Pod Insights EconTalk Savage Landscapes (with Cal Flyn) About this episode What is wilderness when seven billion people share the planet and nowhere remains truly untouched? Author and journalist Cal Flyn discusses her book The Savage Landscape with EconTalk host Russ Roberts, weaving together journeys to some of Earth's most remote places, including a live volcanic eruption in Iceland she hiked toward despite the danger. Flyn rejects the myth of pristine, unpeopled wilderness, revealing that the wildest-looking landscapes have been shaped by humans for centuries. She explores spiritual quests at Mount Sinai, the return of predators to Europe, the uncomfortable economics of trophy hunting, and why we secretly crave discomfort in an age of endless comfort.
Transcript 10,478 words · 2 speakers
0:02 Speaker 00 Welcome to Econ Talk, Conversations for the Curious, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. I'm your host, Russ Roberts, of Shalem College in Jerusalem and Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Go to econTalk.org, where you can subscribe, comment on this episode, and find links to other information related to today's conversation. You'll also find our archives with every episode we've done going back to 2006. Our email address is [email protected] . We'd love to hear from you. Today is June 29, 2026, and my guest is author and journalist Cal Flynn. Her latest
0:44 Speaker 00 book, and the topic for today's conversation, is The Savage Landscape: How We Made the Wilderness. Cal, welcome to Econ Talk.
0:53 Speaker 01 Well, thank you so much for having me.
0:55 Speaker 00 This book, as I read it, is about a paradox. Wilderness is, in some sense, in a world of 7 billion people, an illusion. The experience of wilderness is something of a paradox. After all, you're in it, and so the idea that it's untrammelled and pristine can't literally be true if you're in it. And yet, despite that, and despite the challenges we might have in defining it, somehow, this concept, and whatever taste we get of it, speaks deeply to us in ways that are hard to understand, hard to articulate. This book
1:34 Speaker 00 does its best to do so in many different voices and in many ways. And it's beautifully written. Really, it's as good an example of what might be called "nature writing" as I've written a long, long time, so congratulations.
1:50 Speaker 01 Thank you.
1:51 Speaker 00 Say something about the title, The Savage Landscape: How We Made the Wilderness.
1:58 Speaker 01 So the title is gesturing towards a couple of different things when I'm thinking about wilderness as a concept. So first of all, the wilderness is something that is inherently frightening, that this is part of what marks it apart from the pastoral landscape or the purely picturesque. The wilderness is somewhere where we have historically gone to move into a region that is the territory of others, whether that be other species for sure, it might be other people, and it might even be other worlds, because it's also a concept that's been tangled up with the ethereal, or the transcendent, or the theological. It's also got this word in there, savage, which is a very complicated word, because
2:43 Speaker 01 it's often been applied to people, and as well here, I'm sure, this idea of wilderness is often tied up with ideas of other people, and these other people being foreign and savage in some way, that these are wild people of a wild place. And this is a very culturally relative term, you can see that it's slippery. If you speak to one set of people, they will believe that the savages live elsewhere. Nobody believes themselves to be a savage. And so the savage landscape is a peopled wild place. And as I discovered in my book, Historic Concepts of Wilderness, were actually traditionally peopled. It's only relatively recently that we've come to see wilderness as being a non-people place, and that's caused its own problems.
3:25 Speaker 00 Well, I like the title. You could have called it the exotic landscape, because wilderness is also exotic, but savage is a very, obviously, primal and visceral word, and it grabs your attention, the reader's attention. Talk about the process of writing this book. You have some incredible experiences, some of them perhaps took place before you had the idea of the book. But how long did it take you to write it, and where did you travel to experience what you wanted to write about?
4:01 Speaker 01 Yeah, I've been working on this project properly, I would say, for around four years. That's how long it took to research and write it. But as you say, it's an outgrowth of long-running interests of my own. You mentioned that word primal, and I think that that is such an important thing to me. When I think about writing about landscape and nature and the environment, I'm often looking for issues that get a reaction out of myself and hopefully other people as well, so that this might be a place that I find to be frightening, or it might be invigorating, it might be enthralling. And also issues that are provocative or make me think,
4:43 Speaker 01 make me sort of take a back step and realise that I've actually been understanding the world through a really particular lens. That's all to do with my own background and my own stories. So the savage landscape is, I describe it as a history of wilderness. It sort of traces the evolution of this concept over centuries, starting from theological spiritual ideas, moving up through aesthetics, moving into environmental conservation, and sort of finally into this new phase that we're looking at now, which is maybe trying to combine scientific and more traditional ways of looking at landscape and landscape management and stewardship and all of these things that are becoming buzzwords today. And I tell this story, or this bigger story,
5:26 Speaker 01 through a series of ten journeys to different places around the world. So these were often the wildest or most isolated places I could think of, places that have been termed wilderness. And I suppose I was going out there because I was trying to track down real-life examples of wilderness, if they existed. And I kept finding them were sort of slipping away over the hill every time I tried to land on it or walk through it. And so that's the Amazon. In places, I went to the Yanomami Indigenous Reserve to speak to people there about their relationship to the landscape they live in, which is often described as one of the last wildernesses on earth. So I went to Antarctica. And there I started thinking a lot about these sort of shifting landscapes that we have
6:08 Speaker 01 because there it's very literal, the ice itself is forming and reforming. But also to places like modern-day Transylvania to talk about the rise of apex predators there, which is a pattern we'll see across Europe now that so many more of these animals are under protection and have been under protection for some decades now. We're seeing... Rises in the population of wild animals that we associate with the wilderness. And then to remote groups living in more traditional fashions in, for example, high up in the mountains of Nepal, where I spoke to the people of Dolpo, which is a bond culture. They worship a sort of animist slash Tibetan Buddhist religion. And I was
6:50 Speaker 01 very interested in how they, again, relate to the land around them. And I wanted to speak to them and also to think about how we might use concepts they think about the world to apply to our own present day land management ideas in the West.
