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Islands of Abandonment: Life in the Post-Human Landscape
Investigative journalist Cal Flyn's ISLANDS OF ABANDONMENT, an exploration of the world's most desolate, abandoned places that have now been reclaimed by nature, from the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea to the "urban prairie" of Detroit to the irradiated grounds of Chernobyl, in an ultimately redemptive story about the power and promise of the natural world.
376 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2021
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March 27, 2021
Before starting this book I noticed there were a bunch of 5-star ratings from other readers, which I was a bit sceptical about given this was an author I hadn’t previously heard of. My scepticism turned out to be misplaced. I thought this was excellent and a book that provided new understanding for a layman like me.
The author lives in Scotland and begins with a study of five huge spoil tips in West Lothian, made up of blaes. In the Scotland, “blaes” is a word for reddish-coloured stone flakes that this book tells me are the residue of past shale oil extraction. At the author notes, in past decades blaes was spread over outdoor sports pitches in Scotland, including the one at my own primary school, and I could tell many stories about the (un)suitability of blaes for that purpose. Tempting though this is, it would be a digression. What’s remarkable about the spoil heaps in West Lothian is that they have become havens for wildlife in an area where the land is otherwise urbanised or subject to intensive agriculture. This sets the tone for the rest of the book, which is about the resilience of nature even in locations where humans have comprehensively trashed it.
There are visits to the Cyprus “Green Line” and a brief mention of the Korean DMZ, and of course a visit to the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, which now teems with wildlife. The irradiated Chernobyl zone and the heavily mined Korean DMZ are hardly ideal environments for wildlife of course, but it’s evident that the costs to wildlife of living in these areas is less than the cost of them living close to humans, which leads to a rather depressing conclusion about our impact.
There’s a fascinating chapter on large-scale reforestation in the northern hemisphere. Another section of the book looks at urban decline, mainly focused on Detroit which has seen a huge fall in population since its heyday and where entire areas of the city have been demolished. I daresay Americans might be more familiar with this than I was.
I kept thinking that the next chapter of the book couldn’t be as interesting as the last, but the author kept proving me wrong. She moves onto to discuss contaminated land, visiting the mouth of the Passaic River in New Jersey, and the sinister “Place à Gaz” in France, where in the 1920s the French government destroyed 200,000 poison gas shells left over after WW1. Yet more new information for me arrived in a discussion on “metallophyte” plants, which have an evolved tolerance for heavy metals. Some of these plants are classed as “hyperaccumulators” of toxic metals and may have a role in reducing contaminants in former industrial land. Another chapter looks at invasive species in the Usambara Mountains of Tanzania, that escaped from an abandoned botanical research station.
The author is clearly sensitive to criticism that, by focusing on “silver linings” to environmental disasters, she is giving a “free pass” to those who damage the environment. She is therefore careful to reassert her green credentials by looking at the potential for disaster from climate change. This is fair enough although the climate change warnings didn’t include anything I hadn’t read many times before. What was more interesting were her visits to places that suggest what the world might look like after a civilisational collapse. She spends a night on the island of Swoma, in the Orkney Isles, whose last inhabitants, an elderly brother and sister, left in 1974 and before doing so turned their cattle loose. There’s a captivating description of how natural selection is reasserting itself over this domesticated species. Montserrat in the Caribbean is visited as the site of a natural disaster, whilst the Salton Sea in California is the location of another environmental disaster I hadn’t previously heard of. The nearby “Slab City” is suggested as the sort of society that might develop if the worst were to happen to humanity. How did the author even find all these places?
A great read. One of the most original and informative books I’ve read in a long time.
The author lives in Scotland and begins with a study of five huge spoil tips in West Lothian, made up of blaes. In the Scotland, “blaes” is a word for reddish-coloured stone flakes that this book tells me are the residue of past shale oil extraction. At the author notes, in past decades blaes was spread over outdoor sports pitches in Scotland, including the one at my own primary school, and I could tell many stories about the (un)suitability of blaes for that purpose. Tempting though this is, it would be a digression. What’s remarkable about the spoil heaps in West Lothian is that they have become havens for wildlife in an area where the land is otherwise urbanised or subject to intensive agriculture. This sets the tone for the rest of the book, which is about the resilience of nature even in locations where humans have comprehensively trashed it.
There are visits to the Cyprus “Green Line” and a brief mention of the Korean DMZ, and of course a visit to the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, which now teems with wildlife. The irradiated Chernobyl zone and the heavily mined Korean DMZ are hardly ideal environments for wildlife of course, but it’s evident that the costs to wildlife of living in these areas is less than the cost of them living close to humans, which leads to a rather depressing conclusion about our impact.
There’s a fascinating chapter on large-scale reforestation in the northern hemisphere. Another section of the book looks at urban decline, mainly focused on Detroit which has seen a huge fall in population since its heyday and where entire areas of the city have been demolished. I daresay Americans might be more familiar with this than I was.
I kept thinking that the next chapter of the book couldn’t be as interesting as the last, but the author kept proving me wrong. She moves onto to discuss contaminated land, visiting the mouth of the Passaic River in New Jersey, and the sinister “Place à Gaz” in France, where in the 1920s the French government destroyed 200,000 poison gas shells left over after WW1. Yet more new information for me arrived in a discussion on “metallophyte” plants, which have an evolved tolerance for heavy metals. Some of these plants are classed as “hyperaccumulators” of toxic metals and may have a role in reducing contaminants in former industrial land. Another chapter looks at invasive species in the Usambara Mountains of Tanzania, that escaped from an abandoned botanical research station.
The author is clearly sensitive to criticism that, by focusing on “silver linings” to environmental disasters, she is giving a “free pass” to those who damage the environment. She is therefore careful to reassert her green credentials by looking at the potential for disaster from climate change. This is fair enough although the climate change warnings didn’t include anything I hadn’t read many times before. What was more interesting were her visits to places that suggest what the world might look like after a civilisational collapse. She spends a night on the island of Swoma, in the Orkney Isles, whose last inhabitants, an elderly brother and sister, left in 1974 and before doing so turned their cattle loose. There’s a captivating description of how natural selection is reasserting itself over this domesticated species. Montserrat in the Caribbean is visited as the site of a natural disaster, whilst the Salton Sea in California is the location of another environmental disaster I hadn’t previously heard of. The nearby “Slab City” is suggested as the sort of society that might develop if the worst were to happen to humanity. How did the author even find all these places?
A great read. One of the most original and informative books I’ve read in a long time.
June 29, 2022
Though they're not all literally islands, almost every place Cal Flyn visited in writing this book has been abandoned by humans, in almost every case ruined by weapons of war and industrial poisons and having recovered because of the lack of human intervention. Almost the entire book is about these places on every continent so I've edited this down to two examples:
Bikini Atoll, where among other nukes tested, in 1954 the Castle Bravo test was done of a bomb seven-thousand times stronger than the one dropped on Hiroshima. Above and below it left "a barren wasteland." Above remains uninhabited but
the lagoon below was a whirl of kaleidoscopic life. Less so than before—twenty-eight species of coral were still missing—but, nevertheless, now as one of the most impressive reefs on the planet, where corals grew as huge rocky cushions the size of cars, or as dendroids twenty-six feet tall...the new reef had been protected by the atoll’s traumatic history—as a direct result of the lack of human disturbance, the fish populations were bigger, the sharks more abundant, and the coral more impressive.
Abandoned farmland turned to forest. Substantially so in Estonia.
One 2015 analysis of satellite images estimated at least forty thousand square miles of forest regrowth in eastern Europe and European Russia alone—noting that only an estimated 14 percent of the abandoned farmland had yet converted, thus raising the prospect of large-scale carbon sequestration well into the future.
...an unexpected outcome, then, of the collapse of the Soviet Union: the biggest man-made carbon sink in history. A 2019 study attempted to quantify the impact in those terms, suggesting that between 1992 and 2011 the carbon sequestration in the soil of the abandoned farmland, combined with the decline in meat and milk production in the wake of the political upheaval, is equivalent to a reduction in carbon dioxide emissions of 7.6 gigatons. This is around a quarter of the emissions generated due to deforestation in Latin America over the same period, and is, the researchers were keen to underline, likely a “substantial underestimation” as they have not yet taken into account the carbon held in the vegetation itself...
In Scotland where the oil industry thrived until the early 1960s harmful byproducts are tall and dominate the landscape like pyramids but of toxic material. Yet rare orchids previously found only in France have been discovered growing in them. Killifish in Passaic that have resistance to chemicals that kill other life forms: these are worthy of study. At the site of the Chernobyl disaster, along with damage there are forests growing, plants and animals thriving.
This is but a glimpse. Cal Flyn has chosen to go where most scientists and scientific journalists like she is writing on the topic don't. Her writing is sometimes lyrical and literary. She takes the reader around the world putting the focus on areas that have shown amazing resilience in the face of man's poisons, weapons, waste and introduction of invasive species as well as volcanoes.
There are details about some of the mass extinctions that happened in the past, including the Permian. The history of the planet tells us we aren't forever. The question is how much humans will be responsible for the inevitable mass extinction that will happen in the Anthropocene. Islands of Abandonment is very different from most in that it focuses on success stories: places all over the planet recovering from manmade disasters and a few natural ones via rapid evolution or adaptation or -- and this includes the Scottish island of Swona and Montserrat -- simply from being left alone. Cal Flyn is a cautious optimist and although I don't share her optimism (but what do I know?) this is a fascinating and nourishing book.
The doomsday theses...are not born of ambition or spite, but drawn from observation, careful study. From the facts, in other words, as well as we can make them out. But I cannot accept their conclusions. To do so is to abandon hope, to accept the inevitability of a fallen world, a ruinous future. And yet everywhere I have looked, everywhere I have been—places bent and broken, despoiled and desolate, polluted and poisoned—I have found new life springing from the wreckage of the old, life all the stranger and more valuable for its resilience.
Bikini Atoll, where among other nukes tested, in 1954 the Castle Bravo test was done of a bomb seven-thousand times stronger than the one dropped on Hiroshima. Above and below it left "a barren wasteland." Above remains uninhabited but
the lagoon below was a whirl of kaleidoscopic life. Less so than before—twenty-eight species of coral were still missing—but, nevertheless, now as one of the most impressive reefs on the planet, where corals grew as huge rocky cushions the size of cars, or as dendroids twenty-six feet tall...the new reef had been protected by the atoll’s traumatic history—as a direct result of the lack of human disturbance, the fish populations were bigger, the sharks more abundant, and the coral more impressive.
Abandoned farmland turned to forest. Substantially so in Estonia.
One 2015 analysis of satellite images estimated at least forty thousand square miles of forest regrowth in eastern Europe and European Russia alone—noting that only an estimated 14 percent of the abandoned farmland had yet converted, thus raising the prospect of large-scale carbon sequestration well into the future.
...an unexpected outcome, then, of the collapse of the Soviet Union: the biggest man-made carbon sink in history. A 2019 study attempted to quantify the impact in those terms, suggesting that between 1992 and 2011 the carbon sequestration in the soil of the abandoned farmland, combined with the decline in meat and milk production in the wake of the political upheaval, is equivalent to a reduction in carbon dioxide emissions of 7.6 gigatons. This is around a quarter of the emissions generated due to deforestation in Latin America over the same period, and is, the researchers were keen to underline, likely a “substantial underestimation” as they have not yet taken into account the carbon held in the vegetation itself...
In Scotland where the oil industry thrived until the early 1960s harmful byproducts are tall and dominate the landscape like pyramids but of toxic material. Yet rare orchids previously found only in France have been discovered growing in them. Killifish in Passaic that have resistance to chemicals that kill other life forms: these are worthy of study. At the site of the Chernobyl disaster, along with damage there are forests growing, plants and animals thriving.
This is but a glimpse. Cal Flyn has chosen to go where most scientists and scientific journalists like she is writing on the topic don't. Her writing is sometimes lyrical and literary. She takes the reader around the world putting the focus on areas that have shown amazing resilience in the face of man's poisons, weapons, waste and introduction of invasive species as well as volcanoes.
There are details about some of the mass extinctions that happened in the past, including the Permian. The history of the planet tells us we aren't forever. The question is how much humans will be responsible for the inevitable mass extinction that will happen in the Anthropocene. Islands of Abandonment is very different from most in that it focuses on success stories: places all over the planet recovering from manmade disasters and a few natural ones via rapid evolution or adaptation or -- and this includes the Scottish island of Swona and Montserrat -- simply from being left alone. Cal Flyn is a cautious optimist and although I don't share her optimism (but what do I know?) this is a fascinating and nourishing book.
The doomsday theses...are not born of ambition or spite, but drawn from observation, careful study. From the facts, in other words, as well as we can make them out. But I cannot accept their conclusions. To do so is to abandon hope, to accept the inevitability of a fallen world, a ruinous future. And yet everywhere I have looked, everywhere I have been—places bent and broken, despoiled and desolate, polluted and poisoned—I have found new life springing from the wreckage of the old, life all the stranger and more valuable for its resilience.
