for that I knew that I would want to go and meet a group that had been really badly affected by this like wilderness thinking. so for that I went to the Varungas, which are mountains, they’re in Rwanda, they’re in Uganda and they’re in D R C they’re right on the sort of cusp of those three countries. And so I went into the Ugandan side to meet a group called the Batawa who have been essentially evicted from their homeland and have been for more than three decades. So in that way I slowly built up my list of places that I wanted to go and the key thing for me was how do I sort of physically embody this issue that I’m interested in in real stories, real people, real landscapes, so I can bring them to life for a reader.

Charli: Hmm. It’s a beautiful arc. It’s a really rich, fascinating journey that you take us on. And I was really moved by this story of the Batwa people. I found it really heartbreaking reading about their eviction from their homelands in the forest. What was it like for you meeting people from the Batwa who’ve been evicted and learning from them what their lives were like pre-eviction and now after that event?

Cal: It’s quite a strange experience, quite confronting sometimes. so initially I was directed to a group who were living in simple but fairly solid accommodation right on the edge of a national park on the border between Uganda and Rwanda. missionaries had built them these kind of shacks, I suppose you would call them. They were sort of bleached wood but quite handsome looking. And then as I spoke to them, you know, people who were activists from this small village came out and they explained that actually, although the village looked fairly nicely put together, in fact it was in a really dangerous mudslide zone. And so that they had quite recently lost children because they have these repeated mudslides that essentially come from the side of the volcanoes and then they sweep through the village and they’d lost houses to this. And so the reason that this region had been left kind of empty and therefore suitable for the building of their refugee huts was because it was a very dangerous place to live. So that was my initial encounter with the Batwa. They were very keen that I take a lot of notes, that I write about them, that I get their plight out there.

And then I went to another refugee camp which was very homemade and and really unsuitable for human inhabitation, which was right on the end of the Bewindi National Park. And on the edge of Bewindi, and this is really well known for gorilla trekking, which is very expensive. it’s an amazing experience and the gorillas are doing incredibly well. But all the way along the edges of this park are these refugee camps which have been thrown together from bits of tarpaulin and bits of clay that they’ve found and bits of mud and you know it’s really, really absolutely not suitable for human habitation.

There’s just no way out for them. They don’t have sort of traditional knowledge that is easily applied to becoming smallholder farmers, which is I think what the Ugandan government would like them to do. And they want to hang on to their culture, of course they do. They want to stay together as a people with their relatives, of course they do. But they have been trapped for a long time and they’re completely penniless. So it’s it’s a very confronting situation there and it is right next to some of the b biggest tourist sites, certainly in in South Uganda.

Charli: And so these people have been evicted from the forest where they used to live for the stated purpose of protecting the forest and the biodiversity that live there, right?

Cal: Yes, and in particular the mountain gorilla. So, the the national parks that I visited are are quite clear examples of what we call fortress conservation. That is they essentially built a wall around bits of forest, and then they have rangers who are armed, they’re carrying AK forty sevens, they march up and down, and you really do not want to be caught inside the forest. The Batwa claim that they’ve been shot at, they really cannot afford to be going into their traditional spiritual places, they can’t go to where they used to hunt, they can’t go to where they used to gather, because of this militarized force that is quote unquote protecting the jungle and the gorillas within.

In fact, you do see this a lot in the Congo Basin. So the Batwa people are spread out over a number of different countries. I think there’s something like 87,000 of them. More than 90% of them have now been evicted from their homelands. That’s spread through lots of different reserves and national parks. It’s very easy to think of this kind of colonial mode of environmentalism as being something of the 19th century, but in fact this is still being enacted across large swathes of Africa, especially in the Congo Basin, and also areas in Asia as well, this like very militarized approach to environmentalism. And I think a lot of people in the West are not so aware of that. They’re very aware of the dark colonial history of, for example, the American national parks, but they’re not so aware of the very contemporary issues that are continuing to unfold today.

Charli: And if we just back up for a minute, this model of conservation and wilderness protection being implemented, this was essentially exported from the United States, right? That’s that’s where it was developed?

Cal: Sort of. I think you can definitely see a direct line of almost like inspiration. people who’ve been very high up in international conservation are often from either Western Europe or from North America and they are bringing the knowledge that they have from their own countries and the practices that they have from their own countries and essentially applying them in new contexts. So we can see quite a direct influence of the way that conservation was being practiced in North America, starting from the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century, and then it it sort of bled over into other continents. Because America has of course had such an outsized influence, especially in the environmental movement and the wilderness preservation movement specifically overseas. And so we see these American or more general Western modes of of thinking sort of sewn into or threaded through this idea of fortress conservation, which is been the predominant mode of saving the environment, certainly in sub-Saharan Africa and in large parts of Asia as well.

Charli: in this model of conservation that came to dominate the wilderness preservation movement is a very sort of strong idea of humans as a contaminating force, right? It’s got this quite anti-human bent. Where where did that come from?

Cal: Well, there’s a there’s a fairly complicated link with, for example, Christian modes of thinking. It i it’s funny because it flips back and forth. To begin with, the Garden of Eden is a is a safe place of humans and then they are thrown into the wilderness, which is sort of outside of safety. It’s outside of agriculture, it is somewhere to struggle. But then over time it gets flipped and wilderness starts being seen as a kind of pristine place. As populations grow and as the sort of anxieties around human impact grows, which is really from the Industrial Revolution onwards, we start seeing wilderness being reconsidered. It started to be seen as some kind of endangered category of land, and that there’s less and less of it, and therefore it becomes valuable even if it makes people feel unsafe. And so I think there are these like long cultural associations with wilderness that we see, not only in Christianity. we often find these modes of thinking common to other cultures. It really varies on the culture, but we usually have some concept of wilderness that we can recognize.