7:06 Speaker 00 You also went to Mount Sinai, or at least what we think is Mount Sinai. You went into the depths of the ocean, which we don't normally think of as wilderness, which I thought was really quite, quite interesting. Are you a capable person in the outdoors? Would you describe yourself as a capable person?
7:27 Speaker 01 That's an interesting question. I'm, I'm not a professional athlete. I'm, I'm much more of a, I can really stick at things. I'm tenacious. So I'm capable in as much as I can often keep it together. I like to have my system of what I've got in my pack. I like to be prepared. And, you know, if, if I have to do a long and physically arduous journey, I can, I can do that. I can apply myself and keep going. I wouldn't say that the sort of physical elements of it come naturally to me. I'm quite a small woman. I'm quite short statured, all of this kind of thing. And I think temperamentally, I've, I've tried to make myself capable. I really admire the capable people that I come across
8:12 Speaker 01 and meet in wild places. I was always involved in horses and dogs when I was growing up. And so I've always been surrounded by incredibly capable people and been relatively uncapable in comparison. So I think I aspire to that, yes.
8:28 Speaker 00 But I ask because you do a lot of scary things in this book. We'll talk about some of them. You're in danger. You're in physical danger a number of places in the book. And you reflect on past experiences of yours that, that had physical danger. And you're tested. And I, it felt to me...
8:50 Speaker 00 That was part of what you're trying to experience. So it's not enough to go into a beautiful place or a transcendent aesthetically pleasing landscape.
9:03 Speaker 00 When there's predators around, just for an example, there's a number of bears in this book. There are wolves in this book. When you're around those kind of creatures, you have to know how to handle yourself or at least be comfortable handling yourself,
9:17 Speaker 00 even if it's a bit of an illusion. And I assume you've had a reasonable amount of experience dealing with that, as well as a snowstorm in the middle of a pleasant summer hike where all of a sudden you realize you can't see and you're perhaps putting your life at risk.
9:37 Speaker 01 Yeah, you know, it's really an interesting question. Like, questions of safety, risk, bravery, all of these things are so tied up in perception. I'm really fascinated by it, actually, because sometimes when I'm most at physical risk, I feel okay for no real reason. Perhaps I'm with people who seem confident and I soak up their confidence. And other times, I will just be walking somewhere that is objectively safe, but there's something in the air that sort of sets the hair on my back of my neck going up. And so that sense of safety or risk or whatever it is is so shape shifting. And I'm fascinated by that. I seem to always come back to this in my writing.
10:20 Speaker 01 I'm really interested in where the edge of comfort is and where we perceive that to be and what we gain from pushing those boundaries. So really, the writing of this book, to me, was almost a kind of wilderness trial in itself. You know, the classic wilderness quest in which you go out into a strange place, you meet things you don't really understand. They force you to reconsider. It's difficult. You wrestle with your emotions, your metal, and then you come back changed. And that book has definitely been that for me. It's not been an easy book to research or to write for me. It's been quite a long process and quite grueling, both physically but also mentally, intellectually, like getting my head around the concepts.
11:05 Speaker 00 I'll just add that... You know, when you when you test yourself like that, you're also tested by the tools that you have with you. Because by definition, you can't take everything you're going to need. You're going to have to improvise. And you're going to find sometimes that you don't have the thing that you really needed at the at that moment. And I don't know, I think there's, we'll talk at the end, I hope, about how common or uncommon the desire to experience that is. But it's clear from reading the book that that it's not just, well, I held my nose because it was a little dangerous and I want to get my book done. It was the essence of what the book was, was was dealing with
11:47 Speaker 00 physical and intellectual, not the right word, physical and psychological challenges of being out of your comfort zone.
11:56 Speaker 01 Definitely. Yeah, I've been thinking about it a lot of how often while I was reporting or sort of researching in the fields, I'd often feel like I'd run up against what the chapter was about when I started to feel this like incredible all body discomfort. It was like, okay, right, so I'm quite frightened or or the ideas that I'm sort of battling back and forth with someone and having, they're making me feel really unsettled in some way. And to me, that's always been incredibly exciting. It means that I'm not resting, that I'm really getting to the meat of something that that I'm at the edge of everything that I thought to be solid.
12:39 Speaker 01 And it's just getting a little bit springy, it's getting a little bit shaky. So I guess I write a lot about ethics recently in in terms of how we deal with other species and how we can be good neighbors or good peers or colleagues or whatever you want to call it on this planet. That we can see other species as having their own agendas and being like adults like us, you know, that animals and plants and so on are making their own decisions constantly. And we are, we're, I don't like to see myself as at the top of the hierarchy. And so I think going into a wild place where I'm surrounded by other species that are more at home than I am, that that is a humbling mechanism. And so that I find to be. Confronting but exciting. And I think that, so I, for example, I have a chapter when I
13:24 Speaker 01 look at the history of hunting reserves and how a lot of our ideas of wilderness are tied up in these sort of artificially created zones of recreation or experience. And that those were places where kings or lords or aristocrats over time would go again to test their mettle, that they want to be confronted and challenged. And the modern day ethics of trophy hunting was something that I was confronting there. But it's also in the physical journey. I like to take ideas and issues and find them embodied in the world in some way. I think that's a great way to communicate issues rather than talking about them always at a theoretical level or a statistical level.
14:08 Speaker 00 Were there places you wanted to go but couldn't, to write this book, experiences you wanted to have, it just didn't work out?
14:15 Speaker 01 There is one, I'm really interested in other countries' approaches to, for example, the national park or the wilderness reserve. And the Soviets brought in a system in the 20th century called the, they have the Zepa Vedniky, which is like a equivalent to the American national park model, but it's rather stricter. And it's been battered around a lot during the political changes that they've had in Russia over the last century. But nevertheless, it's a really interesting model and it's quite, these regions are often very big, they're under a lot of control. It's quite an imperial way of running nature
14:55 Speaker 01 reserves. And I really wanted to get out to some of these, to experience a similar, but really a parallel system. Unfortunately, the Russian-Ukrainian war began around the time that I was initially looking into traveling out there. And I decided it wasn't quite the moment, but maybe that could be an essay for another time.