August 12, 2022
This excellent book is so important to help understand how the legacy of mankind leaves a shadow on the earth through war, nuclear meltdown, toxification, irradiation, and economic collapse. As the author states this should be a book of darkness, a litany of the worst places in the world........ but it also illustrates how, in most cases, nature can rehabilitate these polluted and unlivable areas without man's interference.
The author visited eleven places in the world where the worst has happened, some of which will be familiar to the reader, others unknown. They range from Chernobyl to the buffer zone in Cyprus to the Zone Rouge in Verdun to the Salton Sea in California, each with its own characteristics. In some of the areas, people still reside but under dangerous and reduced circumstances. When the author asked these individuals why they stayed (or returned), they answered, "it's home", although it is not the home that they once knew and is particularly poignant.
The book is disturbing and sad but also hopeful as it never loses faith in the regeneration of the world's most ruined spaces. I highly recommend it.
The author visited eleven places in the world where the worst has happened, some of which will be familiar to the reader, others unknown. They range from Chernobyl to the buffer zone in Cyprus to the Zone Rouge in Verdun to the Salton Sea in California, each with its own characteristics. In some of the areas, people still reside but under dangerous and reduced circumstances. When the author asked these individuals why they stayed (or returned), they answered, "it's home", although it is not the home that they once knew and is particularly poignant.
The book is disturbing and sad but also hopeful as it never loses faith in the regeneration of the world's most ruined spaces. I highly recommend it.
March 13, 2025
I thought I would like this book, and I did like the beginning very much. Then I became a bit irritated in the middle. And then Cal Flyn completely redeemed herself (and the book) at the end. It's a book about hope, and maybe about faith.
Cal Flyn explores a dozen places around the world that have been abandoned in one fashion or another. Some have been forcibly abandoned, as in the Korean DMZ and the Green Line in Cyprus, where warring factions have turned a military exclusion zone into a de facto nature preserve. Others, like the West Lothian Five Sisters, Chernobyl, and arguably the New Jersey wastelands, were created by industrial processes or accidents that made the land highly unattractive or dangerous to humans. Other places have simply been abandoned because of changing economic or environmental conditions: Estonian farmland, Detroit neighborhoods, the Salton Sea, and the island of Swona. The Verdun exclusion area is contaminated by millions of gas artillery projectiles that were destroyed there by burning them. Montserrat is a unique case, in that two thirds of the island is now an exclusion zone, dating from the destruction of the capital in 1997; the presumed continuing danger from volcanic eruption has maintained most of the restrictions in the exclusion zone. Amani, in Tanzania, is not so much abandoned as it is an object lesson in the dangers of invasive plant species.
In most of the abandoned places, Ms. Flyn finds nature flourishing in the absence of humans; one of the things that comes through clearly is how very much animals and plants benefit from humans being absent from the scene. On Swona, the feral cattle are nearly aggressive towards her, and the birds are definitely so. She spends a good amount of time speculating on how long it takes for domesticated animals like cattle to revert to a wild form, like the aurochs from which modern cattle are descended. I think she is overlooking the more obvious answer, which in my non-scientific opinion is that animals are just a good deal smarter than we give them credit for. The cattle had developed a way of living, apart from humans, with a well-defined social hierarchy; they break into abandoned houses to use them as shelter in winter, and they naturally circled up around the calves to protect them, much like musk oxen do in the Arctic. In Montserrat, plants and animals have moved into abandoned houses, greatly benefitting the bat population there (I have experienced that firsthand), but the losses that the people suffered from the volcano in terms of lost opportunities and beloved places are heartbreaking. In the DMZ in Korea, many rare animals are found that exist nowhere else on the peninsula. So Cal Flyn's point, and I think it's an important one, is that if we will just leave nature alone, in most cases it does quite well without us, often amazingly well.
Where she goes a little astray, in my opinion, is in making a bit too much of nature's ability to heal the planet's woes, at one point suggesting that all that may be required for curing global warming is the regeneration of forests on a large enough scale. Well, yes, as long as we also stipulate the extinction of the human race. Far be it from me to discourage the planting of trees (I've planted literally thousands in the last thirty years), but the math says tree planting alone is not enough. Though perhaps Ms. Flyn is hinting at, if not extinction, then a massive collapse of human populations; certainly she sounds that way at times. The other area where I must differ with her is regarding invasive plants where she vaguely argues, in the case of Amani, that butterflies like lantana, and maybe invasive plants will be a net benefit in ways we don't understand. Again, the science on this is clear; to insects, a non-native plant usually looks like an inhospitable desert that offers them no food. Maybe we can't do anything about the invasives that are here already (though many groups work to eradicate them) but people should not plant non-native species.
I did not care much for the New Jersey interlude, but I suppose it shows the resilience of life even in the presence of deadly levels of pollution, and she made that point well, along with the description of the amazing rejuvenation of coral and fish populations at Bikini Atoll, which was destroyed, as Ms. Flyn says, "by the literal atom bomb". In her visit to the dying Salton Sea, and the "Slab City" people who hang out in the desert, we see more of her faith in life and the future of life. Some of her best writing is here, at the end of the book.
"Time, after all, is the great healer. The question is: 'How long does it need?' Then: 'How long have we got'"
That is indeed the question. But then she says, after quoting the mystic, Julian of Norwich,
"I am no mystic. I have received no visitation, no annunciation. There may be no absolution. But I do know this: all is not lost." And, after a discussion of the science of CO2 production, and its effects, she concedes that feedback loops in global warming may have locked in horrific things to come, "The enemy may be within the walls." And yet she concludes, "But we must find faith enough to fight."
And yes! That's what I wanted to hear; that, and not another doom and gloom, end-of-the-world book. And she does deliver a message of hope - not an unambiguously happy message that everything will be fine, because it won't be; there will be enormous losses, and our lives will likely get worse before we come out the other side (if we do). It's a tough, realistic message, and I agree with her; even if we are facing massive droughts, famines, and societal collapse in many areas of the world caused by climate change, we can't give up (or worse, be oblivious), because we haven't lost yet, and the best of the world is worth fighting for.
I look forward to more books from Ms. Flyn.
Cal Flyn explores a dozen places around the world that have been abandoned in one fashion or another. Some have been forcibly abandoned, as in the Korean DMZ and the Green Line in Cyprus, where warring factions have turned a military exclusion zone into a de facto nature preserve. Others, like the West Lothian Five Sisters, Chernobyl, and arguably the New Jersey wastelands, were created by industrial processes or accidents that made the land highly unattractive or dangerous to humans. Other places have simply been abandoned because of changing economic or environmental conditions: Estonian farmland, Detroit neighborhoods, the Salton Sea, and the island of Swona. The Verdun exclusion area is contaminated by millions of gas artillery projectiles that were destroyed there by burning them. Montserrat is a unique case, in that two thirds of the island is now an exclusion zone, dating from the destruction of the capital in 1997; the presumed continuing danger from volcanic eruption has maintained most of the restrictions in the exclusion zone. Amani, in Tanzania, is not so much abandoned as it is an object lesson in the dangers of invasive plant species.
In most of the abandoned places, Ms. Flyn finds nature flourishing in the absence of humans; one of the things that comes through clearly is how very much animals and plants benefit from humans being absent from the scene. On Swona, the feral cattle are nearly aggressive towards her, and the birds are definitely so. She spends a good amount of time speculating on how long it takes for domesticated animals like cattle to revert to a wild form, like the aurochs from which modern cattle are descended. I think she is overlooking the more obvious answer, which in my non-scientific opinion is that animals are just a good deal smarter than we give them credit for. The cattle had developed a way of living, apart from humans, with a well-defined social hierarchy; they break into abandoned houses to use them as shelter in winter, and they naturally circled up around the calves to protect them, much like musk oxen do in the Arctic. In Montserrat, plants and animals have moved into abandoned houses, greatly benefitting the bat population there (I have experienced that firsthand), but the losses that the people suffered from the volcano in terms of lost opportunities and beloved places are heartbreaking. In the DMZ in Korea, many rare animals are found that exist nowhere else on the peninsula. So Cal Flyn's point, and I think it's an important one, is that if we will just leave nature alone, in most cases it does quite well without us, often amazingly well.
Where she goes a little astray, in my opinion, is in making a bit too much of nature's ability to heal the planet's woes, at one point suggesting that all that may be required for curing global warming is the regeneration of forests on a large enough scale. Well, yes, as long as we also stipulate the extinction of the human race. Far be it from me to discourage the planting of trees (I've planted literally thousands in the last thirty years), but the math says tree planting alone is not enough. Though perhaps Ms. Flyn is hinting at, if not extinction, then a massive collapse of human populations; certainly she sounds that way at times. The other area where I must differ with her is regarding invasive plants where she vaguely argues, in the case of Amani, that butterflies like lantana, and maybe invasive plants will be a net benefit in ways we don't understand. Again, the science on this is clear; to insects, a non-native plant usually looks like an inhospitable desert that offers them no food. Maybe we can't do anything about the invasives that are here already (though many groups work to eradicate them) but people should not plant non-native species.
I did not care much for the New Jersey interlude, but I suppose it shows the resilience of life even in the presence of deadly levels of pollution, and she made that point well, along with the description of the amazing rejuvenation of coral and fish populations at Bikini Atoll, which was destroyed, as Ms. Flyn says, "by the literal atom bomb". In her visit to the dying Salton Sea, and the "Slab City" people who hang out in the desert, we see more of her faith in life and the future of life. Some of her best writing is here, at the end of the book.
"Time, after all, is the great healer. The question is: 'How long does it need?' Then: 'How long have we got'"
That is indeed the question. But then she says, after quoting the mystic, Julian of Norwich,
"I am no mystic. I have received no visitation, no annunciation. There may be no absolution. But I do know this: all is not lost." And, after a discussion of the science of CO2 production, and its effects, she concedes that feedback loops in global warming may have locked in horrific things to come, "The enemy may be within the walls." And yet she concludes, "But we must find faith enough to fight."
And yes! That's what I wanted to hear; that, and not another doom and gloom, end-of-the-world book. And she does deliver a message of hope - not an unambiguously happy message that everything will be fine, because it won't be; there will be enormous losses, and our lives will likely get worse before we come out the other side (if we do). It's a tough, realistic message, and I agree with her; even if we are facing massive droughts, famines, and societal collapse in many areas of the world caused by climate change, we can't give up (or worse, be oblivious), because we haven't lost yet, and the best of the world is worth fighting for.
I look forward to more books from Ms. Flyn.
Read
February 2, 2021Fascinating and beautifully written account of abandoned places. We see all sorts here--places where nature has returned and flourished, places where people are clinging on for good or ill, places which have been so horrifically ruined that nothing grows and plants are evolving that can eat dioxins. There's a lot to hope for here in the ways nature can eat human activity and restore itself, and also a lot to be really depressed about. Vivid and haunting.
December 7, 2021
Given enough time, fiction writers today will eventually go dystopian, using their considerable imaginations to conjure a post-Apocalyptic world: empty grocery shelves, tufts of grass emerging from the cracks in the Interstates, cannibals lurking within cellar doors. Eschatological storytelling.
Cal Flyn did not look to some future existence. She just looked around. Today. This week. At “islands” of devastation around the world. She invented nothing. And oddly, she found reason to hope. Oddly, because hope arises in these places . . . when the people leave.
I’ll let Flyn explain, as she does in an opening Invocation:
These are landscapes racked by war, nuclear meltdown, natural disaster, desertification, toxification, irradiation, and economic collapse. This should be a book of darkness, a litany of the worst places in the world. In fact, it is a story of redemption: how the most polluted spots on Earth—suffocated by oil spills, blasted by bombs, contaminated by nuclear fallout, or scraped clean of their natural resources—can be rehabilitated through ecological processes.
Where did she go? To West Lothian, Scotland (handy for her), to visit the bings, the huge mounds of shale-mining detritus. To the Buffer Zone in Cyprus. To abandoned collective farms in Estonia. To Chernobyl, of course. She visited Detroit Blight and Dioxin-laced waters in Paterson, New Jersey and Staten Island; Verdun, where land mines still lie. She tracked invasive species in Tanzania and cattle left to their own devices in Swona, Scotland. She walked through the volcanic ash in Montserrat and sludged through the toxic dust; the swirling, pigmented sea; the neurotoxic algae; the fishbone beaches; the dissolving seafront trailers sinking into the mud; the jetties launching out into nothing that is Salton Sea in a California desert.
If there is an apocalypse, she writes, it will almost certainly smell like hydrogen sulfide.
This was brilliant and thought-provoking, the writing lucid, even poetic. (Exploring an abandoned church, I take a bridal course down the aisle.)
First the bad news. The poisons - DDT, PCB, dioxin – that have been pumped into the water outside northern New Jersey are “virtually nonbiodegradable.” Crabs have nevertheless proliferated. All the crabs you could eat, she writes. They look healthy enough. But a single Newark blue-clawed crab carries enough dioxin in its body to give a person cancer.
Our scientific intrusions: We too find ourselves in an arms race with pesticide-resistant insects, herbicide-resistant plants, drug-resistant viruses, and antibiotic-resistant bacteria.
