Islands of Abandonment
Nature Rebounding in the Post-Human Landscape
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
A SUNDAY TIMES BEST NON-FICTION BOOK OF THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY
A beautiful, lyrical exploration of the places where nature is flourishing in our absence
"[Flyn] captures the dread, sadness, and wonder of beholding the results of humanity's destructive impulse, and she arrives at a new appreciation of life, 'all the stranger and more valuable for its resilence.'" —The New Yorker
Some of the only truly feral cattle in the world wander a long-abandoned island off the northernmost tip of Scotland. A variety of wildlife not seen in many lifetimes has rebounded on the irradiated grounds of Chernobyl. A lush forest supports thousands of species that are extinct or endangered everywhere else on earth in the Korean peninsula's narrow DMZ.
Cal Flyn, an investigative journalist, exceptional nature writer, and promising new literary voice visits the eeriest and most desolate places on Earth that due to war, disaster, disease, or economic decay, have been abandoned by humans. What she finds every time is an "island" of teeming new life: nature has rushed in to fill the void faster and more thoroughly than even the most hopeful projections of scientists.
Islands of Abandonment is a tour through these new ecosystems, in all their glory, as sites of unexpected environmental significance, where the natural world has reasserted its wild power and promise. And while it doesn't let us off the hook for addressing environmental degradation and climate change, it is a case that hope is far from lost, and it is ultimately a story of redemption: the most polluted spots on Earth can be rehabilitated through ecological processes and, in fact, they already are.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Journalist Flyn (Thicker Than Water) travels to abandoned wilderness sites around the globe to study how ecosystems regrow in this riveting collection of essays. The world, Flyn writes, "has a great capacity for repair, for recovery, for forgiveness... if we can only learn to let it do so." In "The Waste Land," Flyn argues that "eyesore sites" such as the industrial slag heaps of West Lothian, Scotland, present a new way of looking at nature in terms of "ecological virility" instead of beauty, as such sites are often biodiverse. "Unnatural Selection" highlights the rapidly evolving marine species in Arthur Kill, Staten Island, that have demonstrated "the ability to adapt to a befouled and ruinous world, and even thrive there," while "Alien Invasion" takes readers to Amani, Tanzania, to witness the havoc wrought on old-grown forests by invasive species introduced to the area by Europeans in the early 1900s. At each location—disputed territory in Cyprus, a village decimated by volcanic eruptions in Montserrat—Flyn finds redemption in the "new life springing from the wreckage of the old." Through lush and poetic language, she captures the vital forces at work in the natural world. This is nature writing at its most potent.