15:17 Speaker 00 Yeah. Let's start with the, we're not going to be able to go through every chapter, every concept, but I want to start about thinking about wilderness as a spiritual quest, which is the first, the first concept you look at.
15:32 Speaker 00 Two questions. First, describe what historically human beings have turned to the wilderness for, to commune with the divine or something transcendent. And did you feel anything at Mount Sinai? So, give me those two things if you can.
15:50 Speaker 01 Absolutely. Yeah, Sinai, to me, as a sort of opening sequence, it helped me think about the role that wilderness has played, not only in the Abrahamic religions, but across many religions, across time, really. So, some of the earliest recorded literature that we have, the Sumerians were writing about wilderness quests, about going into the wilderness in search of transcendence of a kind. You know, Gilgamesh is looking for the immortality, the secret of immortality. And I suppose many of us are looking for that when we go into the wilderness. We see it in the story of the Buddha. We see this in the story of Prince Rama in the Ramayana. And it pops up again and again that
16:33 Speaker 01 you must leave your culture experience. And yeah, this idea of coming back changed, more enlightened, more able to see the truth of everything, you know, that underneath the scrim. And so, I went to Sinai as a physical manifestation of these ideas, partly. And so, I also wanted, I suppose, my own sense of enlightenment, my own sense of epiphany. And sometimes maybe by going to the site of the burning bush, or by going to the site of Elijah's epiphany, that maybe you'll stumble into one of your own. You know, I think, I say this as a joke, but also for real. I think I'm always looking for that.
17:11 Speaker 00 Sure.
17:12 Speaker 01 I think many people maybe are that it's, I don't expect it to happen on a daily basis, but I'm always searching for it. And so, walking to Mount Sinai to watch the sun go down over these sort of bald, rocky mountains all around, you're very high up. You're slightly higher than the rest of the range. And the colors are incredible, you know, the desert sky at night is really something. And we stayed up. I was up there with a local Bedouin guide and stayed in a little hut on the top of the peak, very close to the top of the peak, and then got up again to watch the sunrise. And that's when most pilgrims end up coming up. So I kind of watched the people coming up, ready to have their experience. And I think it's a strange thing, because it draws
17:57 Speaker 01 a crowd. And that's the, one of the many perversities at the heart of wilderness seeking, is that these really well-known wilderness sites become tourist sites, or sites of pilgrimage, or, you know, crowds end up coming. And so that's kind of what's happened to Mount Sinang. It has a, the old track that you can go up, these steps have been carved into the side of the mountain, which I'm sure at the time that they were carving those, people were complaining about the, you know, the tourism that was happening on the mountainside. And now, the steps have become too tricky, and they've made a big camel track, so you can hire a camel and get carried up to the top for your epiphany. And I think it's a funny thing, because you can be self-conscious in a crowd, in a way that you might not be
18:41 Speaker 01 alone. And so, I think perhaps that's, that's partly, you're aware of yourself as being one of many people, and you all want this thing. And something about that maybe eats into the sincerity of the moment. And so, I think that was one of my early inklings about how complicated this was going to be, that if you go to famous wildernesses, other people will have had the same idea. And that keeps coming back to bite people. You find hermits becoming so incredibly world famous, that, you know, they have to hire secretaries, and so on and so forth. It's a recurring dilemma for famous wildernesses and wilderness seekers.
19:19 Speaker 00 Did you feel anything?
19:22 Speaker 01 I think I felt amazement, and I felt aesthetic appreciation, but I did not feel the next step up, the next level. And I think I did feel these sort of moments of...
19:37 Speaker 01 Realization of parts of my research and often at slightly unexpected moments. So, for example, when I went to Antarctica, it was exciting to step onto the Antarctic continent and it was incredible to see that, but that felt, again, sort of almost organized or there were other people there. But if I was alone on the deck on the ship and I saw a particular alignment of icebergs, that moment might be it for me. You know, the shaft of a particular unexpected sunlight, ray of sunlight coming in, you know, these things that strike you in the moment as being perfect. I don't think you can necessarily plan for
20:20 Speaker 01 those, but you can put yourself in the path of those. I think that's definitely something I've been learning is that actually sometimes you can't pursue them exactly, but you can be ready.
20:32 Speaker 00 So there's a monastery in Mount Sinai, a Christian monastery, right? And the great thing about Mount Sinai is we don't really exactly know where it is. And I want to leave it, I'll move on, but I heard of someone who said, as he was arduously climbing up those stairs, he says, "If this isn't the actual Mount Sinai, why are we climbing it? If it is the actual Mount Sinai, I'm not worthy and I shouldn't be climbing it." I don't think he got out of it. I think he ended up climbing it. But it is a revelation
21:12 Speaker 00 as tourist attraction is a very strange, is a very strange, strange idea. It's bizarre. I want to talk about predators and I want to talk about Yellowstone, which you talk about in the book. I used to be very interested in the, I still am in the abstract. It's just not something I read about as much as I used to, but I used to be very interested in the...
21:35 Speaker 00 The reintroduction of wolves into Yellowstone and the elimination of wolves before that. And what that did, um, the elimination of wolves in the earlier part of the 20th century is it, it allowed the elk to flourish, uh, which despoiled the, uh, rippering ecosystems of the park, the willows and the beaver habitat and other things because the elk would just eat everything down to the ground. And I always found it, um, deeply depressing. It is a beautiful landscape. It's gorgeous. But I always felt, as you mentioned in passing, it's sort of
22:17 Speaker 00 a disnified experience, partly because of the crowds and the same kind of thing we're talking about with Mount Sinai. So if you want to have a religious experience at Yellowstone, it's not, it's not so straightforward. But the elimination of the wolves, which are scary in our imagination, whether they're actually scary is a different question, but they play a large role, as you write about, in the human fears about the darkness and, and full moons and other, and other things. And they, they turned the park into something, um, that generated a lot of foot traffic because elk are not scary. It's just a sort of this,
23:00 Speaker 00 again, the disification is to, is to make people think it's wild because they see a herd of elk. But, uh, that herd of elk should every once in a while be in fear of, of, of a pack of wolves that will relentlessly bring down the weaker, older animals and allow the rest of the landscape to be healthier. So talk about that just in general and in your experience in Transylvania, uh, about both the, sort of the fear and the challenges we have in creating a, uh, what seems natural, but it makes a lot of people really scared. So they're not so keen on it.