And there are supervolcanoes which have caused mass extinctions in the past and will do so again, she assures us. Should a supervolcano erupt again—as Yellowstone, roughly speaking, is due to—it would be the greatest disaster civilization has ever seen. Millions would be killed during the immediate blast. An entire continent would be blanketed in ash, turning day into night, poisoning water, and devastating global agriculture for years. Temperatures might plunge 32° for a decade or more. . . . It would almost certainly spell the end of the age of humans, the end of the age of mammals. So be good, for goodness sake.
So Flyn neither denies nor sugar-coats the science. Yet she still manages a rosy outlook.
The Iran-Iraq war saw miles of borderland planted between the two countries with upward of twenty million land mines. More than thirteen thousand have been killed or injured there. But the Persian leopard, once endangered, is thriving there. Although the big cats weigh up to one hundred and eighty pounds, they rarely put all their weight on one paw, and thus escape the Soviet-era munitions. I liked that.
When the Soviets left (Estonia, for example), the locals abandoned the collective farms, the kolkhozy. Fields fell into disuse: the barley, dependent upon human intervention to survive, did not return. So the landscape changed: First came the wildflowers, the annuals, the weeds. Later the thorn bushes, the brambles . . . the dishabille. And eventually, Trees. Global forest cover has actually grown by around seven per cent . . . since 1982. And with that is, of course, carbon sequestration. Not enough, Flyn admits, but it still perks her up.
Of course, much of Flyn’s hopefulness is based on her long-view. The world has bounced back from previous mass extinctions in the past, hasn’t it? Yes, that’s true, and so it will again. But without us to enjoy it, I might add.
Still, I love that she cautions against human antidotes to natural crises, especially ones we humans have created. Our collective guilt over man’s impact upon the environment can, I feel, propel us in the direction of overtreatment, based on an assumption that we know what’s best for damaged habitats, and that it’s better to do something than nothing at all. But the surprising vitality of abandoned sites—even those that appear, to the untrained eye, derelict and dull—and the way some can come to surpass carefully tended reserves in terms of biodiversity, demonstrate how interventions—as bleeding and purging did before them—can sometimes do more harm than good. We must learn restraint, in other words: to recognize when best to give Earth its head, as we might a horse in rough terrain.
Cal Flyn did not look to some future existence. She just looked around. Today. This week. At “islands” of devastation around the world. She invented nothing. And oddly, she found reason to hope. Oddly, because hope arises in these places . . . when the people leave.
I’ll let Flyn explain, as she does in an opening Invocation:
These are landscapes racked by war, nuclear meltdown, natural disaster, desertification, toxification, irradiation, and economic collapse. This should be a book of darkness, a litany of the worst places in the world. In fact, it is a story of redemption: how the most polluted spots on Earth—suffocated by oil spills, blasted by bombs, contaminated by nuclear fallout, or scraped clean of their natural resources—can be rehabilitated through ecological processes.
Where did she go? To West Lothian, Scotland (handy for her), to visit the bings, the huge mounds of shale-mining detritus. To the Buffer Zone in Cyprus. To abandoned collective farms in Estonia. To Chernobyl, of course. She visited Detroit Blight and Dioxin-laced waters in Paterson, New Jersey and Staten Island; Verdun, where land mines still lie. She tracked invasive species in Tanzania and cattle left to their own devices in Swona, Scotland. She walked through the volcanic ash in Montserrat and sludged through the toxic dust; the swirling, pigmented sea; the neurotoxic algae; the fishbone beaches; the dissolving seafront trailers sinking into the mud; the jetties launching out into nothing that is Salton Sea in a California desert.
If there is an apocalypse, she writes, it will almost certainly smell like hydrogen sulfide.
This was brilliant and thought-provoking, the writing lucid, even poetic. (Exploring an abandoned church, I take a bridal course down the aisle.)
First the bad news. The poisons - DDT, PCB, dioxin – that have been pumped into the water outside northern New Jersey are “virtually nonbiodegradable.” Crabs have nevertheless proliferated. All the crabs you could eat, she writes. They look healthy enough. But a single Newark blue-clawed crab carries enough dioxin in its body to give a person cancer.
Our scientific intrusions: We too find ourselves in an arms race with pesticide-resistant insects, herbicide-resistant plants, drug-resistant viruses, and antibiotic-resistant bacteria.
And there are supervolcanoes which have caused mass extinctions in the past and will do so again, she assures us. Should a supervolcano erupt again—as Yellowstone, roughly speaking, is due to—it would be the greatest disaster civilization has ever seen. Millions would be killed during the immediate blast. An entire continent would be blanketed in ash, turning day into night, poisoning water, and devastating global agriculture for years. Temperatures might plunge 32° for a decade or more. . . . It would almost certainly spell the end of the age of humans, the end of the age of mammals. So be good, for goodness sake.
So Flyn neither denies nor sugar-coats the science. Yet she still manages a rosy outlook.
The Iran-Iraq war saw miles of borderland planted between the two countries with upward of twenty million land mines. More than thirteen thousand have been killed or injured there. But the Persian leopard, once endangered, is thriving there. Although the big cats weigh up to one hundred and eighty pounds, they rarely put all their weight on one paw, and thus escape the Soviet-era munitions. I liked that.
When the Soviets left (Estonia, for example), the locals abandoned the collective farms, the kolkhozy. Fields fell into disuse: the barley, dependent upon human intervention to survive, did not return. So the landscape changed: First came the wildflowers, the annuals, the weeds. Later the thorn bushes, the brambles . . . the dishabille. And eventually, Trees. Global forest cover has actually grown by around seven per cent . . . since 1982. And with that is, of course, carbon sequestration. Not enough, Flyn admits, but it still perks her up.
Of course, much of Flyn’s hopefulness is based on her long-view. The world has bounced back from previous mass extinctions in the past, hasn’t it? Yes, that’s true, and so it will again. But without us to enjoy it, I might add.
Still, I love that she cautions against human antidotes to natural crises, especially ones we humans have created. Our collective guilt over man’s impact upon the environment can, I feel, propel us in the direction of overtreatment, based on an assumption that we know what’s best for damaged habitats, and that it’s better to do something than nothing at all. But the surprising vitality of abandoned sites—even those that appear, to the untrained eye, derelict and dull—and the way some can come to surpass carefully tended reserves in terms of biodiversity, demonstrate how interventions—as bleeding and purging did before them—can sometimes do more harm than good. We must learn restraint, in other words: to recognize when best to give Earth its head, as we might a horse in rough terrain.
Read
December 10, 2022Más que un ensayo la mar de didáctico sobre distintos lugares de alrededor del mundo que —después de haber sido abandonados por el ser humano— han sido reclamados por la naturaleza, «Islas del abandono» es un auténtico documental inmersivo de aventuras en el que el público lector pasea por ciudades sepultadas bajo la ceniza de un volcán, por bosques tan peligrosos para las personas que la naturaleza se ha recuperado hasta límites insospechados, por entornos industriales que ahora son auténticos vergeles o por islas en las que nadie ha puesto el pie en décadas.
No cabe duda de que la autora es una auténtica erudita: sabe de biología, de geología, de historia, de sociología... pero lo que mejor hace es mezclar todo este conocimiento y exponerlo de una forma muy atractiva en el sentido literario. Sientes que paseas con ella, que tú también estás en peligro, que estás descubriendo todo lo que ven sus ojos... y, por el camino, aprendes sobre un montón de temas que pueden parecer aleatorias pero que tienen un claro hilo conductor.
«Islas del abandono» es un libro perfecto para la gente a la que le fascina las curiosidades del mundo. Si te gustan cosas tan dispares como las casas abandonadas, los paisajes apocalípticos, las catástrofes naturales, los volcanes, los dinosaurios o los animales en peligro de extinción, este libro te maravillará.
No cabe duda de que la autora es una auténtica erudita: sabe de biología, de geología, de historia, de sociología... pero lo que mejor hace es mezclar todo este conocimiento y exponerlo de una forma muy atractiva en el sentido literario. Sientes que paseas con ella, que tú también estás en peligro, que estás descubriendo todo lo que ven sus ojos... y, por el camino, aprendes sobre un montón de temas que pueden parecer aleatorias pero que tienen un claro hilo conductor.
«Islas del abandono» es un libro perfecto para la gente a la que le fascina las curiosidades del mundo. Si te gustan cosas tan dispares como las casas abandonadas, los paisajes apocalípticos, las catástrofes naturales, los volcanes, los dinosaurios o los animales en peligro de extinción, este libro te maravillará.
May 18, 2022
This book is amazingly informative and well written. Flyn travels the world to see first hand, places that have been abandoned by humans. In the process the reader gets to mull over the potential for continued life on earth and reflect on ways to put the brakes on destruction. She makes it clear that we are in serious trouble, but all of her visits show some degree of natural regeneration, even places as hopeless as Chernobyl or Bikini Atoll.
Her abandoned places have been deserted for a variety of reasons such as the retreat of collective farming after the break up of the Soviet Union, Bikini and Chernobyl permanently radioactive, chemically toxic wastelands following indiscriminate dumping, urban blight in Detroit and even a small Orkney island left by its last two elderly human residents in 1974. The handful of cows those two humans turned loose have successfully re-wilded in less than 50 years and more than tripled in numbers.
One of the happier results of abandonment in much of the world is that there has been a dramatic increase of land left fallow. When that happens there tends to be natural regeneration (primary succession). Lichens develop on slag heaps, followed by mosses, grasses, wildflowers, willows and ultimately trees. Flyn suggests “redemption, not restoration” and a glimmer of hope. This is not “a free-pass.” What is utterly destroyed will not come back in its original form and change doesn’t have easily anticipated results. Sometimes abandonment works best for nature.
A number of times the author makes one think about choices without even having to directly address the issue. When she’s walking in the sludge and muck at Arthur Kill (a toxic wasteland in New Jersey remaining after chemical manufacturers abandoned their plants as well as their dioxins and PCB’s) she finishes her tour and returns to her car. Does she pour a bottle of water over the boots she’s wearing, themselves a product of some unpleasant chemical source, and dump them in her car? I think not. What she was trudging through is virtually indestructible. Does she hurl the boots as far into the wasteland as possible hoping that someday someone will have an answer for ridding the area of its disastrous poisons? That’s what the Russian “experts” at Chernobyl did when they built a temporary sarcophagus for their mess.
The book leaves so much to think about. Highly recommended reading.
Her abandoned places have been deserted for a variety of reasons such as the retreat of collective farming after the break up of the Soviet Union, Bikini and Chernobyl permanently radioactive, chemically toxic wastelands following indiscriminate dumping, urban blight in Detroit and even a small Orkney island left by its last two elderly human residents in 1974. The handful of cows those two humans turned loose have successfully re-wilded in less than 50 years and more than tripled in numbers.
One of the happier results of abandonment in much of the world is that there has been a dramatic increase of land left fallow. When that happens there tends to be natural regeneration (primary succession). Lichens develop on slag heaps, followed by mosses, grasses, wildflowers, willows and ultimately trees. Flyn suggests “redemption, not restoration” and a glimmer of hope. This is not “a free-pass.” What is utterly destroyed will not come back in its original form and change doesn’t have easily anticipated results. Sometimes abandonment works best for nature.
A number of times the author makes one think about choices without even having to directly address the issue. When she’s walking in the sludge and muck at Arthur Kill (a toxic wasteland in New Jersey remaining after chemical manufacturers abandoned their plants as well as their dioxins and PCB’s) she finishes her tour and returns to her car. Does she pour a bottle of water over the boots she’s wearing, themselves a product of some unpleasant chemical source, and dump them in her car? I think not. What she was trudging through is virtually indestructible. Does she hurl the boots as far into the wasteland as possible hoping that someday someone will have an answer for ridding the area of its disastrous poisons? That’s what the Russian “experts” at Chernobyl did when they built a temporary sarcophagus for their mess.
The book leaves so much to think about. Highly recommended reading.
February 1, 2025
I was attracted to this book after reading Ians excellent review.
Link here https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
Other GR friends have also added excellent reviews.
Jills here. https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
Numdicas here. https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
I have listened to the audio as told by the author and have no criticism at all of her narration. She made this a fascinating book.
I have no intention to add anything more to the above reviews other than add personal insight to the Green Line in Cyrus. My wife and I had a week in Cyprus in 2000 in January, their winter. It did remind me of winter in Brisbane, beautiful days and cool nights. We did make a trip to the Green Line in Nicosia and it was as described in this book. Where we found very interesting was the ghost city of Famagusta. We went to a café that for the price of a coffee allowed us to get onto the roof and look into the city with binoculars. It was a deserted city the likes I had at the time no imagination for. Along the boundary fence were many warnings not to take photos etc. Up on the roof we took pics and the only movement we caught sight of was a couple of UN vehicles in the distance. It had an eerie dystopian feel, a place that one would want to go and have a look around, take pictures.
We made visit to another area of the Green Line that surrounds Kokkina https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kokkina
Our recall when driving close was the quantity of abandoned shacks and barns and the amount of bullet holes and damage. The wiki link states that “The village itself still carries heavy battle damage.” I don’t recall being able to see the village itself from the road we drove.
