The paradox of land management

This week on The Wild Idea, we’re joined by author and essayist David Gessner, whose new book The Book of Flaco tells the story of the lone owl who escaped captivity and captured the heart of New York City. It’s a story about freedom, wildness, and the ways we project meaning onto the natural world, which makes it the perfect entry point for a bigger conversation about legacy, land, and the myths we inherit.

What do we do with the contradictions in our conservation heroes?

Gessner helps us dig into the complicated legacies of conservation icons like Teddy Roosevelt, Edward Abbey, and Wallace Stegner—visionaries who shaped how Americans think about wilderness, even as they embodied contradictions of their own.

He doesn’t shy away from their flaws. In fact, he says, reckoning with those imperfections is part of the point. “They were visionaries and they were human,” he tells us. “We can take what’s useful from them and let the rest fall away.”

From presidential mythmaking to the role of resistance in conservation, this episode explores how we inherit ideas of wildness and how we might reclaim them for the future. We talk about Gessner’s own experiences on public lands, why awe alone isn’t enough, and how wildness doesn’t just live in remote landscapes but “wherever resistance meets beauty.”

Because saving wild places has never been about purity. It’s about persistence, imperfection, and keeping the conversation alive.

🎧 Listen now wherever you get your podcasts, or at thewildidea.com.

Books, resources, and other notes from today’s episode:

• The Book of Flaco: The World’s Most Famous Bird by David Gessner
• Leave it as it is: A Journey Through Theodore Roosevelt’s American Wilderness by David Gessner
• All The Wild That Remains: Edward Abbey, Wallace Stegner and the American West by David Gessner
• Terry Tempest Williams
• Karsten Heuer
• “A polygamist of place: The tradition of the Eastern Westerner”by David Gessner (High Country News)

Gessner is a professor at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, where he is also the founder and Editor-in-Chief of the literary magazine, Ecotone. His own magazine publications include pieces in the New York Times Magazine, Outside, Sierra, Audubon, Orion, and many other magazines, and his prizes include a Pushcart Prize and the John Burroughs Award for Best Nature Essay for his essay “Learning to Surf.” He has also won the Association for Study of Literature and the Environment’s award for best book of creative writing, and the Reed Award for Best Book on the Southern Environment. In 2017 he hosted the National Geographic Explorer show, “The Call of the Wild.”

Connect with David at his website.

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