Viking
Review by Walter Cummins
Cal Flyn has traveled to the ends of the earth in her efforts to explore, describe, and contemplate a variety of wildernesses in her goal to understand why the notion of a wilderness has such a hold over us. If not to every end, certainly enough to seem so—Mount Sinai, the Amazonian rainforest, Romania’s Transylvanian forests, Mozambique, an Icelandic volcano, the Grand Canyon, a gorilla habitat in Uganda, the Antarctic, the depths of the ocean floor, the peaks of Nepal, the Scottish highlands, and more. She possesses the stamina for adventures and the exceptional writing ability to capture the look and feel of all that she has seen, as in, “All around, the shapes of the peaks stood in silhouette: humpbacked figures looming darkly before a different quality of darkness, black felt against black silk.”
While descriptions of what Edmund Burke called the sublime—“the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling”—fill the book, it offers so much to contemplate that each reader is likely to have a personal reaction to all of the information and visualizations, a parallel to what Flyn says about the wilderness itself: “To do so, they [explorers of the Antarctic] had first to define what a wilderness was. A tall order, as this book has attempted to illustrate. How can one map a feeling, a perception, a judgement that changes from person to person?”
What stood out in my own consideration was the interaction, and sadly conflict, of human beings with the landscape. In Flyn’s discussion of national parks she notes the price of preserving vast pristine areas made possible by the dislocations, sufferings, and even deaths of Native Americans from the Grand Canyon and of the Batwa people from Uganda’s Bwindi and Mgahinga national parks.
This circumstance reminded me of the power ceded to mankind by the Old Testament God in the Book of Genesis: “And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.”
If taken literally, does that mean dominion over other humans who get in the way, including of the right to build roads, campsites, and souvenir stands, along with the freedom to crowd together and take photographs of spectacular views, leaving soda cans and candy wrappers when they are gone?
These are the tourists. What of the scientists seeking to study the geography, resources, and flora and fauna of places? They build habitations and access trails that result in unintentional despoiling of habitats, even in an area as remote and foreboding of the Antarctic, where the human presence has been minimal.
Some environmentalists wish for total freedom from a human presence in special areas, which would mean that they would be closed to visitors and exist the way they were before people, now in the billions, populated the planet. Other humans, perhaps a majority, consider it their right to see all from the skimobiles and even to mine for resources.
Yet the lure of the wilderness, even for those who use it as a plaything, may manifest an essential, deep-rooted need for the human species. This is how Flyn puts it: ““The wilderness, a concept anchored in the physical world, nevertheless seems to express some deeper instinct: a drive to escape the bounds of ‘normality’ and connect with something larger, an urge to tear away the scrim, the petty distractions, so as to live more fully, to open oneself to the immensity of all existence, all creation, all of everything. An urge that may be, it seems, universal.”
But it’s not that simple. The relationship between humans and wilderness is a “paradox” and an “enchanting delusion.” People have a desire to see, know, understand, and tame the wilderness. But if we succeed and make it a place of human presence, it is no longer a pure wilderness. As Flyn dramatizes her own travels through many versions of what has been a wilderness, she implies that such open visitations call into question whether the area can continue to be called a wilderness.
Humans now have the technological power to mine the ocean floor and even bring back mineral samples from outer space. We already have littered the outer atmosphere with more than 45,000 pieces of space junk. Flyn asks if we are aware of the consequences of what we are doing. She warns, “Don’t hurt what you don’t understand.”
For many of the earth’s human billions engagement with wilderness is a source of information, entertainment, and even a source of profits, three forms of control. For some, primarily indigenous groups with animistic belief systems, the natural world is holy. They seek a spiritual integration rather than dominion. Flyn poses an existential question, “What is more tragic: a species existing in the world, invisible to science, or a species whose demise has been diligently, lovingly recorded?”