Excellent book and highly recommended.
Link here https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
Other GR friends have also added excellent reviews.
Jills here. https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
Numdicas here. https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
I have listened to the audio as told by the author and have no criticism at all of her narration. She made this a fascinating book.
I have no intention to add anything more to the above reviews other than add personal insight to the Green Line in Cyrus. My wife and I had a week in Cyprus in 2000 in January, their winter. It did remind me of winter in Brisbane, beautiful days and cool nights. We did make a trip to the Green Line in Nicosia and it was as described in this book. Where we found very interesting was the ghost city of Famagusta. We went to a café that for the price of a coffee allowed us to get onto the roof and look into the city with binoculars. It was a deserted city the likes I had at the time no imagination for. Along the boundary fence were many warnings not to take photos etc. Up on the roof we took pics and the only movement we caught sight of was a couple of UN vehicles in the distance. It had an eerie dystopian feel, a place that one would want to go and have a look around, take pictures.
We made visit to another area of the Green Line that surrounds Kokkina https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kokkina
Our recall when driving close was the quantity of abandoned shacks and barns and the amount of bullet holes and damage. The wiki link states that “The village itself still carries heavy battle damage.” I don’t recall being able to see the village itself from the road we drove.
Excellent book and highly recommended.
March 17, 2022
If you have ever wondered what your home, your town, your county would look like if humans abandoned it for a decade or three, this is the book for you. Some, like Chernobyl in Ukraine or No-Man's Land in Cyprus, were evacuated hastily without much warning. Others, like a variety of industrial wastelands that she visits, were not so much evacuated as left behind, as the reasons why people had ever been there disappeared, and the unhealthy waste they had left behind made it unlikely to be converted to any other use (a similar example is the Zone Rouge, Verdun, France, still polluted with explosives and the remnants of toxic gas canisters from World War One). A third category have not quite been abandoned, but their human population is so reduced, in numbers and prosperity, that nonetheless it is reverting in some ways to a state of wildness: parts of Detroit, Michigan and Paterson, New Jersey.
Cal Flyn has visited these places, and brought back eloquent accounts of the wildlife which have moved in when humans have moved on. In some ways, it demonstrates that the only real risk that humanity poses to wildlife is our continued presence; in even the most toxic places, most plants and animals flourish far more in our absence than they do in the greenest city park. We are, in some sense, a toxin more problematic than nuclear radiation or industrial waste. But in another sense, it is demonstrating that Nature Abhors a Vacuum. Where there is any remote prospect of life surviving, it will do so, and adapt to prosper in whatever climate it finds there; the only thing that can keep it out, is some other life, and then only with continued efforts. This accords with my own experience in city living, which is that no amount of trapping or poisoning will do as much to keep rodents away, as a feral cat or three in the neighborhood.
Flyn does a masterful job at bringing each location to life in our mind's eye. An example, from dropping the book open at random:
"Once, on an island in the archipelago where I live, I was walking along a remote single-track road when I stumbled upon the freshly crushed body of a rabbit. Its eyes were still bright, its fur soft and dry. Two ravens examining its corpse warned me off with irritable croaks before setting about the body: beaks like pen-knives, slicing flesh with neat little snips from the bone. Two hours later, the ravens were gone, the remains inherited by hooded crows. They fluttered up like butterflies to reveal clean bones, only the tiniest remnants of meat remaining, a skeletal form lying prone where earlier had been a still-warm creature. Next would come a closer shave - the carrion bettles, the fly larvae - before finally bacteria would fizz away even those pale traces."
The reason I cannot give this book a higher rating than I do, is that it rather limps home, losing its nerve in the final two chapters. The author admits to being influenced by friends who, hearing of the topic of her book-in-progress, expressed concern that it might be too optimistic, and encourage humanity to not overly regret the damage they do to ecosystems that will, in time, recover (if allowed to). She ends, therefore, with an attempt to reel back in the unintentionally optimistic implication that life will (and has, repeatedly) found a way to survive humanity, once given a space to do so, and if it never precisely recreates the ecosystem which preceded us, it nonetheless swiftly sets about creating new ones. It is an astonishingly heterodox conclusion, too heterodox by half for an author who is clearly a progressive with progressive friends, and she tries to cover it up with about 60 pages of as much orthodox pessimism as she can manage. It is not nearly so interesting, or so informative, as what comes before, but perhaps it helped her to avoid being treated as a traitor to the cause by her friends. We are a social species, after all (one reason why, when most of the humans have left a place, very often the rest will also).
But, the preceding three-fourths of the book tell a story not nearly so well known, and perhaps never so well told, and if I ended up skimming the last two chapters, I was happy to have read every word of the ten chapters that came before them.
Cal Flyn has visited these places, and brought back eloquent accounts of the wildlife which have moved in when humans have moved on. In some ways, it demonstrates that the only real risk that humanity poses to wildlife is our continued presence; in even the most toxic places, most plants and animals flourish far more in our absence than they do in the greenest city park. We are, in some sense, a toxin more problematic than nuclear radiation or industrial waste. But in another sense, it is demonstrating that Nature Abhors a Vacuum. Where there is any remote prospect of life surviving, it will do so, and adapt to prosper in whatever climate it finds there; the only thing that can keep it out, is some other life, and then only with continued efforts. This accords with my own experience in city living, which is that no amount of trapping or poisoning will do as much to keep rodents away, as a feral cat or three in the neighborhood.
Flyn does a masterful job at bringing each location to life in our mind's eye. An example, from dropping the book open at random:
"Once, on an island in the archipelago where I live, I was walking along a remote single-track road when I stumbled upon the freshly crushed body of a rabbit. Its eyes were still bright, its fur soft and dry. Two ravens examining its corpse warned me off with irritable croaks before setting about the body: beaks like pen-knives, slicing flesh with neat little snips from the bone. Two hours later, the ravens were gone, the remains inherited by hooded crows. They fluttered up like butterflies to reveal clean bones, only the tiniest remnants of meat remaining, a skeletal form lying prone where earlier had been a still-warm creature. Next would come a closer shave - the carrion bettles, the fly larvae - before finally bacteria would fizz away even those pale traces."
The reason I cannot give this book a higher rating than I do, is that it rather limps home, losing its nerve in the final two chapters. The author admits to being influenced by friends who, hearing of the topic of her book-in-progress, expressed concern that it might be too optimistic, and encourage humanity to not overly regret the damage they do to ecosystems that will, in time, recover (if allowed to). She ends, therefore, with an attempt to reel back in the unintentionally optimistic implication that life will (and has, repeatedly) found a way to survive humanity, once given a space to do so, and if it never precisely recreates the ecosystem which preceded us, it nonetheless swiftly sets about creating new ones. It is an astonishingly heterodox conclusion, too heterodox by half for an author who is clearly a progressive with progressive friends, and she tries to cover it up with about 60 pages of as much orthodox pessimism as she can manage. It is not nearly so interesting, or so informative, as what comes before, but perhaps it helped her to avoid being treated as a traitor to the cause by her friends. We are a social species, after all (one reason why, when most of the humans have left a place, very often the rest will also).
But, the preceding three-fourths of the book tell a story not nearly so well known, and perhaps never so well told, and if I ended up skimming the last two chapters, I was happy to have read every word of the ten chapters that came before them.
May 31, 2022
I read this book along with the Solarpunk group. Here's our discussion thread: https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...
Islands of Abandonment brought me hope like very few other books.
When a friend recently asked me, "How do you picture your distant future--twenty years from now?", I said, "As a climate refugee." And I was only half-joking; eco-anxiety is a very real thing to me, as it is to most people who were born in the 1980s or later.
But this book surprised me. It showed me how little we (or at least I) know about life. It reminded me how resilient life is.
Especially in the following excerpts:
https://choveshkata.net/forum/viewtop...
Islands of Abandonment brought me hope like very few other books.
When a friend recently asked me, "How do you picture your distant future--twenty years from now?", I said, "As a climate refugee." And I was only half-joking; eco-anxiety is a very real thing to me, as it is to most people who were born in the 1980s or later.
But this book surprised me. It showed me how little we (or at least I) know about life. It reminded me how resilient life is.
Especially in the following excerpts:
https://choveshkata.net/forum/viewtop...
March 30, 2024
Was passiert, wenn die Natur sich von Menschen bebaute Orte zurückerobert, hatte schon immer eine unwiderstehliche Faszination für mich. Das erste Mal wurde ich damit meines Wissens in dem Sci-Fi-Klassiker „Logan’s Run“ (Flucht ins 23. Jahrhundert) konfrontiert, als wir ein großes Panorama des völlig von Pflanzen überwucherten Weißen Hauses präsentiert bekommen. Ähnlich faszinierte mich das, was am Ende eines anderen Sci-Fi-Klassikers, „Der Planet der Affen“, zu sehen ist (ich sage nicht, was, falls es irgendjemanden gibt, der den Film noch nicht kennt). Beide Filme habe ich zum ersten Mal als Kind gesehen und gehören noch heute zu meinen absoluten Lieblingsfilmen.
Cal Flyn nimmt sich in ihrem preisgekrönten Sachbuch solcher Orte an. Natürlich ist unsere Zivilisation (noch) nicht untergegangen. Dennoch gibt es zahlreiche Orte, die der Mensch aufgegeben hat. Oft sind sie fürchterlich verschmutzt und toxisch, etwa „Arthur Kill“ in den USA, oder, was ebenfalls ein unendliches Faszinosum darstellt, die Umgebung von Tschernobyl. Andere Orte sind aufgrund eines Konflikts unbewohnt, so die Pufferzone in Zypern. Wieder andere wurden einfach verlassen, weil das Leben in ihnen sich nicht mehr lohnt, Swona in Schottland gehört dazu.
Es gibt natürlich auch natürliche Gründe, warum Orte unbewohnbar werden, Vulkane, insbesondere Supervulkane, stellen hier ein großes Risiko dar. Und nicht zuletzt sorgt der menschengemachte Klimawandel gerade dafür, dass dies in Rekordzeit geschieht:
„We are the meteor. We are the supervolcano. And it is becoming clear that there will be no going gack to the way things were before.“ (Seite 289)
Allen Orten gemein ist, dass die Natur den Menschen mit ihrer Fähigkeit überrascht, selbst unter widrigsten Bedingungen Leben aufrechtzuerhalten und wieder entstehen zu lassen. Für das verseuchte Gebiet um Tschernobyl ist sogar festzustellen, dass die nukleare Katastrophe eine geringere Beeinträchtigung der Natur darstellt als die potentielle Anwesenheit des Menschen:
„In other words, though the radiation does them no good, the benefit of the absence of humans in fact far outweigh the harm.“ (Seite 103).
Was nicht heißt, dass diese Natur auch wieder für den Menschen oder alle Tierarten bewohnbar wäre. Ein krasses Beispiel die Verseuchung der Meere mit PCB:
„In the Arctic, the bodies of Inuit people – those subsisting on traditional diets featuring seal and narwhal meat – have been found to contain such high concentrations of PCBs and other chemicals that they could be classified as hazardous waste.“ (Seite 170)
Cal Flyn beschreibt aus den verschiedenen Ursachen verlassene Orte kapitelweise anhand eines Beispiels, auf das sie sich jedoch nicht beschränkt: Auch andere Orte, Effekte und verwandte Ursachen kommen zur Sprache. Immer wieder wartet Flyn dabei mit erstaunlichen, schockierenden Fakten auf, das Buch bleibt von Anfang bis Ende absolut unterhaltsam und spannend.
Dass die Natur und das Leben uns überdauern werden, ist nichts Neues. Doch Cal Flyns Untersuchungen legen nahe, dass Eingriffe des Menschen bei der Wiederbelebung von Orten manchmal mehr Schaden anrichten als Gutes tun.
Ein großartiges, verblüffendes und erschreckendes Sachbuch.
Cal Flyn nimmt sich in ihrem preisgekrönten Sachbuch solcher Orte an. Natürlich ist unsere Zivilisation (noch) nicht untergegangen. Dennoch gibt es zahlreiche Orte, die der Mensch aufgegeben hat. Oft sind sie fürchterlich verschmutzt und toxisch, etwa „Arthur Kill“ in den USA, oder, was ebenfalls ein unendliches Faszinosum darstellt, die Umgebung von Tschernobyl. Andere Orte sind aufgrund eines Konflikts unbewohnt, so die Pufferzone in Zypern. Wieder andere wurden einfach verlassen, weil das Leben in ihnen sich nicht mehr lohnt, Swona in Schottland gehört dazu.
