Cal Flyn

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

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

Cal Flyn’s book is a wonderful account of the resilience of nature, and its capacity to reclaim and at least start to repair some of the most heavily damaged tracts of land. Flyn visits various regions around the world that had previously borne the ravages of industrialisation, and sees how wildlife is gradually reasserting itself, despite the severest of challenges. I have to pause here, because reading the preceding sentences, I realise that the book might be misconstrued as a denial of show more the threats that the environment and planet face, and I am sure that nothing could be further from the author’s mind.

She does, however, extend some degree of hope that, if the colossal rate of endemic environmental damage can be slowed, then there may be scope for some natural healing. She begins with consideration of slag heaps in West Lothian, just fifteen miles south west of Edinburgh caused by the extensive (though ultimately short lived) mining of shale oil, which produced up to 600,000 barrels annually. Known as ‘the Bings’, the red hills look like something one might expect to find on Mars. Originally heaps of shale (six tons of which were created for every ten barrels of oil recovered), they were left towering over the countryside, and wholly barren. They are now being reclaimed by nature with the ponds around their bases now teeming with life, and rare wildflowers scatted all over the man-made hill. Deer, badgers and grouse wander at large across the landscape, and they Bings sport more species of plant than Ben Nevis.

Flyn analyses several other locales that have suffered such potentially catastrophic damage, including the land around Chernobyl, and offers similar reports from all of them. Nature is starting, very slowly and very gradually, to re-establish a foothold. It is, of course, a painfully slow process. The Bings have been barren for almost a century, and the signs of life around Chernobyl are still meagre, nearly forty years after the meltdown.

Flyn writes with great clarity augmented by occasionally beautiful imagery. While her concern for the environment and the planet are evident, she does not seem to preach, and puts her arguments fairly and compellingly. This was a fascinating, enjoyable and thought-provoking book. 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