23:45 Speaker 01 Definitely. In present day Europe, we're seeing a really interesting pattern of rising numbers of bears, particularly brown bears, which are somewhere between, I guess, a black bear and a grizzly bear. So they're closer to a grizzly bear. They're big and they're quite scary. These numbers have been rebounding and what we are seeing is a sort of reemergence of conflict between people, especially agricultural people, and the animals themselves. I love the term for it, the wildland urban interface. So it's just the idea of these, a frontier of a kind, right?
24:27 Speaker 01 Which is, especially in Romania, where this pattern has been running for a long time, because during the communist regime, Ceaușescu protected the bears a lot earlier than they were protected elsewhere, because he loved to hunt them. And so the numbers have been jumping up and up and up. And so Romania has been becoming a much wealthier country. It's developing, it's growing in population. And so they're building, especially in Transylvania, these beautiful, they look almost German Bavarian, they're like chocolate box little towns. They're expanding and they're building these new houses right out into what was, until quite recently, forest. And so they're having a lot of conflict with bears coming down and going into the schools and raiding the canteens,
25:11 Speaker 01 or they're going into the churches and they're eating wax candles and they're drinking the communion wine and the wafers and all sorts of things like this. And it's become a real flashpoint, because it's, it becomes a political question of, you know, who's getting primacy here? Aren't you meant to be protecting us from these guys? You know, all of these old conflicts that we used to have. So in Europe, really, throughout medieval times and in the United States, kind of the early colonial years, and unfolding right as the Westward expansion continued, you know, this conflict with wildlife is very primal. People have very strong reactions to feeling afraid or feeling at risk, and especially if their children are involved. And so...
25:55 Speaker 01 It's become this big symbolic thing in Romania and increasingly in countries like Germany and Luxembourg and Belgium are seeing wolves for the first times in more than a hundred years and more than 200 years in some cases as these predator populations expand. And in regions like in parts of Iberia, people are having to relearn old skills of having these shepherd dogs to protect their herds, to bring in specialists, electrical fencing, and all sorts of things that we've kind of forgotten or we've never really had to develop in the modern day because we have been so in the ascendance for so long. And so this kind of rebalancing due to the protections that have come in over the end
26:38 Speaker 01 of the 20th century and sometimes earlier are seeing these old feelings rise up and bubble up. And as you were mentioning, the movement of predators not only changed the behavior of people and the feelings of people, but also of other species as well. They have a term called the landscape of fear. It's a slightly simplified model, but the idea is that these predators keep the herbivores and the grazers on the move and that shapes the vegetation that grows. And so we see populations of bears will affect the landscape itself, or we will see the population of people will affect the landscape itself because it's all an interconnected knock-on system.
27:20 Speaker 01 And so it is fascinating, especially when you look at apex predators, because they have such strong effects in ourselves and in other species as well.
27:29 Speaker 00 The big issue in the United States, in the West, is, as you say, often with the interface between the wild animal and the domesticated animal. So the sheep and the cattle are the backbone of the local economy in many cases. You can't really and you don't want A real fence. Ideally, you want an ecosystem is not going to always have natural borders and boundaries. And the wolves of Yellowstone occasionally get into people's sheep, and that's they don't like it. I get it. So that's and similarly in England, I think it's in and Scotland, I'd be curious your thoughts. You know, there's so much romance
28:09 Speaker 00 about sheep farming and it's changed. It sheep farming created what we think of as the English countryside in many ways, or what Scotland looks like. It's not really natural. It's the result. And I don't have any problem with that. But it's not. It's the result of a human agricultural experience and for a thousand years. And I'm fine. I don't think there's a pristine Eden to return to there realistically. But any attempts to bring back any kind of serious predators are going to involve very, very difficult economic decisions and and cultural ways of life. And many, many other things that come along with those those economies of that kind.
28:55 Speaker 01 Oh, absolutely. And in the UK, I find it fascinating, actually, the instinct to do it at all. Because if you think about it, from a sort of utilitarian point of view, it's really an act of self sabotage to bring these animals back from economically, but also perhaps psychologically, you know, when people are terribly afraid of predators way out of, you know, it's an outsized fear compared to the risk that they really cause us, although brown bears are dangerous, particularly wolves less so. But people do have this very strong instinct to bring them back. They symbolize something else, something beyond their own presence. And of course, farmers tend to be really against it. But
29:38 Speaker 01 there is a large, very vocal and really quite mainstream movement towards bringing them to the UK. And we have to decide to do that because we're an island. They're not just going to flood back in the way that they're flooding through, you know, most of Central Europe at the moment, unless a small number of them manage to get on a cargo ship at some point, we're going to have to let them go. And that, I think, is a massive question. And it really gets to the heart of what people feel to be missing from their relationship with their own landscape. They they don't find it to be fearful enough. And so they're trying to bring in fearful elements to kind of return that sense of the wild, however artificial that might be.
30:18 Speaker 00 I don't think the phrase "artificial intelligence" is in your book. Am I correct?
30:23 Speaker 01 No, I haven't engaged a whole deal with artificial intelligence.
30:27 Speaker 00 So, what's interesting, a book like this, and I think it speaks deeply to most of us, not all of us, well, again, at the end, maybe we'll talk about it a little bit, the different feelings people have about these kinds of issues, but, you know, in some dimension, people are increasingly wilderness-free in their day-to-day lives. They might go on a cruise to the Antarctica or to the Galapagos, or some exotic thing that gives them a very sanitized taste of the wilderness, and they're increasingly spending their time on their phone, in a different world, in a digital world. And your book has such physicality to it, and I assume it's the way you live generally.