Es gibt natürlich auch natürliche Gründe, warum Orte unbewohnbar werden, Vulkane, insbesondere Supervulkane, stellen hier ein großes Risiko dar. Und nicht zuletzt sorgt der menschengemachte Klimawandel gerade dafür, dass dies in Rekordzeit geschieht:
„We are the meteor. We are the supervolcano. And it is becoming clear that there will be no going gack to the way things were before.“ (Seite 289)
Allen Orten gemein ist, dass die Natur den Menschen mit ihrer Fähigkeit überrascht, selbst unter widrigsten Bedingungen Leben aufrechtzuerhalten und wieder entstehen zu lassen. Für das verseuchte Gebiet um Tschernobyl ist sogar festzustellen, dass die nukleare Katastrophe eine geringere Beeinträchtigung der Natur darstellt als die potentielle Anwesenheit des Menschen:
„In other words, though the radiation does them no good, the benefit of the absence of humans in fact far outweigh the harm.“ (Seite 103).
Was nicht heißt, dass diese Natur auch wieder für den Menschen oder alle Tierarten bewohnbar wäre. Ein krasses Beispiel die Verseuchung der Meere mit PCB:
„In the Arctic, the bodies of Inuit people – those subsisting on traditional diets featuring seal and narwhal meat – have been found to contain such high concentrations of PCBs and other chemicals that they could be classified as hazardous waste.“ (Seite 170)
Cal Flyn beschreibt aus den verschiedenen Ursachen verlassene Orte kapitelweise anhand eines Beispiels, auf das sie sich jedoch nicht beschränkt: Auch andere Orte, Effekte und verwandte Ursachen kommen zur Sprache. Immer wieder wartet Flyn dabei mit erstaunlichen, schockierenden Fakten auf, das Buch bleibt von Anfang bis Ende absolut unterhaltsam und spannend.
Dass die Natur und das Leben uns überdauern werden, ist nichts Neues. Doch Cal Flyns Untersuchungen legen nahe, dass Eingriffe des Menschen bei der Wiederbelebung von Orten manchmal mehr Schaden anrichten als Gutes tun.
Ein großartiges, verblüffendes und erschreckendes Sachbuch.
September 12, 2022
Thanks to other readers here on Goodreads, I have read yet another fascinating book, this one on the natural world’s transformation of human induced “wastelands” from Verdun to Detroit to Chernobyl. As a species we often seem driven to the destruction of ourselves and the world that we inhabit, and Cal Flynn carefully observes and generously reports on the journey of life when we don’t interfere after we have wreaked havoc.
Insightful and provocative, I will seek more on these topics.
Insightful and provocative, I will seek more on these topics.
September 26, 2025
It is hard not to see this place, this Medean landscape, as a portent: a vision of the future or warning of what more is to come. An augury of the end of the world, the dawning of the age of dust.
3.5 stars—the extract above captures the value of the book in terms of message both oblique and often purple, as well as its annoying assemblage in terms of exclamation. Flyn travels to exclusion zones and reports on the post human ecology. It is a mild form of disaster porn though the allure is just there like the foundations for unbuilt homes on the shores of the rapidly diminishing Salton Sea.
This was a good book for a holiday. Portable and essentially episodic. I read a good portion in a rainforest north of Vancouver while glancing about to imagine the impact that I and the hundreds of other tourists were having on such beauty.
I am grateful that the author pointed me in the direction of Jem Bendell who I hope to be exploring soon.
3.5 stars—the extract above captures the value of the book in terms of message both oblique and often purple, as well as its annoying assemblage in terms of exclamation. Flyn travels to exclusion zones and reports on the post human ecology. It is a mild form of disaster porn though the allure is just there like the foundations for unbuilt homes on the shores of the rapidly diminishing Salton Sea.
This was a good book for a holiday. Portable and essentially episodic. I read a good portion in a rainforest north of Vancouver while glancing about to imagine the impact that I and the hundreds of other tourists were having on such beauty.
I am grateful that the author pointed me in the direction of Jem Bendell who I hope to be exploring soon.
March 24, 2021
In the thousands of years since we stopped becoming hunter-gatherers and we have changed almost everything on the planet in one way or another. We have drained and flooded places, destroyed mountains, built brand new hills, changed the course of rivers, dug deep into the earth and obliterated whole cities. When we move on to the next places what then for the places we have trashed and ruined?
Rather than travelling to all the beauty spots in the world, In Islands of Abandonment Cal Flyn decides to head to all those places that most people wouldn’t be adding to their list of places to go after lockdown. As well as finding ruin and devastation, she also finds strange beauty, rare plants and nature starting to take back what is once owned.
Starting very close to home, she heads to a place called Five Sisters. This place in West Lothian is a series of hills that are the waste from shattering rocks to extract the shale oil from. When they were created they were a grim, dark site, but now they are now a soft green as life has found a foothold on their steep slopes. The vegetation is similar to what you would find on a tundra but after the site was surveyed in 2004 a biologist was startled to find that in amongst the willow herb there were some incredibly rare plants indeed, including the Young’s Helleborine and other orchids.
Borders that have been created following disputes in Korea and Cyprus are two places that are on her destination list. In Cyprus, she meets with a man who had to flee his home in 1974 and though that he would be back in a few days. He still hasn’t returned and he can see his former home through the fence. The DMZ between North and South Korea has almost become a wildlife sanctuary in its own right with various large mammals now being spotted.
In Spain there are now around 3000 villages that the populations have abandoned for the cities are slowly crumbling into dust and being reclaimed by nature. The same thing is happening in Detroit. They call it blight; gone are the industries of the region and the employment that it brought. Entire streets have been left as the people have moved elsewhere and Flyn has included some photo from Google Streetview as they are reclaimed by scrub and trees.
Landscapes have been irrevocably changed by disasters both natural and man-made. At the time of writing this both Mount Etna and another unpronounceable one in Iceland are very active at the moment. Being shown round the remains of a town that was covered after a volcano blew its top off is an eye-opening experience. For man-made disasters, there is little to touch Chernobyl for its impact in Ukraine and across the continent. I distinctly remember it happening way back in the 1980s and I am not sure what was the most disturbing, the disinformation and propaganda from the Soviets or the vast cloud of radiation drifting across the UK. The exclusion zone around the plant is slowly being reclaimed by nature and the scientists are still learning how the massive dose of radiation is still affecting the region.
In nearby Estonia, there are vast swathes of farmland that has been abandoned and Flyn sees how the landscapes are slowly re-foresting themselves. It is becoming a massive carbon sink and in some ways replacing the trees being lost from the Amazon. A completely different place is Slab City, this desert community is a place that those in our society who don’t really fit, or in certain cases are trying to evade the authorities end up. It is a bit of a lawless place and feels a bit, Mad Max.
Some of the places that she travels to are pretty grim, a reminder of the worst that we can do to this only planet that we have. Thankfully Flyn is a sensitive and perceptive writer, she engages with the people that she meets at the places mentioned and visited in the book and her detailed background research adds depth to the prose making this a fascinating study of the places around the planet.
Rather than travelling to all the beauty spots in the world, In Islands of Abandonment Cal Flyn decides to head to all those places that most people wouldn’t be adding to their list of places to go after lockdown. As well as finding ruin and devastation, she also finds strange beauty, rare plants and nature starting to take back what is once owned.
Starting very close to home, she heads to a place called Five Sisters. This place in West Lothian is a series of hills that are the waste from shattering rocks to extract the shale oil from. When they were created they were a grim, dark site, but now they are now a soft green as life has found a foothold on their steep slopes. The vegetation is similar to what you would find on a tundra but after the site was surveyed in 2004 a biologist was startled to find that in amongst the willow herb there were some incredibly rare plants indeed, including the Young’s Helleborine and other orchids.
Borders that have been created following disputes in Korea and Cyprus are two places that are on her destination list. In Cyprus, she meets with a man who had to flee his home in 1974 and though that he would be back in a few days. He still hasn’t returned and he can see his former home through the fence. The DMZ between North and South Korea has almost become a wildlife sanctuary in its own right with various large mammals now being spotted.
In Spain there are now around 3000 villages that the populations have abandoned for the cities are slowly crumbling into dust and being reclaimed by nature. The same thing is happening in Detroit. They call it blight; gone are the industries of the region and the employment that it brought. Entire streets have been left as the people have moved elsewhere and Flyn has included some photo from Google Streetview as they are reclaimed by scrub and trees.
Landscapes have been irrevocably changed by disasters both natural and man-made. At the time of writing this both Mount Etna and another unpronounceable one in Iceland are very active at the moment. Being shown round the remains of a town that was covered after a volcano blew its top off is an eye-opening experience. For man-made disasters, there is little to touch Chernobyl for its impact in Ukraine and across the continent. I distinctly remember it happening way back in the 1980s and I am not sure what was the most disturbing, the disinformation and propaganda from the Soviets or the vast cloud of radiation drifting across the UK. The exclusion zone around the plant is slowly being reclaimed by nature and the scientists are still learning how the massive dose of radiation is still affecting the region.
In nearby Estonia, there are vast swathes of farmland that has been abandoned and Flyn sees how the landscapes are slowly re-foresting themselves. It is becoming a massive carbon sink and in some ways replacing the trees being lost from the Amazon. A completely different place is Slab City, this desert community is a place that those in our society who don’t really fit, or in certain cases are trying to evade the authorities end up. It is a bit of a lawless place and feels a bit, Mad Max.
Some of the places that she travels to are pretty grim, a reminder of the worst that we can do to this only planet that we have. Thankfully Flyn is a sensitive and perceptive writer, she engages with the people that she meets at the places mentioned and visited in the book and her detailed background research adds depth to the prose making this a fascinating study of the places around the planet.
February 25, 2022
In Islands of Abandonment Cal Flyn looks for places that have mostly been abandoned by humans, and describes what has happened. In many ways this is a similar concept to the book The World Without Us, and the authors visited some of the same places in these books, Chernobyl for example.
It sounds so easy to go to places like that, imagine the fate of man, and come away with a hopelessly dystopian view of the world, but that’s not the case here. And the main difference between these two books is that Cal Flyn finds hope in these places.
It’s not a book that shies away from our climate crisis, it doesn’t view the world through rose tinted glasses, but it isn’t pessimistic either. In my view, Cal Flyn is a good writer. Her writing style is often quite poetic, but still quite clear. This was a reading pleasure, and I’m going to read it again.
It sounds so easy to go to places like that, imagine the fate of man, and come away with a hopelessly dystopian view of the world, but that’s not the case here. And the main difference between these two books is that Cal Flyn finds hope in these places.
It’s not a book that shies away from our climate crisis, it doesn’t view the world through rose tinted glasses, but it isn’t pessimistic either. In my view, Cal Flyn is a good writer. Her writing style is often quite poetic, but still quite clear. This was a reading pleasure, and I’m going to read it again.
August 7, 2021
Thoughts soon.
November 11, 2020
Cal Flyn: the next Robert Macfarlane?
I'm always delighted when a woman gets to write a book like this, but I haven't given five stars for that reason. It's quite similar in format to Gaia Vince's 'Adventures in the Anthropocene', but where Vince's book attempted to raise the reader's optimism about individual efforts to combat climate change, and failed at this in my opinion, Flyn makes few promises of hope and yet, I was left uplifted.
Flyn blends environmental and human history as she takes us to places all around the world, from Chernobyl, to a WW1 battlefield in France, to a desert in the USA. There is a lack of "representation" of the Global South, but I wonder if that's because time hasn't yet worked its strange magic to return life - or new versions of it - to places there that have been ecologically devastated more recently than counterparts in the Global North.
Chernobyl has been written about exhaustively, though Flyn still finds fresh material (she visits all the places that are focused on in the book, with the exception of a few additional examples such as reef recovery in the Bikini Atoll). Where Flyn truly excels is in finding and writing about places that many readers are likely to have never heard of. Slab City in the US desert; the arsenic-ash pool in France; or the West Lothian 'bings', mining waste heaps now flourishing with rare plantlife.
Another quality of the book that stands out is its balance of focus on the human and the non-human. While much nature-writing these days is criticised for an almost egotistical use of animals purely as a means to examine people, Flyn gives attention to both. Slab City is more of a human study, for example, while Harris Island off Scotland is a fascinating vignette of species self-rewilding (I am keenly interested in rewilding and have read many books on the subject, and I hadn't come across the cattle of Harris before).
Flyn describes her explorations in assured and beautiful prose. Very occasionally, there were too many similes and metaphors in short succession, but that's a bit of a nit-pick. What matters is that the author captures the chiaroscuro that her "islands of abandonment" have created - the terrible cost of their destruction, but also the unanticipated joy of life that has managed to find a way. That is where Flyn's message of hope comes in. She is under no pretence that the coming consequences of climate change will bring untold suffering to humans and non-humans alike, but examples like the ones in her book provide tangible hope that some kinds of life will again rise from the ashes - and more quickly and more successfully than we might imagine.
(With thanks to NetGalley and William Collins for this ebook, in exchange for an honest review)
I'm always delighted when a woman gets to write a book like this, but I haven't given five stars for that reason. It's quite similar in format to Gaia Vince's 'Adventures in the Anthropocene', but where Vince's book attempted to raise the reader's optimism about individual efforts to combat climate change, and failed at this in my opinion, Flyn makes few promises of hope and yet, I was left uplifted.
