Islands of Abandonment

 
 
Islands of Abandonment

Nature Rebounding in the Post-Human Landscape

by Cal Flyn

Viking

2021

 

 

In the introduction to Islands of Abandonment, author Cal Flyn explains that she started her project of visiting and reporting on places that humans no longer lived or used expecting to talk only about the devastation. There are good reasons why humans have designated these places as off-limits, and yet what Flyn found, when she looked, was evidence that the absence of humans was more beneficial to life in these places than presence of whatever we're avoiding (the radiation, or toxic spills, or unexploded ordinance, or whatever) was harmful.

The general finding at each site she visited was that slowly, eventually, after humans had been away long enough, diverse plants and animal species moved back in to the place people left behind, and these places often go on to become some of the most biodiverse places the world, providing stopping points for migratory birds, habitat for endangered species. These are some of the most dangerous and polluted places on Earth, and they are also refuges for species that might otherwise be extinct.

The technical name for this process is 'succession.' Pollen and spores blow in. Roots extend. Different kinds of plants jockey for space, then settle into niches. Often, forest regrows. Insects lay eggs. Animals seek temporary shelter, then make homes. Without intervention, a new ecosystem thrives. There are few areas of untouched wilderness left, but these reclaimed spaces represent a kind of feral nature.

Flyn goes to Chernobyl, closed off due to radiation, to the Zone Rouge in France, where forest grows over denuded WWI battlefields, except for a spot where they burned all the unused chemical weapons, and still nothing grows in the toxic ash. She visits the DMZ dividing the island of Cyprus, and to the abandoned collective farms left fallow after the fall of the USSR. She goes to a former colonial botanical garden in Tanzania, to a small island off Scotland where the people left but the cows remained, become feral and de-domesticated along with the land.

Flyn's book is divided into 4 parts. In the first part, she looks at clear success stories of re-wilding. In the second, she focuses on partially-abandoned places where people still live, including depopulated Detroit. As Flyn notes, every place she visited has some human presence, both people who stayed, and people who moved in after the others left. In the third part, she looks at places where the human impact lingers, so that it's not a return to the previous ecology but the birth of something hybrid and new.

And in the last part, she looks at the island of Montserrat, where volcanic ash now buries ⅔ of the land, and the Salton Sea in California, where over the course of the 20th century, suprise flooding turned a desert basin into an inland sea, and then evaporation turned it first toxic, then back to desert. These are places made unlivable by natural processes, but in their scale and scope, Flyn sees premonitions of the effects of climate change and pollution caused by human activity. If most of the book has seemed sort of hopeful (that the Earth can and has recovered from some of the worst we've done to it, just by being left alone) this section reminds us to still fear what human survival will look like as the planet continues to warm and change.