The Magazine of The Sierra Club
The Wilderness Within, Explored
Cal Flyn's "The Savage Landscape" is a deep examination of how we create meaning
Do we really need another book about our fraught relationship with the natural world? The answer is, in fact, yes. In The Savage Landscape: How We Made the Wilderness (Viking, 2026), Cal Flyn takes readers to far-flung places like Transylvania and the Amazon rainforest while surveying perceptions of wilderness across history: playground of the privileged, home of ferocious beasts, source of the sublime.
Our species has worshipped, tended, maligned, and abused wilderness. We also fear it. Even Brazil’s Yanomami are spooked by the jungle where less-contacted tribes roam. Wilderness, then, is a state of mind, one humans both crave and dread.
The Savage Landscape is a deep examination of how we create meaning—with wilderness, the ultimate tableau, reflecting our best and worst impulses. By plumbing the depths of this contradiction, Flyn charts a path out of the ecological crisis gripping us.
