Cal Flyn

What happens when we humans stop intervening in a place that we've previously been exploiting in some benign or (more often) harmful way? Bad things, you would expect, as our poisons and displacements of nature continue to take their effect, and a lot of the time that's clearly true, but Cal Flyn sets out to show in this book that nature is often a lot more resilient than we give it credit for. Or, to put it another way, that the simple presence of humans is usually more destructive to the show more ecology of a place than any nastiness we leave behind. She shows us the exceptional biodiversity to be found in places like Scottish oil-shale spoil heaps, the Cyprus ceasefire line, the Chernobyl exclusion zone, or abandoned agricultural land in the former Soviet Union. Rare species can sometimes recolonise a place astonishingly quickly on their own, and more effectively than happens in some managed nature reserves. Of course, that doesn't happen everywhere, and there are some poisons so harmful that it's very unlikely that life will ever find a way to work around them.

Flyn also looks at social effects of abandonment: the way "blight" spreads in a declining city like Detroit, damaging the physical and mental health of the community. But also at the way abandoned sites can provide a haven — albeit not a very safe one — for artistic and political expression by people who don't feel they belong in bourgeois society. She meets junkies in abandoned mills in New Jersey and survivalists on a former military base in the California desert, and tries to show us what they are about, even though she herself clearly doesn't feel very comfortable in their company.

Flyn makes it clear that she doesn't want to be read as an apologist for environmental recklessness, and that it is always better not to break things in the first place than to hope they will repair themselves, but she does seem to be arguing that an unrelieved pessimistic note in discourse about the environment can be even more damaging than false optimism. If we are convinced that life on earth is doomed anyway, there's not much incentive to change things. Flyn is clearly sure that life on earth will continue, with or without us, and that the best way to improve the odds is to stop whatever it is we are doing... show less

Islands of Abandonment is an exploration and meditation on how nature has recovered and reclaimed many abandoned and damaged sites around the world. Author Cal Flyn explores both well-known sites, such as Chernobyl and the DMZ between North and South Korea, and many more lesser-known ones, such as abandoned farmland in Estonia regrowing as forest and a tiny island in Scotland dominated by a herd of feral cows. She also explores the human history that led to such places being abandoned and show more meets those at the fringes of society who have chosen to make these places their homes. At turns both horrifying and hopeful, Islands of Abandonment is a fascinating, provocative, and sometimes disturbing read. It is encouraging to read about species adapting to and reclaiming even the most highly disturbed sites (and who knew that forest cover is actually increasing in some countries?), yet more than a little unsettling to see the damage that humans have done (and continue to do) to their environments. I think this is one of the best non-fiction books that I have read in some time, and it has given me much to think about. Highly recommended. show less

This is quite good, and unusual. Cal graduated from Oxford University in experimental psychology, with a focus on the 'psychology of abandoned places'. A fancy way of saying, she has thought deeply about the many dimensions of abandonment. She has literary sensibilities, an eye for the poignant, and is a great writer. Cal visits a dozen places around the world and riffs on different themes. My favorite is about the herd of feral cows on an abandoned Scottish island farm - what does it mean show more to be feral, when will they revert to a fully wild species, will they ever be rid of vestiges of domestication? How do cows live when divorced from humans - it turns out, they are pretty interesting, unlike domestic cows. Their lives are legendary, with battles between males for dominance, the landscapes scarred by fights, the rise and fall of "kings", hermits, bone graveyard visits. Definitely in need of a Watership Down treatment.

Ultimately you get a sense that the human/nature divide doesn't really exist, humans are a part of the natural processes. This might seem obvious, but for many, humans are a weed, an invasive species. She mentions that invasive often go through a boom and bust cycle, the bigger the boom the harder they fall. Well, much to consider, nothing definitive or preachy, just some thoughts bravely exposed while exploring abandoned places. show less

Once plastered white, the walls are marbled with grime, misted here and there in deep mold-green. Soon, though, it's too dark to tell. Despite stern words, spoken inward, I feel my pulse quicken.
At every corner, where the unknown looms tenebrous and forbidding, I need to force myself forward--take a breath, touch my fingers to the wall, feel my way around. I smell wet stone, soil, decay; the smell of the crypt....
The wind is moving fast through empty space: mighty currents of air, sucking show more the breath form my lungs. And the birds--the birds rise up as one great moving, wheeling mass. Screaming, squalling, outraged to see me-- here, now, on this island of abandonment.

While I expected the subject matter to be fascinating, I was unprepared for how lyrical and intimate Cal Flyn's writing is. I absolutely love this book.

The introduction, with the above excerpt, details Ms. Flyn's exploration of Inchkeith:
an island in the Firth of Forth, just four miles across the water from Edinburgh. In its time Inchkeith has been many things: the remote site for an early Christian "school of the prophets," later a quarantine island for those stricken with syphilis (banished there "till God provided for their health"), then a plague hospital and even an island prison, with water for walls.
It was also home to King James IV's "forbidden experiment". Last abandoned after WWII, it's become a breeding ground for dozens of bird species, as well as birthing grounds for seals, and home to various butterflies and moths.

In the first chapter, she also stays close to home, exploring the spoil heaps (bings) left behind in Scotland after the collapse of the oil industry, tying in lines from T.S. Eliot's Wasteland with the flora and fauna that have gradually taken root (literally and figuratively) in this former wasteland.

The second chapter, about the Buffer Zone in Cyprus, blew me away. Did everyone except me know about this? The Atlantic covered it in 2014. In addition to an exploration of what has happened physically in this "No Man's Land," she tells the story of Yiannakis Rousos, whose family fled their successful citrus farm in 1974 and (although they still own the land on paper) have been unable to return since.

From there, she explores an abandoned Soviet farming collective in Estonia, Chernobyl, Detroit, Paterson and Arthur Kill in New Jersey, the Zone Rouge, the Amani Imperial Biological-Agricultural Institute in Tanzania (where invasive species have spread outside an essentially abandoned botanical garden), then back to Scotland, to the island of Swona (home to some of the only truly feral cows in the world), to Plymouth, Montserrat (buried by volcanic flows in 1995), and finally to the Salton Sea in California.

Along the way, she explores what happens when humans abandon an area, often after leaving it virtually uninhabitable, and what that could mean for the planet in the long run.

It's a fascinating read -- one that I enthusiastically recommend and will read again.

Nonfiction November 2021: Book #1 show less