Episode 180: Cal Flyn - The Savage Landscape

Cal Flyn is an award-winning writer from the Highlands of Scotland. She writes creative nonfiction, literary criticism, and long-form journalism. Cal’s journalistic writing has been published in Granta, National Geographic, The Wall Street Journal, The Sunday Times, The Economist, and others.

On this episode of Nature Revisited, Flyn poses the question "What is Wilderness"? For thousands of years, people have sought out uncontrolled, unknown, or uncharted nature in search of religious epiphany, self-actualization, and an escape from modern life. But having traversed the most forbidding, untamed and inhospitable wild lands—the supposedly uninhabited wilds of the world—she found that such truly untouched lands don't exist: Nearly every wilderness has been or is actively inhabited by humans. By viewing the notion of wilderness as a human construct, Flyn reveals how much we can still discover in wilderness, both as an idea and a vital part of the living world.