31:14 Speaker 01 I think so. I mean, I write my books on a laptop, so if that happens, I have a social media account. But, yeah, I think the key thing for me has always been seeing these things as... Well, one thing I've learned from research, and whether that's online research or just reading in books, is that often, I think I understand, but I haven't quite, until I see it for myself, I have an impression. And then often, especially if I'm writing about an international issue, often, as soon as I arrive somewhere, I'll be like, "Oh, I had this quite wrong."
31:48 Speaker 00 Yeah.
31:49 Speaker 01 I didn't quite understand it. The way local people talked about it summoned an image in my head that turned out to be incorrect, or I just happened to be speaking to somebody who was very partisan, or something like this. And so, I find it's important for my process, or it has been so far, in my writing, to go to places, to talk to people, and to, I don't know, wander around. If I'm going to write about the rainforest, I think I need to go into the rainforest. If I'm going to write about mountains, I need to hike for a couple of weeks into the mountains to speak to people who live in the mountains and find out how they live. Because that stuff is hard to...
32:27 Speaker 01 Guess at, even if you're reading research. And actually, a lot of the places that I was writing about didn't have a huge, huge literature on them. Antarctica is a little bit different. A lot has been written on Antarctica and it's relatively short human history. But, for example, the region that I went to in Nepal, and even to some extent Yanomami culture, or to the Batwa people I spoke to in Uganda, the English language literature is relatively small and is often a little bit unreliable. It's based on a small number of English-speaking writers. So, to me, because I had a background in news reporting a long time ago, I kind of knew that if you actually speak to people on the ground, they will tell you something
33:09 Speaker 01 slightly different to what you were expecting, and that that can be an important part. To me, I think the physical side of things is... Also, I just like to write about the physical side of things. You know, I like to write immersively. I like to write about what does it smell like? What does it feel like? You know, what was my reaction to it emotionally? Because that is an important part of the story to me. And I think it helps people also engage. If I'm a character in the book and I'm going and speaking to people, but I'm a little bit nervous, it makes it a story. You know, it makes it an adventure story.
33:43 Speaker 00 Now, there's a part of, I think this is fair, some listeners may bristle, but there's a part of the environmental movement that sees human beings as the enemy. And it's reasonable, certainly, to see human beings as the enemy of wilderness. The encroaching that you talked about in Romania, and certainly in England, and everywhere human beings go, we inevitably encroach on the natural world in some fashion. But it felt to me like your book, in the writing of your book, in the thinking that you did, you got a more nuanced view of human beings generally.
34:24 Speaker 00 And as you suggest, and I think in your opening remarks, wilderness is where people live, that interface between the wildness of nature and the human experience. So how did, did this change for you at all? Did you, did you learn something, or did your views evolve on this question?
34:44 Speaker 01 One thing I've been slowly learning over the course of my entire career, really, especially while I've been writing books, is this way that people are sewn up together with their landscape. And of course, that's true in the city. That's very obviously true to most people in the West's eyes, that you are the creator of this landscape. But it's also true of a lot of places that are labelled as being wild, that these are also cultural landscapes, in a sense. I came across this when I wrote my first book, Thicker Than Water, which is a book about violence on the Australian frontier. So I was writing about an episode in the 19th century, something I've got a family link
35:24 Speaker 01 to. And I discovered that when people first, when Europeans, and particularly British people, first landed on the coast of New South Wales in Australia, they got off the ships and they said things like, "Oh, it's just like a country park. You know, this is incredible. Aren't they lucky?" You know, the Aboriginal people in Australia are able to live lives of luxury because the landscape is providing for them. It's just so fruitful. And really, what that landscape is, is the result of forested farming, is the result of the planting of fruit trees, it's the result of tending. I'm not sure I'd call it farming exactly, or forested farming has become a term, but it is an interaction
36:06 Speaker 01 with the landscape, and it's a purposeful interaction with the landscape. And through understanding that, you can see how the people of the place and the place are all sewn up together. And that turns out to be true all over the world, wherever you look. It might look like wilderness to me, but when you dig down into it, there have been people living there for centuries, for hundreds of years, and they interact with the landscape, and that changes. We're all interconnected, we're all living in each other's world. And I think that that has been, to me, an intellectual discovery, but also a bigger sort of...
36:41 Speaker 01 Shift in the way I understand the world's work and how I understand what nature is. That it doesn't need to be man versus nature, but in fact, we're all in one system. And that this ideal wilderness exists absolutely as an emotional spiritual concept. And to some extent, an abstract geographical concept, one that we might map for legal reasons to create designations. But the reality of it is much looser and it tends to be human impacted in some way along some kind of spectrum. And if we understand maybe a tarmac car park at one end of the spectrum and then,
37:20 Speaker 01 I don't know, perhaps a jungle with forest peoples who move around a lot at the other end. That might be, it's also a human impacted landscape. It's also the homeland of someone. It also technically is owned by someone, although their land ownership system looks different to ours. And is difficult for our legal system to recognize straightforwardly. But nevertheless, these things are all one and the same. I think that's been a big discovery for me. And that so much of the time, we try and apply our own understanding of land ownership, stewardship, whatever that means to other peoples. And it doesn't really work. Our system falls apart. And so often in the past, that has meant that we've essentially steamrollered
38:03 Speaker 01 other people's ways of doing things at great environmental cost.
38:08 Speaker 00 So you got very close to a volcano. And it was probably my favorite chapter. It's not normally what I think of as a wilderness. It's sort of a phenomenon. Describe what you did that maybe wasn't so smart. I was going to ask you what the scariest experience was in wilderness. I think it's probably that one, but I could be wrong. So talk about what you did that was a little bit risky and what you saw.
38:38 Speaker 01 Absolutely.
