Savage Landscapes (with Cal Flyn)

Cal Flyn: Well, thank you so much for having me.

Cal Flyn: 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 it’s often been applied to people. And, as we’ll hear, 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-peopled place, and that’s caused its own problems.

Cal Flyn: 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, make me take a back step, and realize 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: I describe it as a history of wilderness. It traces the evolution of this concept over centuries, starting from theological spiritual ideas, moving up through aesthetics, moving into environmental conservation, and 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, through a series of 10 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 they were slippering 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 started thinking a lot about these shifting landscapes that we have, 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 Bon culture [a pre-Buddhist culture–Econlib Ed.]: they worship animist/Tibetan-Buddhist religion. And I was 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.

Cal Flyn: That’s an interesting question. I’m not a professional athlete. 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, if I have to do a long and physically arduous journey, I can do that. I can apply myself and keep going. I wouldn’t say that the 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 tried to make myself capable. I really admire the capable people that I come across 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. Yeah.

Cal Flyn: Yeah. It’s really an interesting question. 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 sets the hair on the 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. 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. 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 mettle. And then you come back changed. And, that book has definitely been that for me. It has 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 concepts.

Cal Flyn: Definitely. Yeah. I’ve been thinking about it a lot, of how often while I was reporting or researching in the field, I’d often feel like I’d run up against what the chapter was about, when I started to feel this incredible all-body discomfort. It was, like, ‘Okay, right. So, I’m quite frightened.’ Or, the ideas that I’m 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 I’m at the edge of everything that I thought to be solid and is just getting a little bit springy. It’s getting a little bit shaky.

So, I guess I write a lot about ethics, recently, 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 adults like us: that animals, and plants, and so on are making their own decisions constantly. And, I don’t like to see myself as at the top of a 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.

So, for example, I have a chapter when I 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.

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?

Cal Flyn: Absolutely. Yeah. Sinai, to me, as a sort of opening sequence, 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. 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 you must leave your culture experience and this idea of coming back changed, more enlightened, more able to see the truth of everything, 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, by going to the site of Elijah’s epiphany, that maybe you’ll stumble into one of your own. I say this as a joke, but also for real. I think I’m always looking for that. And, I think many people maybe are, that–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 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. 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 watched the people coming up ready to have their experience. And I think there’s a strange thing because it draws a crowd.

And, that’s one of the many perversities at the heart of sort 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 what’s happened to Mount Sinai. It has the old track–that you can go up these steps being carved into the side of the mountain, which I’m sure, at the time that they were carving, those people were complaining about 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 alone. And so, I think perhaps 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 they have to hire secretaries, and so on and so forth. It’s a recurring dilemma for famous wildernesses and wilderness seekers.

Cal Flyn: 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 realization at 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. It was incredible to see that. But that felt, again, 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. The shaft of a particular unexpected ray of sunlight coming in, these things that strike you in the moment as being perfect. I don’t think you can necessarily plan for 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.

Cal Flyn: 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 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 this up-frontier[?] of a kind, 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. 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 becomes a political question of, who is getting primacy here? Aren’t you meant to be protecting us from these guys? All of these old conflicts that we used to have–in Europe, really throughout medieval times, and in the United States, the early colonial years and unfolding right as the westward expansion continued, 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, it’s become this big symbolic thing in Romania. And increasingly, countries like Germany, Luxembourg, and Belgium are seeing wolves for the first time in more than 100 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 specialist 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 ascendence for so long.

And so, this kind of rebalancing due to the protections that have come in over the end 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 change 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. 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.

Cal Flyn: Oh, absolutely. And, in the United Kingdom, 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, economically. But also, perhaps psychologically, when people are terribly afraid of predators, way out of–it’s an out-sized 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, there is a large, very vocal, and really quite mainstream movement towards bringing them to the United Kingdom. And, we have to decide to do that because we’re an island. They’re not just going to flood back in, in the way that they’re flooding through 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 don’t find it to be fearful enough, and so they’re trying to bring in fearful elements to return that sense of the wild, however artificial that might be.

Cal Flyn: No. I haven’t engaged a whole deal of artificial intelligence.