Flyn blends environmental and human history as she takes us to places all around the world, from Chernobyl, to a WW1 battlefield in France, to a desert in the USA. There is a lack of "representation" of the Global South, but I wonder if that's because time hasn't yet worked its strange magic to return life - or new versions of it - to places there that have been ecologically devastated more recently than counterparts in the Global North.
Chernobyl has been written about exhaustively, though Flyn still finds fresh material (she visits all the places that are focused on in the book, with the exception of a few additional examples such as reef recovery in the Bikini Atoll). Where Flyn truly excels is in finding and writing about places that many readers are likely to have never heard of. Slab City in the US desert; the arsenic-ash pool in France; or the West Lothian 'bings', mining waste heaps now flourishing with rare plantlife.
Another quality of the book that stands out is its balance of focus on the human and the non-human. While much nature-writing these days is criticised for an almost egotistical use of animals purely as a means to examine people, Flyn gives attention to both. Slab City is more of a human study, for example, while Harris Island off Scotland is a fascinating vignette of species self-rewilding (I am keenly interested in rewilding and have read many books on the subject, and I hadn't come across the cattle of Harris before).
Flyn describes her explorations in assured and beautiful prose. Very occasionally, there were too many similes and metaphors in short succession, but that's a bit of a nit-pick. What matters is that the author captures the chiaroscuro that her "islands of abandonment" have created - the terrible cost of their destruction, but also the unanticipated joy of life that has managed to find a way. That is where Flyn's message of hope comes in. She is under no pretence that the coming consequences of climate change will bring untold suffering to humans and non-humans alike, but examples like the ones in her book provide tangible hope that some kinds of life will again rise from the ashes - and more quickly and more successfully than we might imagine.
(With thanks to NetGalley and William Collins for this ebook, in exchange for an honest review)
December 21, 2020
3.5 rounded up
Islands of Abandonment sees Cal Flyn travel to different locations around the world which have been altered by humans and then abandoned for various reasons - including natural disaster (Plymouth, Montserrat) and events which have occurred at the hands of people (Chernobyl and the Cyprus Buffer Zone - to see how these places have adapted in the aftermath of human intervention and as they "re-wild" again. The adaptation Flyn focuses on is primarily that of plants and animals, however some chapters focus more on the people who live in these areas.
The book is made up of a mixture of a travelogue of sorts, telling the story of the places and the people the authors meets, as well as research Flyn does into the history of these locations. The chapters on places in Scotland (Swoma and Five Sisters shale bings) were the ones I found to be the most enjoyable, and I found that this made for a different and enjoyable non-fiction read.
Thank you Netgalley and 4th Estate for the advance copy, which was provided in exchange for an honest review.
Islands of Abandonment sees Cal Flyn travel to different locations around the world which have been altered by humans and then abandoned for various reasons - including natural disaster (Plymouth, Montserrat) and events which have occurred at the hands of people (Chernobyl and the Cyprus Buffer Zone - to see how these places have adapted in the aftermath of human intervention and as they "re-wild" again. The adaptation Flyn focuses on is primarily that of plants and animals, however some chapters focus more on the people who live in these areas.
The book is made up of a mixture of a travelogue of sorts, telling the story of the places and the people the authors meets, as well as research Flyn does into the history of these locations. The chapters on places in Scotland (Swoma and Five Sisters shale bings) were the ones I found to be the most enjoyable, and I found that this made for a different and enjoyable non-fiction read.
Thank you Netgalley and 4th Estate for the advance copy, which was provided in exchange for an honest review.
August 21, 2022
“The benefits of the absence of humans in fact far outweigh the harm.”
I bought this book in hope of hope. Like any thinking hominid, I struggle with what our species has done and is doing, so incredibly stupidly and suicidally, to Pachamama, to the Earth, our only source of life. You all know, so I won’t list our sins. Can some life grow from the catastrophic deathscapes we leave behind? Tell me yes, please. Turns out, the answer is, um, well, maybe in some cases kind of, but only if humans leave, absolutely GTFO, and Stay Out.
Cal Flyn is a superb storyteller. She can tell a heartbreaking story that doesn’t leave one broken; wind a tale of truth, that can divert into history and biology and human foibles of all sorts, and still one is left with wonder and awe. I found myself reading late into the night, and awakening still full of thoughts about this remarkable and highly recommended book. Brilliant.
I bought this book in hope of hope. Like any thinking hominid, I struggle with what our species has done and is doing, so incredibly stupidly and suicidally, to Pachamama, to the Earth, our only source of life. You all know, so I won’t list our sins. Can some life grow from the catastrophic deathscapes we leave behind? Tell me yes, please. Turns out, the answer is, um, well, maybe in some cases kind of, but only if humans leave, absolutely GTFO, and Stay Out.
Cal Flyn is a superb storyteller. She can tell a heartbreaking story that doesn’t leave one broken; wind a tale of truth, that can divert into history and biology and human foibles of all sorts, and still one is left with wonder and awe. I found myself reading late into the night, and awakening still full of thoughts about this remarkable and highly recommended book. Brilliant.
March 13, 2022
A fascinating book covering various areas which for one reason (environmental disasters such as volcanoes) or another (pollution) have been (mostly) abandoned and left to nature. Cal Flyn finds some small cause for optimism in these abandoned areas where nature has been surprisingly resilient in rewilding these places
October 11, 2023
I didn't like this book, I found it sloppy, simplistic and annoying. The fact that it couldn't settle on its subtle title says a great deal, is it about:
'Nature Rebounding in the Post Human Landscape'
or
'Life in the Post-Human Landscape'
because although those sub titles describe some of the content in some of the chapters neither of them fit all the chapters or all the subjects touched on.
What became clear as I read through the simplistic and error ridden tales in each chapter was that this was not a a book with a theme rather it was a cut-and-paste job assembled from observations and thoughts (and not very deep, interesting or original ones) the author had while travelling to the various places in her twelve chapters. What is annoying, and also typical, is that there is no indication of when most of these visits were made. Even allowing for COVID it is apparent from internal evidence that many may have been last visited considerably before the book was written/published in 2021.
What was most annoying was her lack of any sense of historical or political context when dealing with so many of the subjects she dealt with. She talks about the reforestation that is taking place in areas of the former Soviet Union and its satellites with the collapse of the collective farm system. But what does it mean? aside from the fact abandoned land tends to become forested? To try and understand what if anything this might mean one needs some context:
Previous to the revolution in 1917 Russia's farms had, aside from feeding its own population, exported vast amounts of wheat which provided the foreign currency which underwrote the loans that paid for Russia's industrialisation and railroad development. Because this vast export of grain undercut world prices which made the grain produced on Junker estates in Prussia less economic and threatened the viability of the class that had traditionally provided Germany's ruling class. As a result protectionist policies to prop up uneconomic Prussian estates meant that German banks were prevented from providing loans to Russia who then turned to France and French banks which resulted in Imperial Germany fearing encirclement thus contributing a small piece to the cause of WWI.
After the revolution Russia's Soviet rulers wanted foreign currency just as much as the Tsars and to provide it, and as a measure of social control, all farm land was nationalised and collectivised. It was a massive failure and, although nobody under 65 will remember this, a large part of Soviet-USA relations and diplomacy in the 1970's revolved around the Soviets buying vast amounts of grain from the USA and elsewhere because they could not feed themselves.
So if the Soviet Union* was unable to feed itself with all the collective farms up and running, how is it managed now (and also countries like the newly independent Baltic states, Belarus or places like Uzbekistan and Tajikistan)? Is it still importing vast amounts of food? Is more food being grown on less land? Without any sort of context (one thing is for sure the author has never visited a former collective farm in any part of the current Russian Federation or any of the countries that have emerged from the Soviet Union) the fact that there are now loads of trees growing on abandoned farms is interesting but it could be a very short lived phenomena. No consideration is given to what Russians think of this contraction in their farm land, nor is it examined as a good or bad thing except as a 'rewilding' phenomena.
This superficiality is typical of much of what the author has written - particularly with regards to its coverage of cities like Detroit in the USA were 'blight' is discussed as if it was an airborne disease the lighted upon Detroit like a species of Dutch elm disease and rotted away vast areas of the city. The same goes for her discussion of the Salton Sea in California. Both are the result of long term complex political/economic and cultural forces and choices. Without looking at the way water is owned and managed in California and elsewhere you understand nothing. I saw, in the 1980's and 90's examples of the rot and decay of many urban centres in the USA, LA is a perfect example. It is not as desolate as Detroit but downtown LA, the area around the famous Biltmore Hotel, is as empty of life as downtown Detroit. I saw the same in smaller cities throughout the mid-west like Dayton and Toledo in Ohio none of these places, and many more throughout the USA, have a functioning city centre or urban life as we would understand it in Europe. The roots of this phenomena go back to a raft of policies implemented in the aftermath of WWII and then in the early 1950's**.
Also the decline of cities in the past has been as dramatic as that of Detroit. For the 1,400 years after it ceased to be the capital of the Roman empire Rome and its population declined to the point where only a fraction of the city within its ancient walls was inhabited; most of it was farmland. Then in 1871 it became the capital of the reunited country of Italy and it began to grow again. Detroit may have died as an industrial centre but it is surrounded by a very prosperous hinterland and there is no reason to suppose that when enough of Detroit's current remaining population - the poor, the ethnic, the old - disappear that its empty acres will not be reclaimed by the wealthy who abandoned it. The fact that it is a famous example of urban re-wilding may be as temporary and as easily forgotten as 'Fordlandia' in the Brazilian amazon (check Wikipedia for details).
I could go on and on, and many may say I have gone on long enough but this book is nothing but a series of trite essays about trees and plants growing in places once inhabited by man which is about as profound or interesting as older books which talked about 'conquering' nature. Without context or understanding all she writes is as profound or meaningful as the after dinner talk of the drunk and the stoned. There are many important questions about the future of our world*** but they are barely mentioned less addressed in this self indulgent waste of time.
*I am well aware that the Soviet Union and the Russian Federation are not identical geographical entities but this is a review, not a peer reviewed academic paper and generalities will be used.
**Most right wing Americans like to imagine that it was built by 'free enterprise' without the burden or direction of the Federal government. The entire post WWII sub-urbanisation and increase in motor car use were the direct result of policies designed to starve public transport of finance and deprive urban areas of finance for home purchases.
***I can't help mentioning how so many American politicians, economists, lobbyists, inflamed by fears over growing Chinese power and influence, get enraged because the Chinese government has and continues to spend vast amounts of money on infrastructure projects, particularly railways. Public transport is anathema to American free marketeers who believe that all planning should revolve around the motor car or for longer distance travel aeroplanes. That the Chinese plans seem to work is even more annoying.
'Nature Rebounding in the Post Human Landscape'
or
'Life in the Post-Human Landscape'
because although those sub titles describe some of the content in some of the chapters neither of them fit all the chapters or all the subjects touched on.
What became clear as I read through the simplistic and error ridden tales in each chapter was that this was not a a book with a theme rather it was a cut-and-paste job assembled from observations and thoughts (and not very deep, interesting or original ones) the author had while travelling to the various places in her twelve chapters. What is annoying, and also typical, is that there is no indication of when most of these visits were made. Even allowing for COVID it is apparent from internal evidence that many may have been last visited considerably before the book was written/published in 2021.
What was most annoying was her lack of any sense of historical or political context when dealing with so many of the subjects she dealt with. She talks about the reforestation that is taking place in areas of the former Soviet Union and its satellites with the collapse of the collective farm system. But what does it mean? aside from the fact abandoned land tends to become forested? To try and understand what if anything this might mean one needs some context:
Previous to the revolution in 1917 Russia's farms had, aside from feeding its own population, exported vast amounts of wheat which provided the foreign currency which underwrote the loans that paid for Russia's industrialisation and railroad development. Because this vast export of grain undercut world prices which made the grain produced on Junker estates in Prussia less economic and threatened the viability of the class that had traditionally provided Germany's ruling class. As a result protectionist policies to prop up uneconomic Prussian estates meant that German banks were prevented from providing loans to Russia who then turned to France and French banks which resulted in Imperial Germany fearing encirclement thus contributing a small piece to the cause of WWI.
After the revolution Russia's Soviet rulers wanted foreign currency just as much as the Tsars and to provide it, and as a measure of social control, all farm land was nationalised and collectivised. It was a massive failure and, although nobody under 65 will remember this, a large part of Soviet-USA relations and diplomacy in the 1970's revolved around the Soviets buying vast amounts of grain from the USA and elsewhere because they could not feed themselves.
So if the Soviet Union* was unable to feed itself with all the collective farms up and running, how is it managed now (and also countries like the newly independent Baltic states, Belarus or places like Uzbekistan and Tajikistan)? Is it still importing vast amounts of food? Is more food being grown on less land? Without any sort of context (one thing is for sure the author has never visited a former collective farm in any part of the current Russian Federation or any of the countries that have emerged from the Soviet Union) the fact that there are now loads of trees growing on abandoned farms is interesting but it could be a very short lived phenomena. No consideration is given to what Russians think of this contraction in their farm land, nor is it examined as a good or bad thing except as a 'rewilding' phenomena.