38:41 Speaker 01 I've got this chapter, I wanted to write a bit about evolving ideas of landscape and how that had shifted, kind of in art history but philosophically, I don't know. Part of that is talking about the sublime, how we started to appreciate the sublime more, how the sublime has been appreciated through history, and how this is a mix of fear and admiration. It might be a beautiful place but it's also somehow a horrifying or terrifying place or object, or whatever this is. Edmund Burke in the 18th century was talking about how this is the most powerful emotion known to man, and I found that really intriguing. I think I agree, actually, but I also wanted to feel it and summon it myself
39:24 Speaker 01 as part of my exploration of the concept. And so he enumerates in his paper that lots of different types of sublime experience. He would talk about tempests on the sea, he would talk about waterfalls. And so I was chasing these natural phenomenon to experience it for myself. I got to a waterfall, stand under it and be like, is this the sublime? Waiting to be swept over with a swoon of the sublime. I kept thinking, it's gonna have to be a bigger waterfall, I think. And then, over time, I was getting really obsessed with the eruptions in Iceland. And at some point, I realized that this was what I was thinking about, you know, that this was a natural phenomenon that, to me, was beautiful
40:06 Speaker 01 and also horrifying. And I found it completely electrifying. I got really obsessed with watching it. And I made two attempts to go and see sort of live eruptions. The first time, it was a bit of a bust. I started traveling towards Iceland, and by the time I got there, the eruption was over. This was a terrible, crushing disappointment for me. And then, another time, I happened to have a couple of days free and it was erupting again. And I was like, this time, this time, I'm going to see it for myself. And so I got myself out to Iceland and then started essentially moving as close to the crater as I could. Early iterations of these eruptions, you could actually go right up to it and and look at it on these um agreed tracks with the tourist board.
40:51 Speaker 01 And this one was felt to be less of a safe eruption, so it was closed, but I still really wanted to see it. And so essentially, I I drove up to the edge of what had become an exclusion zone, a temporary exclusion zone, and then decided just to hike in myself until I felt unsafe. Great idea. Previously, I've written quite a bit about it. Yeah. Previously, I've written a bit about exclusion zones. I wrote about abandoned books in my last book, uh, sorry, abandoned places in my last book, um, Islands of Abandonment. So I went to Chernobyl and I went to quite a few places that have been sort of fenced off. And so I've got a little bit of form for this. I'm really fascinated about what happens when you feel like you don't have permission to be somewhere. That i- is an intensifier. You know, your emotions are really on high alert.
41:35 Speaker 01 And so I was walking in over this open heathland. I mean, really, it was kind of a moss flats where there'd been previous volcanic flows that had grown over. So some decades before, they had been grown over with moss and I was getting closer and closer to the eruption. But it was behind a a screen of hills and it was, I was very, very close before I got a really a clear view of the crater. And I think I I just blasted straight through sublime experience and and came out the other side in this like horror, terror for my life. But it was incredible. Um, it's definitely the most frightened I was during the book and partly it was intensified by feeling I wasn't meant to be there, that somehow that if anything happened to me, it
42:20 Speaker 01 would be my fault. I'd courted this danger. And so that that made me, made it worse or better or whatever it was. And that that complexity, that like discordant clash of emotions did make it one of the strongest emotional experiences I've ever had in my life. And also aesthetically incredible is that orange glowing, the heat coming off it, the size of it, the scale of it, it just made no sense. I still have almost like a hard time in in picturing it almost because it was such a strange thing to look at and understand and comprehend. And I got there, I got this glimpse of it. It was like full in the face, warm on my face. And then I was finding it really hard even to look at this eruption because it it was
43:04 Speaker 01 so intense um as an experience. And yeah, so I guess I guess I found it. I guess I got what I was looking for.
43:13 Speaker 00 The writing is especially vivid and beautiful in that chapter. Did you have a notebook with you? Did you take notes while you were in the middle of that? Do you remember? Or did you get back to your car and write it down? You would?
43:28 Speaker 01 I had my phone with me. I type into the notes, you know? So I have it carried with me all the time. I find that's really a handy way to do it. I do carry around like a black notepad, which I use most of the time. But if I'm really on the hop, I'll write into the notes app on my phone. Or sometimes I record little voice notes to myself. But I find being able to do it really, really fast and messy. So that that's the stuff that's hard to conjure again later. You can write it into sentences later, but just like vivid impressions or strange images or words that jump out at you. I just try and I just have a sort of word mash in my in my notes that I can later make sense of.
44:06 Speaker 00 Let's talk about hunting.
44:10 Speaker 00 Economists tend to be, well, we care a lot about incentives. And the one of the biggest problems with wildlife is ironically, for some people, is that it's not owned. So people don't have an incentive to take care of it and protect it. And attempts to give an ownership incentive sometimes allow the owners to do things with the resource that other people don't care to have done. Meaning a village might have control of its elephants as opposed to no one having control. No one has control. They get poached and killed and they are endangered. But if you give certain areas control over that and allow them to, say, sell hunting licenses,
44:55 Speaker 00 they can use that money to do conservation. And more importantly, they have an incentive to make sure that people don't poach. And I think it's a It's one of the fantastic examples of how economics, for economists, certain kind of economists, we just go, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Other people are just totally disgusted that you allow a magnificent creature like an elephant to be killed for money as a way to keep them protected. I mean, that just seems like something's wrong there. We go, but that's the way the world works sometimes, and it works better than the alternative. So you're not an economist. You experienced some different flavors of this in your book.
45:39 Speaker 00 Talk about how you feel about hunting and whether it changed at all, that feeling when you explored how it was being used in Africa.
45:48 Speaker 01 Yeah, absolutely. I was initially most interested about that line that you sort of mentioned there, this sort of sense that somehow this is perverse, that you can sell the life of maybe one animal or a small number of animals to save the life of other members of the same species or other members of similar related species. It's a kind of trolley problem, or at least that that's how a lot of people who run these special reserves or hunting reserves think of it, that maybe you'll have like one lion on the track and then a thousand on the other track. And I think that, well, I wanted to see this in action to begin with.
