Life in the Post-Human Landscape
Islands of Abandonment is a fascinating exploration of locations around the world from which human occupants have retreated, allowing nature to reclaim the space.
Cal Flyn looks at places abandoned for a variety of reasons including war; disaster; population decline and economic recession. Her research took her from the disaster zone of Chernobyl to an abandoned botanic garden in Africa and to industrial and residential wastelands in the USA.
She travelled alone, putting her own safety at risk it seemed to me. Yet the only time she said she felt fear was the night she spent on a tiny Scottish island uninhabited but for wild cows.
Each of the12 featured locations in Islands of Abandonment explores a different issue.
In Tanzania for example she visited a botanic garden that was the product of an experimental planting programme by the German colonial government in the 1880s. The lasting legacy is a problem — which has also happened with other botanic gardens — of invasive species.
Visiting Cyprus, Flyn peered through barbed wire to see an unlikely nature reserve that has developed among the watch towers in the buffer zone dividing the country in two.
Industrial development has also left its scars. In Scotland Flyn climbed huge slag heaps that date back to the country’s heyday of oil production between the 1860s and 1920s. She discovered how large swathes of land in New York are saturated with high levels of dioxins, PCBs and pesticides from the now abandoned shipbuilding operations.
One of her examples resonated with me particularly because I witnessed the effects of abandonment for myself. In the 2000s when I travelled regularly to Detroit, Michigan, each trip brought new evidence of the effects of the city’s decline. Initially I’d just see the occasional house with boarded up windows and doors but within a couple of years there were whole blocks of them, their occupants struggling to find work and unable to pay the mortgage. Pretty soon the vegetation took over — grass verges uncut and weeds springing up everywhere. It was so sad because they were once decent homes.
As you’d expect, much of Islands of Abandonment is pretty bleak. Flyn however sees it as ” a story of redemption.”
… it is a story of how the most polluted spots on Earth … can be rehabilitated through ecological processes. How the hardiest plants can find their toeholds, colonising concrete and rubble as they might sand dunes, how the palettes of ecological succession change as moss turns to golden grass, the the bright flats of poppies and lupins. How when a place has altered beyond recognition and all hope seems lost, it might still hold the potential for life of another kind.
Where other people see waste land and dereliction. Flyn sees beauty and hope. For her the way nature has reclaimed these abandoned spaces (offers an opportunity for environmental recovery.
We are in the midst of a huge, self-directed experiment in rewinding. Because abandonment IS rewilding, in a very pure sense as humans draw back and nature reclaims what once was hers. It has been taking place — is currently taking place — on a grand scale, while no-one has been watching. This is, I think an extremely exciting prospect.
Flyn isn’t arguing that allowing nature to take its course is the only way of tackling environmental degradation. But she does suggest that it holds a glimmer of hope for the future.
It’s a fascinating and thought-provoking book, thoroughly researched yet very readable. If you have any concerns about the damage we are doing to our planet, you’ll love this.