- Economics
- Answering Challenges to Advanced Economies
What is wilderness when seven billion people share the planet and nowhere remains truly untouched? Author and journalist Cal Flyn discusses her book The Savage Landscape with EconTalk host Russ Roberts, weaving together journeys to some of Earth's most remote places, including a live volcanic eruption in Iceland she hiked toward despite the danger. Flyn rejects the myth of pristine, unpeopled wilderness, revealing that the wildest-looking landscapes have been shaped by humans for centuries. She explores spiritual quests at Mount Sinai, the return of predators to Europe, the uncomfortable economics of trophy hunting, and why we secretly crave discomfort in an age of endless comfort.
Listen to the episode here.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Cal Flyn is an award-winning writer from the Highlands of Scotland. She writes long form journalism and literary nonfiction. Her latest book is The Savage Landscape: How We Made the Wilderness. Her previous book, Islands of Abandonment: Nature Rebounding in the Post-Human Landscape, has been a Sunday Times bestseller and was shortlisted for numerous awards including the Baillie Gifford Prize for nonfiction. It won her the title of Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year in 2022, the UK and Ireland's most influential prize for young writers, and the E.M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters.
RELATED SOURCES
- Cal Flyn. Official Website.
- Cal Flyn. The Savage Landscape: How We Made the Wilderness. New York: Viking, 2026.
- Terry Anderson. “Terry Anderson on the Environment and Property Rights.” Interview with Russ Robeets. EconTalk. August 18, 2014.
- Cal Flyn. Thicker Than Water: History, Secrets and Guilt: A Memoir. London: William Collins, 2016.
- Edmund Burke. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. Oxford University Press. “Niassa Special Reserve.” Wildlife Conservation Society.
- Catherine Semcer. “Catherine Semcer on Poaching, Preserves, and African Wildlife.” Interview with Russ Roberts. EconTalk. February 18, 2019.
- Lord Alfred Tennyson. In Memoriam A.H.H. Poetry Foundation.