46:30 Speaker 01 Again, I understand how it really works when applied. And so I found a professional hunter called Paul Stones, who was willing to have me shadow him and two American trophy hunters who went to a region called Niassa Special Reserve. This is in Mozambique on the border with Tanzania. It's a huge nature reserve. It's about the size of Switzerland, and it's divided up into lots of different blocks, many of which are hunting blocks. And it's pretty expensive to go trophy hunting there. If you want to go lion hunting, for example, it will probably cost you in excess of $100,000. And a lot of that, or some of that, will
47:09 Speaker 01 be pumped into the conservation project itself. It's a very expensive activity, so a lot of it does get swallowed up in the practicalities of getting people there and away and all the equipment to this very remote region. But some of the money is kept locally and either given to the community or used to run these anti-poaching methods that they have out there, the sort of patrols and so on. I was fascinated by it, I have to to say. I I have been hunting before in different contexts. Um, I wrote about deer calls in Scotland for population management reasons. Um, and so the concept of hunting itself, um, I I felt I would be relatively comfortable with.
47:52 Speaker 01 But of course, safari hunting, big game hunting, this is a whole other thing, partly because it's more dangerous. And partly because it feels more emotionally salient in some way that you are, um. Often these are more endangered animals, red deer in Scotland are ten a penny. Whereas here we were talking about maybe shooting, I don't know, a crocodile or a, you can shoot a hippo. You can, you can shoot anything you want. You can shoot wild lions or the, those are the projects that are of conservation in that, in that region. And so how do I feel differently about it? I suppose I was quite convinced by the economics of it. I find that difficult to to get away from this.
48:34 Speaker 01 The numbers make sense, um, inasmuch as you can have a small number of hunters come into a region that is quite difficult to use for tourism. It is quite unstable. And shortly after we were in Nyassa, a neighboring camp was raided and staff members beheaded um, by Islamists hiding in, hiding in the sort of Miyombo woodland round there. Um, so it's a difficult place to bring in large numbers of people who are photographic tourists, for example. Or it's not really for luxury tourists in that way. Um, and also other countries, Zambia as an example, have tried to ban trophy hunting. And then they've had to go back because they haven't been able to find the finances from other sources.
49:15 Speaker 01 And I believe in the US you have a similar kind of uh, funding gap that you're looking ahead to because people who are into hunting, fishing and so on are aging out. And so the younger generation, if they're not going to be buying permits in the same number, that's going to cause a funding crisis um, for conservation uh, in a different context altogether. I will say, in the African hunting safari context, the racial element is very difficult to.
49:42 Speaker 01 Look away from it. It feels very central to the whole model, which is often that people coming on these safaris with a lot of money are almost invariably white. These days, actually, mainly American, although in the past, they tended to be European and often British. And so those dynamics are very strong and are really, I think, at the heart of why a lot of Black Africans are uncomfortable with the model of trophy hunting. And it's not so much around the ethics around shooting animals themselves, but it's more about this feeling that it's continuing or preserving colonial ways of interacting between different groups of people. And I think that that actually became, to me, the biggest issue that I could see.
50:24 Speaker 00 You're renting, you're giving a license, literally and figuratively, to people to come from the outside. Forget the racial element. It's just a non-native, non-indigenous, non-national element comes. And in a way, that's what terrorism is generally. And of course, it's also a little bit controversial in the modern era, right? Europe, just to take an example, is, parts of Europe are a giant museum. And there's not a great thriving economy in some of the countries that have this museum-like quality. And so you rent,
51:08 Speaker 00 essentially, the opportunity for people to admire your landscape, or your museum, literal museum, or your quaint, narrow street with the cobblestones. And that, you know, the outsider sighs and takes up space in what was once a relatively abandoned cafe and is now overwhelmed by foreigners. And it's, you know, it's one of the many challenges of a global world, right? In a way, it's a beautiful thing. You know, right now, we're in the middle of the World Cup. There's hordes, I think it's an accurate word, hordes of fans descending on American cities.
51:49 Speaker 00 With their native imported foreign rights of music, song, celebration, rowing, if you're from Norway. And it's beautiful. I mean, the Americans have embraced these folks. The foreigners are shocked that America is a relatively friendly place. And it's a big giant love fest. It doesn't feel that way when you think about selling a license to come on safari, say, for the equivalent of something around, you know, seventy to a hundred thousand dollars to kill something to put on your trophy wall back in your giant home and wherever it is in America. It just seems it's not quite as easy to romanticize.
52:34 Speaker 01 I guess what's being rented, the renting is the hunting itself and also the experience of the land. And so part of what's sewn into the hunting reserve model is that people who live locally aren't really able to use it. You know, that in the past, this would have been people were not able to, I don't know, gather firewood. And indeed, this is kind of the case in lots of places where they're practicing trophy hunting in Africa today. So there were local villages on the edges and even inside the special reserve in Niassa. And they have deals essentially with the owners or the managers of the land of what they're allowed to do. And often that doesn't include hunting. And so the
53:19 Speaker 01 residents of the hunting reserve are not able to hunt themselves. And I guess that's what's being rented out. And it depends who is doing the renting. So in other countries, I think in Namibia, it's a lot more community run. And so it tends to be a happier model because it's the community themselves renting out rather than a landowner, a population, and then a lot of negotiation about who gets to use what.
53:41 Speaker 00 Well, I think what's nice about the elephants, I don't know what's, I haven't kept up with this literature at all, but, you know, we have episodes going back to 2006. I don't know, in the early days, we had a number of episodes of the program on this question. But the idea was that the village had control of it. And it wasn't so much for conservation or, you know, earmarked. It was that the village was really poor. And the opportunity to
54:09 Speaker 00 Take care of the elephants doesn't come as expensive, not financially. It's just that nobody wants to, it's not a job, they don't belong to anyone. But if you tell the village that if they're, that they're allowed to sell a certain number of permits to kill certain numbers of elephants, then they'll have the incentive to not have people poach them without payment, which means that the village can have an economy based around this, this practice. And it's, you know, I'm, I'm pretty hard-nosed about these things generally, but it is a, there is something untoward or unseemly about it, but the alternative is awful.
