Islands of Abandonment: Life in the Post-Human Landscape

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A dark howl of decay and human hubris, shot through with the inevitable rebirth of nature, this book haunted me long after I finished it. Cal Flyn Has recently been shortlisted for the British Academy Book Prize for Global Cultural Understanding. I know that when I think about the environment when I think about climate change and all the damage that's been done, it is overpowering and I think to move on and to keep going every day it is important for us to have that sense of hope and optimism.

Maybe painstaking is the wrong word, she opines, for it “ implies slow deliberate travel in a single direction. The rock elder statesman brings wit and warmth to his reading of his memoir, in which he traces his beginnings from the Virginian suburbs, to playing drums in Nirvana and filling stadiums in his band, Foo Fighters. By turns haunted and hopeful, this luminously written world study is pinned together with profound insight and new ecological discoveries that together map an answer to the big questions: what happens after we’re gone, and how far can our damage to nature be undone?These abandoned sites offer many case studies of how our actions affect evolution in animals and plants. Flyn ponders what lessons this holds for our intensive, hands-on conservation efforts that often include culling, “ one of the biggest ethical quandaries at the heart of comtemporary conservation” (p. That's what we as humans find very difficult to think about and that we can often be very impatient when we have conservation projects because we want to see results now. Flyn sees the same everywhere; humans leave and nature comes rushing back in like an unstoppable tide.

She discusses rapid evolution, such as fish becoming insensitive to PCBs, and coevolution; and how invasive species settling in “ does throw a little cold water on the idea of ecosystems as the intricately wrought, carefully balanced product of millennia of coevolution” (p. Flyn reveals how “when a place has been altered beyond recognition and all hope seems lost, it might still hold the potential for life of another kind”.Cal Flyn’s Islands of Abandonment is a book about abandoned places: ghost towns and exclusion zones, no man’s lands and post-industrial hinterlands – and what happens when nature is allowed to reclaim its place. Yet, having acknowledged the devastation humans have wrought, she finds cause for optimism in the most desolate terrain where vegetation has flourished and the animal kingdom has adapted. Abandoned ship scrapyards around New York hide a darker legacy of soil and sludge laced with lethal levels of dioxins, PCBs, and pesticides that is best left undisturbed.