‘A brilliant exploration of wildness in both nature and humankind.’ That's what Alice Winn said about the new book by Cal Flyn. Cal is an award-winning writer from the Highlands of Scotland, and the book is called The Savage Landscape: How We Made the Wilderness. A five-year odyssey she sometimes thought would kill her, Cal travelled the world exploring the concept of wilderness as it ‘shifted from a spiritual notion to an aesthetic and later to an (increasingly controversial) conservation ideal.’ Which le...
‘A brilliant exploration of wildness in both nature and humankind.’ That's what Alice Winn said about the new book by Cal Flyn. Cal is an award-winning writer from the Highlands of Scotland, and the book is called The Savage Landscape: How We Made the Wilderness.
A five-year odyssey she sometimes thought would kill her, Cal travelled the world exploring the concept of wilderness as it ‘shifted from a spiritual notion to an aesthetic and later to an (increasingly controversial) conservation ideal.’ Which led to a critical question, as we go about things like rewilding and the 30 by 30 conservation target, how do we decolonise that ideal, while not losing all it has gained?
Then, having been introduced to the new book, I got even more excited looking over Cal’s back catalogue. Her previous book was the award-winning best-seller, Islands of Abandonment: Nature Rebounding in the Post-Human Landscape. What a collection of stories that was too. And out of both books, Cal says ‘coming out hopeful was a surprise to me.’
But we start with her first book, being on her harrowing connection with Australia. Thicker Than Water emerged as she traced the path of a distant relative who became fêted as a pioneer hero in Australia, but has more recently been implicated as ringleader of a number of brutal massacres of the Gunai Aboriginal people.
We talk about all this, the telling connections across some of her most extraordinary encounters, and what Cal’s found in herself, the rest of us, and the rest of nature, that continues to surprise and inspire.
Chapter markers & transcript.
Recorded 4 June 2026.
Title image of Cal sourced from The Guardian.
Music:
Scotland Mountains, by Angel Salazar (from Artlist).
Regeneration, by Amelia Barden.
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