New from Cal Flyn in May 2026 - very much looking forward to this....
This book takes us into the wild – deep into dark forests, to the top of mountains and into the heart of deserts. It addresses our deep yearnings to be awed and inspired by landscapes that remain beyond our reach and examines what nature gets up to in the absence of humans.
In 10 chapters, each loosely structured around a visit to some of the world’s wildest and most invigorating landscapes, the book asks provocative questions about the nature of wilderness and how wild places might best be appreciated or preserved.
These locations have been chosen for their physical beauty, their perceived isolation, and the moral or emotional complexity of the human stories that can be found there. In this search for wilderness, we will meet ascetics in search of theophany in the desert; lonely shepherds seeing off wolves under the stars; missionaries preaching from shacks deep in the jungle; wise lamas meditating under lofty mountain peaks.
Via the C&W literacy agency
Wilderness is a powerful, ancient concept, which lies at the intersection of landscape, philosophy, and ecology. It is a place where the human is brought into confrontation with all that is nonhuman, and is challenged and changed as a result.
For thousands of years, people have sought out regions of uncontrolled, unknown, or uncharted nature in search of religious epiphany, self-actualisation, and an escape from what was to them modern life. Wilderness has been the scene of exploration—both physical and psychological—as well as a site of first contacts, privations, moral catastrophes and heroics.
But what is wilderness, really?
This book takes us into the wild – deep into dark forests, to the top of mountains and into the heart of deserts. It addresses our deep yearnings to be awed and inspired by landscapes that remain beyond our reach and examines what nature gets up to in the absence of humans.
In 10 chapters, each loosely structured around a visit to some of the world’s wildest and most invigorating landscapes, the book asks provocative questions about the nature of wilderness and how wild places might best be appreciated or preserved.
These locations have been chosen for their physical beauty, their perceived isolation, and the moral or emotional complexity of the human stories that can be found there. In this search for wilderness, we will meet ascetics in search of theophany in the desert; lonely shepherds seeing off wolves under the stars; missionaries preaching from shacks deep in the jungle; wise lamas meditating under lofty mountain peaks.
Via the C&W literacy agency
Wilderness is a powerful, ancient concept, which lies at the intersection of landscape, philosophy, and ecology. It is a place where the human is brought into confrontation with all that is nonhuman, and is challenged and changed as a result.
For thousands of years, people have sought out regions of uncontrolled, unknown, or uncharted nature in search of religious epiphany, self-actualisation, and an escape from what was to them modern life. Wilderness has been the scene of exploration—both physical and psychological—as well as a site of first contacts, privations, moral catastrophes and heroics.
But what is wilderness, really?
Wilderness is a negative definition, an absence, a lack of human disturbance. In the absence of a rusting civic signpost, there is no obvious visual marker that signals one’s arrival in a wilderness, and thus the search never truly ends. It could be desert, rainforest, steppe, tundra, even ocean. Any exacting definition is debatable, every attempt to draw these regions on the map contested. We are at once informed by scientists that wilderness accounts for 23% of the planet’s surface, and that the very idea of wilderness as we conceive it is a fantasy— that no such ‘pristine’ ecosystem exists, or ever has.
The wilderness is a place where the human is brought into confrontation with all that is nonhuman, and is challenged and changed as a result. For thousands of years, people have sought out regions of uncontrolled, unknown, or uncharted nature in search of religious epiphany, self-actualisation, and an escape from what was to them modern life.
The wilderness is a place where the human is brought into confrontation with all that is nonhuman, and is challenged and changed as a result. For thousands of years, people have sought out regions of uncontrolled, unknown, or uncharted nature in search of religious epiphany, self-actualisation, and an escape from what was to them modern life.
Wilderness has been the scene of exploration—both physical and psychological—as well as a site of first contacts, privations, moral catastrophes and heroics.
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