THE SAVAGE LANDSCAPE

Does wilderness exist? Yes, at least, perhaps, until that moment when a human enters it.

In this sequel of sorts to Islands of Abandonment (2021), about places where humans were once present but now gone, Scottish journalist and essayist Flyn looks at wild places as both ideals and loci of human foibles. That is, she exults in places that are staggeringly beautiful, at least in some measure because they are absent of or scant in humans, such as Yellowstone, the Transylvanian Alps, and the Cairngorms of her native land. These places also speak to some moral, spiritual, or ethical meaning we impose on them. Traveling widely, her visits do all that work. In one instance, for example, she writes of the Brazilian government’s effort to put little-contacted forest peoples such as the Yanomami on “tiny reservations,” helped along by exaggerated ethnographic accounts that have depicted them as savage, primitive, and warlike. “Far from being unpeopled,” Flyn writes, “wilderness was simply the home of people unlike oneself.” In that vein, the Batwa people of Uganda have been driven from their rainforest homes to make a sanctuary for mountain gorillas at the urging of Dian Fossey, who, asserts Flyn, believed that “most Black Africans were violent, grasping, uncaring threats who obstructed her work or actively killed her beloved gorillas.” Flyn can be arch about her fellow humans, not least the ecotourists and “wealthy retired” who clutter up the small cruise ship that takes her to Antarctica, sharing her experience. The writing can be a little overworked at times, too, as when she writes of evidences of human activity on the ice, “Each a blot on the landscape, a pinprick of humanity, a data point of doubt.” Such moments are few compared to her close observations of the world, though, including a fine, self-effacing moment of being alone on a Scottish crag under decidedly bad conditions and living to tell the tale.

A thoughtful account of journeys to wild places that, one hopes, will remain that way.