Cal Flyn: I think so. I mean, I write my books on a laptop, so 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.’ 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 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 in its 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 slightly different to what you were expecting, and 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. I like to write immersively. I like to write about, what does it smell like? What does it feel like? 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. It makes it an adventure story.

Cal Flyn: 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 labeled 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 to. And, I discovered that when Europeans, and particularly the British people, first landed on the coast of New South Wales and Australia, they got off the ships and they said things like, ‘Oh, it’s just like a country park. This is incredible. Aren’t they lucky? 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 results of firestick farming. It’s the result of the planting of fruit trees. It’s the results of tending. I’m not sure I’d call it ‘farming’ exactly–or ‘firestick farming’ has become a term–but it is an interaction 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 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 idea of 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 tarmacked car park at one end of the spectrum and then, 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 other people’s ways of doing things at great environmental cost.

Cal Flyn: Absolutely. 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, or 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 as part of my exploration of the concept.

And so, he enumerates in his paper 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 phenomena to experience it for myself. I’d go 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 going to 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–that this was a natural phenomenon that, to me, was beautiful 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 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 look at it on these agreed tracks with the tourist board. And, this one was felt to be last of a safe eruption, so it was closed, but I still really wanted to see it. And so, essentially, 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.

Cal Flyn: Yeah. Previously, I’ve written a bit about exclusion zones. I wrote about abandoned books in my last book–sorry, abandoned places in my last book, Islands of Abandonment. So, I went to Chernobyl, and I went to quite a few places that had been 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. It’s an intensifier. Your emotions are really on high alert.

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 towards the eruption, but it was behind a screen of hills.

I was very, very close before I got a really clear view of the crater. And, I think I just blasted straight through sublime experience and came out the other side in this, like a horror, terror for my life. But, it was incredible. 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 would be my fault. I courted this danger. And so, that made it worse, or better, or whatever it was.

And that complexity, that 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 a hard time 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 the face. And then, I was finding it really hard even to look at this eruption because it was so intense as an experience.

Yeah. So, I guess I found it. I guess I got what I was looking for.

Cal Flyn: I had my phone with me–

Cal Flyn: 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 have a word mash in my notes that I can later make sense of.

Cal Flyn: Yeah, absolutely. I was initially most interested about that line that you mentioned there, this 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 one lion on the track and then 1,000 on the other track.

And, I think that–well, I wanted to see this in action to begin with. 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. An, 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 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 say I have been hunting before in different contexts. I wrote about deer culls in Scotland for population management reasons. And so, the concept of hunting itself, I felt I would be relatively comfortable with. 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–often these are more endangered animals. So, red deer in Scotland are maybe 10 a penny. Whereas here we were talking about maybe shooting–I don’t know, a crocodile, or you can shoot a hippo. You can shoot anything you want: you can shoot wild lions. Those are the projects of conservation 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 get away from this. The numbers make sense, 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 Niassa, a neighboring camp was raided and staff members beheaded by Islamists hiding in the Miombo woodland around there. 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.

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.

And I believe in the United States, you have a similar kind of 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 for conservation in a different context altogether.

I will say, in the African hunting safari context, the racial element is very difficult to look away from. 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.

Cal Flyn: 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. 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 this 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 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.

Cal Flyn: Yes. And, I think it’s pretty complicated to have–I don’t know, to speak to the village as a single entity. Often, you get a lot of–

Cal Flyn: very dissenting views about what that is and what’s the best thing to do.

Cal Flyn: And, it might be importing 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 mentioned 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 other reasons: the land has been made economically useful in a different way. And, I think I did find that pretty convincing, myself.

Cal Flyn: No. I don’t think they are. I don’t think they are. I think that speaks to something central in human nature, which is, I think, that the level to which you seek out discomfort or seek out simplicity or seek out–yeah, ‘discomfort’ is the best way to put it, I would say. 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 in myself all the time, but you also see it in writing. I read this wonderful book about the anti-modernist movement. So, this is around the beginning of the 20th century, just before as well, when we’re getting electricity, we’re getting anesthetics, we’re getting all sorts of creature comforts 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-righting 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: prove ourselves in a physical way.

But, it’s also to do with the confrontation that I was talking about earlier: 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 it’s all old wine in new bottles. That this 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 Irish Catholic in the 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. 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.