54:51 Speaker 00 So that usually is decisive for me. So it, this, the idea that it's the village owning the, the resource, the wildlife, even if it doesn't literally own it in the, in the Western sense of property rights that you might be used to, is, changes everything.
55:09 Speaker 01 Yes, and I think, you know, it's, it's pretty complicated to, to have, I don't know, to speak to the village as a single entity. Often you get a lot of
55:22 Speaker 00 Correct.
55:23 Speaker 01 Very dissenting views about what that is and what's the best thing to do.
55:26 Speaker 00 Excellent.
55:27 Speaker 01 And it might be sort of importing and an understanding of economics that has not been traditional locally, and so it takes quite a lot to align. But nevertheless, you do see in places where, for example, I, I mentioned that, that model that they use in areas of Namibia where it's the community that is running the actual trophy hunting itself, whereas if you compare it to somewhere like Kenya where hunting has been illegal, it's been banned since the 1970s. Actually, what has happened in a lot of those places is that what was once rangeland has been converted to economically active farmland. And so the numbers have crashed, not necessarily because they've been hunted out, but for
56:11 Speaker 01 other reasons, the land has been made economically useful in a different way. And, and I think I did find that pretty convincing myself.
56:20 Speaker 00 Cool. I want to read an excerpt which I loved. And then I'd like us to talk a little bit about the difference between wilderness and nature. Nature is described as red in tooth and claw. And that gets at the predator idea, it gets at some of the danger of nature in some sense. But you write the following. "I went into the wilderness then and at other times because I wanted to live my life more intensely. I have found that in trading day-to-day concerns for more fundamental questions of
57:00 Speaker 00 safety, survival, navigation, and supplies, I could tap into a rawer, more authentic, more capable part of myself. In cutting down my routine to its most simplistic and my belongings to the most minimal, two nested pots, a roll mat, tent, sleeping bag, map, I have luxuriated in the basic elements of life and my capacity to use them. In setting my own fire, chopping my own wood, making my home on the mountainside or in the forest, learning to keep myself warm and dry in all weather, sometimes extreme, I found a calmness and a clarity often missing from the rest of my life. In scaling high ridges or narrow precipices, sharing a habitat with wild and sometimes
57:42 Speaker 00 dangerous animals, I found a new flavor of fear and how to live with it. By seeking out situations in which there is no easy escape route, I have learned, sometimes with difficulty, how to cope without one." End of quote. Really beautiful. And it gets back partly to what I was saying earlier about people living in a digital world. A large part of humanity, in fact, you could say, almost by definition, civilization, is avoiding those things that you write about so nicely in that paragraph. It's not having to deal with nature. It's isolating ourselves away from nature. It's protecting ourselves from the elements and so on.
58:27 Speaker 00 What would you say to those folks? Are they missing something? Or should we just leave them alone?
58:36 Speaker 01 I don't think they are. I think that speaks to something central in in the human, in human nature, right, which is, I think that the the level to which you seek out discomfort, or seek out simplicity, or seek out yeah, discomfort is the best way to put it. Actually, this is like comfort versus discomfort. And you see this bubbling up in lots of different ways that people will talk about wilderness over time. That there's this sense that comfort, of course, is good. It allows us to make our lives. It allows us to have children. It allows us to be comfortable and to think and be intellectual and all of this kind of thing. But after a while, people begin to worry that they are too comfortable. And I see this myself all the time, but you also see it in
59:21 Speaker 01 in writing. I read this wonderful book about the anti-modernist movement. So this is around the
59:28 Speaker 01 beginning of the 20th century, just before as well. We're getting electricity, we're getting anesthetics, we're getting
59:37 Speaker 01 all sorts of creature comforts that that seem to dull experience for people. And so there was a lot of writing around that time that people were somehow not real, that life was somehow not real. And the way that we talk about the internet now, that we're living through our phones, that it's not real. And it's because we're too comfortable, or it's too easy, or we're able to be lazy. And there is almost like a self-writing mechanism in so many people. You see it in intellectual movements again and again of saying, no, no, we've got to go out there and we've got to be real people. We've got to walk through the mountains or whatever it is, you know, prove ourselves in a physical way, but it's also to do with the confrontation that I was talking about earlier.
1:00:20 Speaker 01 That I personally, I guess, I'm very primed to. I'm very interested in this. And I guess I'm maybe more extreme on the spectrum than a lot of people, but nevertheless, I think we all have that sense. And it's the same anxiety that underlies a lot of what we worry about when we worry about modern society. That is all old wine and new bottles. That this like searching for the wilderness bubbles up again and again. And it's because we're scared of being too comfortable. And we do want to have this confrontation with the other, whatever that is. And we often find that in the outdoors. And it takes lots of different forms. It takes forms that are climatically relevant to us. So if you're a
1:01:04 Speaker 01 Irish Catholic in the sort of early medieval times, that might involve you throwing yourself out into the sea in a coracle. If you're a Russian hermit in the 18th century, it might be you finding a really lonely spot in a forest. You know, it takes different forms, but it is still the same searching for what is real, what is solid. And maybe it's so real and so solid, or so natural, it becomes supernatural. And I think that that is the great underlying force in this wilderness idea. And it's what I realized. It was a siren call for me.
1:01:42 Speaker 00 My guest today has been Cal Flynn. Her book is The Savage Landscape. Cal, thanks for being part of Econ Talk.
1:01:50 Speaker 01 Thank you.
1:01:58 Speaker 00 This is Econ Talk, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. For more Econ Talk, go to EconTalk.org, where you can also comment on today's podcast and find links and readings related to today's conversation. The sound engineer for Econ Talk is Rich Goyette. I'm your host, Russ Roberts. Thanks for listening. Talk to you on Monday.
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