This superficiality is typical of much of what the author has written - particularly with regards to its coverage of cities like Detroit in the USA were 'blight' is discussed as if it was an airborne disease the lighted upon Detroit like a species of Dutch elm disease and rotted away vast areas of the city. The same goes for her discussion of the Salton Sea in California. Both are the result of long term complex political/economic and cultural forces and choices. Without looking at the way water is owned and managed in California and elsewhere you understand nothing. I saw, in the 1980's and 90's examples of the rot and decay of many urban centres in the USA, LA is a perfect example. It is not as desolate as Detroit but downtown LA, the area around the famous Biltmore Hotel, is as empty of life as downtown Detroit. I saw the same in smaller cities throughout the mid-west like Dayton and Toledo in Ohio none of these places, and many more throughout the USA, have a functioning city centre or urban life as we would understand it in Europe. The roots of this phenomena go back to a raft of policies implemented in the aftermath of WWII and then in the early 1950's**.
Also the decline of cities in the past has been as dramatic as that of Detroit. For the 1,400 years after it ceased to be the capital of the Roman empire Rome and its population declined to the point where only a fraction of the city within its ancient walls was inhabited; most of it was farmland. Then in 1871 it became the capital of the reunited country of Italy and it began to grow again. Detroit may have died as an industrial centre but it is surrounded by a very prosperous hinterland and there is no reason to suppose that when enough of Detroit's current remaining population - the poor, the ethnic, the old - disappear that its empty acres will not be reclaimed by the wealthy who abandoned it. The fact that it is a famous example of urban re-wilding may be as temporary and as easily forgotten as 'Fordlandia' in the Brazilian amazon (check Wikipedia for details).
I could go on and on, and many may say I have gone on long enough but this book is nothing but a series of trite essays about trees and plants growing in places once inhabited by man which is about as profound or interesting as older books which talked about 'conquering' nature. Without context or understanding all she writes is as profound or meaningful as the after dinner talk of the drunk and the stoned. There are many important questions about the future of our world*** but they are barely mentioned less addressed in this self indulgent waste of time.
*I am well aware that the Soviet Union and the Russian Federation are not identical geographical entities but this is a review, not a peer reviewed academic paper and generalities will be used.
**Most right wing Americans like to imagine that it was built by 'free enterprise' without the burden or direction of the Federal government. The entire post WWII sub-urbanisation and increase in motor car use were the direct result of policies designed to starve public transport of finance and deprive urban areas of finance for home purchases.
***I can't help mentioning how so many American politicians, economists, lobbyists, inflamed by fears over growing Chinese power and influence, get enraged because the Chinese government has and continues to spend vast amounts of money on infrastructure projects, particularly railways. Public transport is anathema to American free marketeers who believe that all planning should revolve around the motor car or for longer distance travel aeroplanes. That the Chinese plans seem to work is even more annoying.
May 8, 2022
A look at various ways humanity has abandoned land and how nature is taking it back. The author gives 12 different instances and circumstances where humanity's carelessness is beginning to be countered by nature's healing.
*From the DMZ military exclusion zones between the Koreas and areas of Cyprus where no human influence is allowed to NYC High Line which has been changed into a tourist attraction and green area once the city realized that nature was attempting to reclaim it in the years since it was shutdown.
*Slag heaps and mounts of mining discards that provide "fertile' ground for more exotic pioneering plants.
*The former cultivated farming fields that have been lying fallow for years as well as the clear-cut forestland where the sun can once again get to the ground level and encourage new growth.
*Chernobyl and other military munitions and ordnance storage facilities along with nuclear production plants that have become nature preserves, providing a haven for various predators and prey animals.
*The so-called 'urban prairie' like the named "Blight of Detroit' where abandoned and gutted houses of the millions of workers no longer needed by the re-located auto manufacturing plants are literally entire neighborhoods as well as the ravaged hulks of those same plants and other factories.
*The still-damaged rivers that were once vital sources of energy for now-decaying factories along with the nearby marshlands which have become caches of toxic chemicals as waste water was dumped into rivers.
*Former battlefields that still have tons of unexploded buried munitions and rotting remains of shrapnel and weapons. Even the Place a Gaz, a clearing amidst the forest planted over Verdun, where nothing will grow as tons of poisonous gas canisters were burned at the end of the war - the ground poisoned with heavy metals to this day.
*Transplanted species that overwhelm native species perhaps already tittering on the brink of extinction. But on a positive note, in many cases, the non-native have found a niche and the natives - those that have survived - are filling in around it, providing a greater biodiversity.
*Feral herds of former domesticated animals where the characteristics like speed, color, meatiness, productivity or strength are fading as non-human involvement occurs.
*Montserrat and the volcanic eruptions which has wiped the land clear as well as provide new.
*And finally, the Salton Sea which was made by accident but is now being reclaimed by nature just like the Aral Sea in Russia. Both are dustbowls of agricultural pollutants that were part of the run-offs directed into the lake in attempt to refill or stall the evaporation.
So many instances but nature is slowly reclaiming its property. Land in some cases, so damaged that humanity needs to completely avoid it. Another surprise is that all this reconditioned land provides new areas of carbon sequestration. On the levels of gigatons worth. Certainly not enough to counter the amounts driving climate change but possibly enough to give humanity a tiny promise of hope.
Excellent read.
2021-262
*From the DMZ military exclusion zones between the Koreas and areas of Cyprus where no human influence is allowed to NYC High Line which has been changed into a tourist attraction and green area once the city realized that nature was attempting to reclaim it in the years since it was shutdown.
*Slag heaps and mounts of mining discards that provide "fertile' ground for more exotic pioneering plants.
*The former cultivated farming fields that have been lying fallow for years as well as the clear-cut forestland where the sun can once again get to the ground level and encourage new growth.
*Chernobyl and other military munitions and ordnance storage facilities along with nuclear production plants that have become nature preserves, providing a haven for various predators and prey animals.
*The so-called 'urban prairie' like the named "Blight of Detroit' where abandoned and gutted houses of the millions of workers no longer needed by the re-located auto manufacturing plants are literally entire neighborhoods as well as the ravaged hulks of those same plants and other factories.
*The still-damaged rivers that were once vital sources of energy for now-decaying factories along with the nearby marshlands which have become caches of toxic chemicals as waste water was dumped into rivers.
*Former battlefields that still have tons of unexploded buried munitions and rotting remains of shrapnel and weapons. Even the Place a Gaz, a clearing amidst the forest planted over Verdun, where nothing will grow as tons of poisonous gas canisters were burned at the end of the war - the ground poisoned with heavy metals to this day.
*Transplanted species that overwhelm native species perhaps already tittering on the brink of extinction. But on a positive note, in many cases, the non-native have found a niche and the natives - those that have survived - are filling in around it, providing a greater biodiversity.
*Feral herds of former domesticated animals where the characteristics like speed, color, meatiness, productivity or strength are fading as non-human involvement occurs.
*Montserrat and the volcanic eruptions which has wiped the land clear as well as provide new.
*And finally, the Salton Sea which was made by accident but is now being reclaimed by nature just like the Aral Sea in Russia. Both are dustbowls of agricultural pollutants that were part of the run-offs directed into the lake in attempt to refill or stall the evaporation.
So many instances but nature is slowly reclaiming its property. Land in some cases, so damaged that humanity needs to completely avoid it. Another surprise is that all this reconditioned land provides new areas of carbon sequestration. On the levels of gigatons worth. Certainly not enough to counter the amounts driving climate change but possibly enough to give humanity a tiny promise of hope.
Excellent read.
2021-262
August 29, 2021
An amazing - even beautiful- book, with so much NEW information conveyed in gorgeous language.
Cal Flyn is a courageous woman visiting odd places on her own. She begins at the Lothian bings in Scotland, man made mountains of post-industrial waste from shale. This was a monumental beginning that pulled me immediately in. And then just Flyn just/ didn’t/ stop.
Do these subjects, which I’ve never considered before, sound interesting?
• What is a supervolcano, and didja know one caused the Permian extinction?
• Do you want to know what happened inside the walled off zone of Chernobyl?
• What happens to biodiversity in walled off zones in France filled w arsenic resulting from WWI?
• What happens when cities are depopulated due to war, climate events or economics?
I'm not sure the summation is as hopeful as she wants to leave us - but it's something. The events we ignore, and Cal Flyn writes of, are stunning.
Is it the subject matter that brings the art to her words, or is she an artist of words?
Not for everyone, but probably should be.
(And you can look up images on the internet - start with Five Sisters Bing).
Cal Flyn is a courageous woman visiting odd places on her own. She begins at the Lothian bings in Scotland, man made mountains of post-industrial waste from shale. This was a monumental beginning that pulled me immediately in. And then just Flyn just/ didn’t/ stop.
Do these subjects, which I’ve never considered before, sound interesting?
• What is a supervolcano, and didja know one caused the Permian extinction?
• Do you want to know what happened inside the walled off zone of Chernobyl?
• What happens to biodiversity in walled off zones in France filled w arsenic resulting from WWI?
• What happens when cities are depopulated due to war, climate events or economics?
I'm not sure the summation is as hopeful as she wants to leave us - but it's something. The events we ignore, and Cal Flyn writes of, are stunning.
Is it the subject matter that brings the art to her words, or is she an artist of words?
Not for everyone, but probably should be.
(And you can look up images on the internet - start with Five Sisters Bing).
January 11, 2022
Flyn travels to neglected and derelict places, looking for the traces of human impact and noting how landscapes restore themselves – how life goes on without us. Places like a wasteland where there was once mining, nuclear exclusion zones, the depopulated city of Detroit, and areas that have been altered by natural disasters and conflict. The writing is literary and evocative, at times reminiscent of Peter Matthiessen’s. It’s a nature/travel book with a difference, and the poetic eye helps you to see things anew.
(Readalikes: Footprints, Notes from an Apocalypse)
(Readalikes: Footprints, Notes from an Apocalypse)
September 14, 2022
For most of this book the author is cautiously hopeful that the destruction caused by human and natural disasters is remediable, that when left alone nature can fix what has been broken: barren soil is recolonized by plants and animals, forests regenerate, toxins break down; life finds a way. And then, in the last chapter, the reader is brought up short with the message the world may indeed heal itself, but it might take the the self-extermination of mankind to make it happen, a path we are already far along on. And if it happens we will take a hell of a lot of other species with us when we go.
There is a sad irony in many of the chapters of this book, that only after we have screwed things up so badly that the land or water becomes useless (to us), then can Mother Nature get started restoring things. It reminded me of the situation report from the Vietnam war, “We had to destroy the village to save it.”
The author has a good eye for regeneration, identifying the plant and animal species that make the first tentative steps toward reclamation, increasing the viability of the soil and laying the groundwork for later arrivals to help establish a robust ecology. Although she does not call it homeostasis, evolutionary change, climate conditions, and competing species tend to maintain equilibrium as the landscape is renewed.
One chapter deals with effects of introduced plants in Africa, breaking out of their initial planting sites to run wild, outcompeting local species and destroying the balance of the forests. However, over time they start to be tamed by the local environment: they spread more slowly, and parasites and diseases begin to catch up to them. Eventually they melt into their environment as just another part of the whole. It made me think about Killer Bees; as they were making their way north toward the United States there were endless apocalyptic stories about how they were going to take over, destroying the honeybees and indiscriminately killing people and pets. After all that, now that have arrived they have become a kind of low level chronic condition, making the news only when an unfortunate incident results in someone being attacked.
The author visited Chernobyl to examine the long term effects of the disaster, and provides some helpful statistics to put things into perspective: “Chernobyl is the most contaminated site of all. Though the explosion at its fourth reactor had only a fraction of the force of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, the nuclear fallout it released is thought to have been 400 times greater, thanks to the huge quantity of nuclear fuel housed within the damaged reactor.” (p. 96) There is still a large exclusion zone around the site, but much of the radiation has faded and plants and animals have rebounded sharply in this nuclear wildlife preserve. Dangers remain to plants and people, but the area is not a science fiction wasteland. “In most of the zone, radiation has now declined to levels similar to what one might experience in an aircraft, due to cosmic rays, or during a medical diagnostic scan. Today, most concern centres around the radionuclides caesium-137 and strontium-90, both of which have a half-life of around thirty years, and are readily taken up by plants, thus making their way through the food chain.” (p. 102)
For a truly nightmarish place to consider, there is the Place à Gaz, deep in the Zone Rouge, an area around Verdun that was so stricken with unexploded ordnance during World War I that entry is permanently forbidden. There, in 1928, 200,000 chemical weapons, mustard gas, phosgene, and the rest of that devil’s brew, were buried and then set alight. Today, decades later, behind razor-wire fences, a terrible scar still remains, a true dead zone. In 2007 Germans scientists examined the soil. “In places, they discovered 17 per cent of the soil’s weight was made up of arsenic. And plenty more of what biologist call heavy metals: up to 13 per cent zinc, 2.6 per cent lead.” (p. 189) And yet, even here, in this patch of hell on earth, nature is working to reclaim the tortured soil. The area is slowly getting smaller, and some hardy plants are starting to return. Life finds a way.