Charli: Hmm. I find that point interesting because one one other thing that struck me while reading was some of the conversations that you had with the Yanamami people in the Amazon rainforest in Brazil, where you wanted to try and communicate with them about their perception of wilderness, but it wasn’t so clear if they had a word for this and perhaps not even a a concept?

Cal: I think it’s very it’s very difficult, right? These questions of of translation. So this has been a a a very specific question that sort of popped up often. For a while people said that actually the idea of wilderness was a western one and therefore most indigenous people don’t have a concept of wilderness. I don’t really subscribe to that. I just find wilderness notions popping up in all sorts of different forms all over the place. So I don’t believe that to be true, but certainly there’s been a project to try and figure out if you can translate the word wilderness into other languages and what that might tell us. with the Yanamami, I went to a a region that’s called the Yanamami Indigenous Reserve. I was attempting to get this answer. Do you do you understand wilderness? Do you have a word for wilderness? And there’s a lot of back and forth. In this kind of trip, I’m relying on someone who speaks English and Portuguese. Portuguese is his first language and we don’t always totally understand each other. And then he is speaking to someone whose first language is Yanamami. And so there’s this slight echo chamber effect. It becomes very difficult actually when you’re getting into the etymology of things or if you’re getting into the semantics of particular words. It’s very hard to be sure exactly. And so we were sort of bubbling around and and my translator said, I don’t think they have a word for this. He doesn’t seem to understand what I’m getting at. And then he, the head man of the Yanamami group I was visiting, sort of hit on something and he said, yeah, yeah. No, I mean there are definitely areas we wouldn’t go, they’re too wild. And then he described a region about five kilometers away or maybe ten kilometers away, it changes, where people live that they are uncontacted tribe. They are people who have decided to stay out of the contact of the outside world, including other indigenous groups. And he was like, These people, essentially what he was saying was like, these are tribal people, these are savage people, we cannot come into contact with them. And so the equivalent to him of a wilderness was almost like a wilderness within a wilderness to the outsider.

You can see in that dynamic a kind of house of mirrors effect, or how this word wilderness is often redirected that people don’t seem to think it’s where they are, it’s where other wilder people might be, or it’s where an other wilder place might be. This idea of wilderness always seems to be s just over the next hill, you know, it’s just… If you could just walk over and get the next view, you’ll be able to see it. And you’re constantly reaching these false peaks and feeling like you’re right on the edge of the wilderness. People are always pointing me somewhere else. Look for the wilderness over there.

Charli: Right. For most people the wilderness is out there. It’s not here.

Cal: It’s not here and maybe you might be getting closer, but you’ve never arrived.

Charli: And throughout the book you ask a few times, in a few different ways, must the interests of nature always conflict with humans? Did you… where did you end up at the end of this enormous research and writing project? Did you end up any closer to an answer for yourself to that question?

Charli: I think this is one of the greatest challenges currently facing the conservation movement in the world today. So, we can see how contested these questions are by looking at the fuss that happened over the 30 by 30 initiative. So, this was a recent international initiative. It was agreed between many, many countries that thirty percent of the planet’s land and sea areas would be set aside essentially for nature as some kind of protected area. And that was agreed. It was seen to be a a really huge breakthrough. And then there was a massive outcry from indigenous groups saying, wait, who’s thirty percent? I assume this is not going to be central London or Tokyo. So it’s gonna be ours, isn’t it? It’s gonna be our land that you guys are setting away as protected areas.

And so it’s partly because we have a much larger population than before, but I do think that many of the places that have been described as wildernesses all through history have been populated. They just haven’t been recognized as such. And so this is a huge thing that has to be dealt with. And it’s complex. It really depends on the region and it really depends on can we, can we negotiate with local peoples how we can protect enough of the planet as a species that we can ensure our healthy future, not only for ourselves but for other species, and for the atmosphere of the entire planet. But can we do this in such a way that does not involve steamrolling the rights of people who are already minorities, who are already struggling to continue their traditional lifestyles on the planet? Often the way that they live is completely sewn up with the landscape that they live in. And actually the removal of these people would change the ecosystems.

For example, the Dolpu people in Nepal are yak herders, a lot of their interaction with the landscape shapes the landscape. That’s not always obvious if you’re arriving and trekking through the place. It feels like a wild place, but it’s is human impacted because they’ve been there grazing their animals and they’ve been practicing transhumans for hundreds and hundreds of years.

And so it’s not just me who’s calling for a a kind of change of attitudes. This is certainly being baked into the whole environmental movement that for the last at least a decade people have been trying to figure out how do we work with traditional ecological knowledge? How do we work with communities more? How do we make this some kind of consensual movement so that we can both protect biodiversity, the environment as a whole, but also the cultures who live there? And often we find that these two things can be sewn together, that they are so tightly interlinked, that by enabling the future of an indigenous group, we also save the land that they live in. And so this has to be the model that we’re moving forward with into the future. I think it is beginning to spread through certain parts of the environmental movement, but Fortress Conservation has been baked in as a model for so long that it’s a quite a painful transition and it’s going to take a very long time to to figure out the best way of doing this.

Charli: Cal Flyn, thank you so much for your time. It’s been so fascinating talking to you about your new book, The Savage Landscape.

Cal: Thank you. It’s been a joy. Thank you so much.

Charli: Cal Flyn is a journalist and author from Scotland. Her previous work of nonfiction, Islands of Abandonment, won several awards, including the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award. Her latest book is The Savage Landscape, How We Made the Wilderness. She spoke to me from Scotland.

Kathleen: That’s all we have for you for this week’s show. This episode was part three of our four-part summer reading series. You can check out the other episodes by visiting our podcast feed on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get podcasts. And be sure to leave us a review. Thanks for listening.