Living as we do in this troubled time of climate whiplash and political chaos, more of us look outward in search of relief, alternate realities and enticing landscapes where we can abandon our tiny screens and omnipresent “news of the day.”

Always a sports freak and audacious explorer, after I ran into guru Franko and other backcountry “nuts” in the early 1970s, my path became established: repeated quests in search of “savage landscapes” embedded in Los Padres National Forest (see 4.1.1.).

Whenever I’ve crossed into “the San Rafael” (so-called “wilderness”), it feels like stepping over into another realm, a timeless reality replete with extraordinary beauty and overwhelming strangeness — especially to this city boy who grew up in the suburban nightmare of L.A.’s San Fernando Valley.

However, what do we really mean when we think of “wilderness”? This thorny question reverberates in the West.

I first thought about it when reading Simon Schama’s compelling 1995 book, “Landscape and Memory,” and his insight that we draw from the landscape what we want to see.

Cal Flyn’s new book, “The Savage Landscape,” ponders this angle and furthers the intriguing discussion as she openly wonders: What does it mean to term a region a genuine “wilderness” or what she calls “a savage landscape”?

Fifty-five years roaming around our five adjacent “federal” wildernesses has shown me that although wild in most ways, these are pristine regions that have endured considerable human intervention.

The myriad federal efforts to roll back crucial legal protection of our public lands today do not augur well for the insulation of these areas from further development and human depredation.

On the other hand, some extreme environmentalists would like to “rewild” our own backcountry by re-introducing the fierce grizzly bears that once roamed here. (We killed them off in California during the span of a single lifetime, from the 1849 Gold Rush to around 1925).

We almost lost all of the condors (they’re back), and the local desert bighorn sheep barely hang on.

Defining “wilderness” encompasses much more than simply rewilding portions of what is left. By one account, wilderness is a negative definition, a sort of absence featuring a lack of human disturbance.

Scientists have informed us that “wilderness” now accounts for 23% of the planet’s surface, but I agree with Flyn that this number is too generous:

“The very idea of wilderness as [we humans] conceive it is a fantasy” (pg. 4). The pernicious effects of human pollution and our era of ‘“’climate whiplash’”’ alone prove how we impact every speck of this Earth today.”

In general, when we talk about “the wilderness,” we’re actually considering our tortured human relationship with the natural world.

We can go with famed linguist Umberto Eco’s idea that wild nature might be “a kind of alphabet through which God spoke to men.”

If in most ways “wilderness” has evaporated in front of our very eyes, then how does this idea still have such a hold on our minds? I know that I still head out to remote areas as frequently as possible because I want to live my life more intensely, more intentionally, so that even the fiction of the wild stimulates my spirit and emotions.

Flyn outlines five ways we humans perceive wilderness, considering it a special category of landscape.

1 — We go there for the natural landscape itself.

2 — Many of us assume it must have wild creatures abounding in it, and until about 1800 they had to be fierce and able to kill humans.

3 — Some of us assume wilderness has to be physically isolated (not always true).

4 — Connecting with No. 3, some believe the intense seclusion means these regions have to be unpeopled, or hideouts for “wild men,” exiles, hermits, satyrs, centaurs or even bizarre tribes of Amazons. In the Hindu “Ramayana,” Rama and his brothers were exiled “to the forest” for 14 years.

5 — Wilderness can be viewed as a site for spiritual development, like the stories of St. Anthony and the Christian Desert Fathers in Egypt. It could be a region suitable for “vision quests” and during one sabbatical year (1992-93), I managed to spend the proverbial Forty Days and Forty Nights in our own Santa Barbara outback. (No visions but great fun, and very difficult.)

A lot of my fellow hikers and backpackers forge out there because they cherish the emotional, numinous, even mystical, response to pure landscape, however savage.

In adoration of landscape and memory, I make my eternal backcountry returns again and again.

And should we try to bring back the fearsome Grizzlies to our own backcountry as some suggest? (4.1.1.) Of course not, it’s a futile effort and the landscape here is far too dry for them to survive.

If I wanted to lead student groups “out there,” I would need to go armed. (I have never taken a firearm into our backcountry, and I’ve never needed to!) Alaska alone has 30,000 Grizzlies roaming about.

As human beings, we need to promote the health of the natural world right where we live. This will require us to seek more effective ways to preserve our remaining public lands, which should be free of unnecessary roads.

Such areas must not be available to timber companies or any entities seeking to exploit our natural resources for material profit.

4.1.1.

Cal Flyn’s “The Savage Landscape — How We Made the Wilderness” (2026) is available at Chaucer’s Books. The five federal wilderness zones surrounding us are the San Rafael, Matilija, Chumash, Sespe, and Dick Smith, together totaling about 500,000 acres. I’ve scrawled several columns debating the definition of a “true wilderness,” and my three book titles summarize my obsession to get out on the trail: “Eternal Backcountry Return” (2018), “Autobiography in the Anthropocene” (2019) and “Trails Into Tomorrow” (2021). Simon Schama’s “Landscape and Memory” makes important points. Patt Morrison’s “We killed California’s grizzlies. Some want to bring them back,” LA Times, Aug. 17, 2026, p. 1.