Some parts of the book deal with abandoned land, and others with abandoned people. There are chapters on Detroit, Michigan, and Paterson, New Jersey, once vibrant industrial centers that have fallen into decay and abandonment. Detroit is caught in a vicious negative feedback loop: people leave, so there are fewer tax dollars to provide services for those who remain, so more people leave, further reducing services. On the internet there are some astonishing pictures of then-and-now Detroit, streets in the 1940s and 50s that were shoulder to shoulder with houses and stores, and which are now completely empty of human habitation and have returned to woods and meadows. Paterson lives in the shadow of New York City, with all the ruination and depopulation of Detroit, and additionally suffers from decades of toxic pollution to its waterways. Even so, people live in its devastated areas, castaways, criminals, and hard core drug users, ruined lives in ruined buildings.
In some places nature moves in as soon as humans move out, but in others what we leave behind will poison the air, earth, and water far, far into the future. An example is Arthur Kill in Staten Island, where for decades dioxins were made in vast quantities, sometimes forming heaps in the bay that had to be raked down at low tide. Dioxins are stable chemicals, breaking down so slowly they are considered permanent. And they are deadly, “There is no truly ‘safe’ level of dioxin contamination; it’s one of the most toxic substances known to man. It is 170,000 times more deadly than cyanide. The US Environmental Protection Agency considers water with dioxin levels of 31 parts per quadrillion (this is, 31 in 1,000,000,000,000,000) is too contaminated to drink.” (p. 164-165) Even here a few remarkable species of plants and fish have started to adapt, but these are dead zones for the vast majority of life.
Natural disasters also have their place in this book. Long ago, when I was in the Navy, my ship visited Montserrat, a British possession in the Caribbean. I remember the capital, Plymouth, as a vibrant, colorful town which also had an American medical school, whose students were happy to show us around in return for a hot shower on the ship. A few years later a volcano, long thought dormant, exploded, burying Plymouth and the surrounding areas. When the author visited she found a strange place where occasional buildings poked out of the ground, and then realized, “We are standing 40 feet above what was ground level. The isolated buildings ahead are, in fact, the top floors of what were four- and five-storey buildings.” (p. 281)
The book ends with a visit to the dying Salton Sea in southern California, and the people who live around it, whose lives are as dead-end as the sea itself. This is a place where people go when they have nowhere left to go, or when they want turn on, drop out, and vanish. A community exists even in this blighted place, hardy souls living a kind of post-apocalyptic existence, creating shelter from the detritus of the civilization that once thrived around them. The author recognizes that this could be the future of whatever remains of humankind if we push ourselves and our environment over the edge.
There are hopeful passages in this book, and despairing ones. It is heartening to see nature making a comeback even in the most devastated areas, and disheartening to think that they are devastated because of us, because of what we did in the name of progress. That progress may, in the end, be the death of humankind, but nature will go on with our without us.
There is a sad irony in many of the chapters of this book, that only after we have screwed things up so badly that the land or water becomes useless (to us), then can Mother Nature get started restoring things. It reminded me of the situation report from the Vietnam war, “We had to destroy the village to save it.”
The author has a good eye for regeneration, identifying the plant and animal species that make the first tentative steps toward reclamation, increasing the viability of the soil and laying the groundwork for later arrivals to help establish a robust ecology. Although she does not call it homeostasis, evolutionary change, climate conditions, and competing species tend to maintain equilibrium as the landscape is renewed.
One chapter deals with effects of introduced plants in Africa, breaking out of their initial planting sites to run wild, outcompeting local species and destroying the balance of the forests. However, over time they start to be tamed by the local environment: they spread more slowly, and parasites and diseases begin to catch up to them. Eventually they melt into their environment as just another part of the whole. It made me think about Killer Bees; as they were making their way north toward the United States there were endless apocalyptic stories about how they were going to take over, destroying the honeybees and indiscriminately killing people and pets. After all that, now that have arrived they have become a kind of low level chronic condition, making the news only when an unfortunate incident results in someone being attacked.
The author visited Chernobyl to examine the long term effects of the disaster, and provides some helpful statistics to put things into perspective: “Chernobyl is the most contaminated site of all. Though the explosion at its fourth reactor had only a fraction of the force of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, the nuclear fallout it released is thought to have been 400 times greater, thanks to the huge quantity of nuclear fuel housed within the damaged reactor.” (p. 96) There is still a large exclusion zone around the site, but much of the radiation has faded and plants and animals have rebounded sharply in this nuclear wildlife preserve. Dangers remain to plants and people, but the area is not a science fiction wasteland. “In most of the zone, radiation has now declined to levels similar to what one might experience in an aircraft, due to cosmic rays, or during a medical diagnostic scan. Today, most concern centres around the radionuclides caesium-137 and strontium-90, both of which have a half-life of around thirty years, and are readily taken up by plants, thus making their way through the food chain.” (p. 102)
For a truly nightmarish place to consider, there is the Place à Gaz, deep in the Zone Rouge, an area around Verdun that was so stricken with unexploded ordnance during World War I that entry is permanently forbidden. There, in 1928, 200,000 chemical weapons, mustard gas, phosgene, and the rest of that devil’s brew, were buried and then set alight. Today, decades later, behind razor-wire fences, a terrible scar still remains, a true dead zone. In 2007 Germans scientists examined the soil. “In places, they discovered 17 per cent of the soil’s weight was made up of arsenic. And plenty more of what biologist call heavy metals: up to 13 per cent zinc, 2.6 per cent lead.” (p. 189) And yet, even here, in this patch of hell on earth, nature is working to reclaim the tortured soil. The area is slowly getting smaller, and some hardy plants are starting to return. Life finds a way.
Some parts of the book deal with abandoned land, and others with abandoned people. There are chapters on Detroit, Michigan, and Paterson, New Jersey, once vibrant industrial centers that have fallen into decay and abandonment. Detroit is caught in a vicious negative feedback loop: people leave, so there are fewer tax dollars to provide services for those who remain, so more people leave, further reducing services. On the internet there are some astonishing pictures of then-and-now Detroit, streets in the 1940s and 50s that were shoulder to shoulder with houses and stores, and which are now completely empty of human habitation and have returned to woods and meadows. Paterson lives in the shadow of New York City, with all the ruination and depopulation of Detroit, and additionally suffers from decades of toxic pollution to its waterways. Even so, people live in its devastated areas, castaways, criminals, and hard core drug users, ruined lives in ruined buildings.
In some places nature moves in as soon as humans move out, but in others what we leave behind will poison the air, earth, and water far, far into the future. An example is Arthur Kill in Staten Island, where for decades dioxins were made in vast quantities, sometimes forming heaps in the bay that had to be raked down at low tide. Dioxins are stable chemicals, breaking down so slowly they are considered permanent. And they are deadly, “There is no truly ‘safe’ level of dioxin contamination; it’s one of the most toxic substances known to man. It is 170,000 times more deadly than cyanide. The US Environmental Protection Agency considers water with dioxin levels of 31 parts per quadrillion (this is, 31 in 1,000,000,000,000,000) is too contaminated to drink.” (p. 164-165) Even here a few remarkable species of plants and fish have started to adapt, but these are dead zones for the vast majority of life.
Natural disasters also have their place in this book. Long ago, when I was in the Navy, my ship visited Montserrat, a British possession in the Caribbean. I remember the capital, Plymouth, as a vibrant, colorful town which also had an American medical school, whose students were happy to show us around in return for a hot shower on the ship. A few years later a volcano, long thought dormant, exploded, burying Plymouth and the surrounding areas. When the author visited she found a strange place where occasional buildings poked out of the ground, and then realized, “We are standing 40 feet above what was ground level. The isolated buildings ahead are, in fact, the top floors of what were four- and five-storey buildings.” (p. 281)
The book ends with a visit to the dying Salton Sea in southern California, and the people who live around it, whose lives are as dead-end as the sea itself. This is a place where people go when they have nowhere left to go, or when they want turn on, drop out, and vanish. A community exists even in this blighted place, hardy souls living a kind of post-apocalyptic existence, creating shelter from the detritus of the civilization that once thrived around them. The author recognizes that this could be the future of whatever remains of humankind if we push ourselves and our environment over the edge.
There are hopeful passages in this book, and despairing ones. It is heartening to see nature making a comeback even in the most devastated areas, and disheartening to think that they are devastated because of us, because of what we did in the name of progress. That progress may, in the end, be the death of humankind, but nature will go on with our without us.
March 27, 2022
Ir tikai marts, bet šī noteikti būs šogad labākā lasītā populārzinātniskā grāmata.
Kaut pareizāk būtu tiekt - dzejzinātniskā. Autore apraksta cilvēces sapurgātos zemes stūrīšus ar tādu melodiju vārdos, grūti noticēt savai lasītāja laimei.
“Time is, after all, the great healer. The question is: How long does it need?. Then, How long have we got'. It may not be long”
Grāmata gudri sadalīta nodaļās, kas atklāj dažādas ekoloģiskās katastrofas, kuras vieno atrašanās vieta vai pāridarījuma veids. Nu briesmīgi mēs esam, cilvēki. Bieži vien pat gribot labu, darām sliktu. Sev. Citiem. Savai nākotnei.
Bet viena stīga caurvij katru rūpju stāstu. Citējot Dr. Malcolm no ''Juras laikmeta parka'' - Life breaks free, it expands to new territories, and crashes through barriers painfully, maybe even dangerously, but, uh, well, there it is. Life will find a way.
Kaut pareizāk būtu tiekt - dzejzinātniskā. Autore apraksta cilvēces sapurgātos zemes stūrīšus ar tādu melodiju vārdos, grūti noticēt savai lasītāja laimei.
“Time is, after all, the great healer. The question is: How long does it need?. Then, How long have we got'. It may not be long”
Grāmata gudri sadalīta nodaļās, kas atklāj dažādas ekoloģiskās katastrofas, kuras vieno atrašanās vieta vai pāridarījuma veids. Nu briesmīgi mēs esam, cilvēki. Bieži vien pat gribot labu, darām sliktu. Sev. Citiem. Savai nākotnei.
Bet viena stīga caurvij katru rūpju stāstu. Citējot Dr. Malcolm no ''Juras laikmeta parka'' - Life breaks free, it expands to new territories, and crashes through barriers painfully, maybe even dangerously, but, uh, well, there it is. Life will find a way.
November 7, 2021
First the good (and there's a lot): Flyn is a wonderful writer, and this is really a joy to read. While you would expect it to be fairly depressing to read about places that were so ravaged by conflict, pollution or other man-made catastrophes (and at times it is), there is also this surprising optimism to it all, seeing nature absolutely flourish even in the desolation. It is also immensely educational. I learned so much history of countries around the world (including my own), fascinating stories I never knew or didn't know enough about. This is one of those books that's really a pleasure to read -- fascinating, introspective, poetic and educational.
My one grudge-- I really wanted photos! Flyn is really wonderful at describing these places and in many cases it is not legal or possible to take photos. But, but.... I really wanted to see them! We get a few black and white photos at times, but I was left wanting more visuals. That said, it's a fantastic book. Recommended.
I read a digital ARC of this book via Net Galley.
My one grudge-- I really wanted photos! Flyn is really wonderful at describing these places and in many cases it is not legal or possible to take photos. But, but.... I really wanted to see them! We get a few black and white photos at times, but I was left wanting more visuals. That said, it's a fantastic book. Recommended.
I read a digital ARC of this book via Net Galley.
October 30, 2021
A very well written book on the forgotten places, the abandoned, the unloved, the abused, battered, scorched and exploited pieces of Earth that have been unfortunate enough to come into contact with the human parasite.
What is shocking is the level of devastation we have reaped on this planet in the short amount of time we have been privileged enough to be here. What is not shocking is how quickly nature recovers when we are absent and the Earth is free from our constant degradation and persecution.
We have caused so many problems as humans. We are a pretty despicable race aren't we?
Amazing writing but ultimately slightly depressing to reflect on our shittiness.
Great high quality photographs to accompany the text.
What is shocking is the level of devastation we have reaped on this planet in the short amount of time we have been privileged enough to be here. What is not shocking is how quickly nature recovers when we are absent and the Earth is free from our constant degradation and persecution.
We have caused so many problems as humans. We are a pretty despicable race aren't we?
Amazing writing but ultimately slightly depressing to reflect on our shittiness.
Great high quality photographs to accompany the text.
September 24, 2022
«Los terrenos baldíos que a simple vista parecen horribles pueden enseñarnos formas nuevas y más sofisticadas de observar el entorno natural; no en términos pintorescos ni atendiendo al cuidado que se ha depositado en ellos, sino fijándonos en su fuerza ecológica. Una vez hemos aprendido a hacerlo, el mundo ofrece un aspecto muy distinto. Lugares que de entrada parecen "feos" o "carentes de valor" pueden tener gran importancia desde el punto de vista ecológico y su fealdad o falta de valor bien podrían ser la condición que los ha mantenido abandonados, salvándolos así de una remodelación o de una "gestión" demasiado entusiasta y, por tanto, de las destrucción».
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