Islands of Abandonment: Life in the Post-Human Landscape

"This is a terrific book that comes from a young writer who reads and researches and does not work as an academic. Cal Flyn has found this urgent theme, and her treatment of it as she explores and ‘visits’ it around the world, is really arresting. We live in a damaged world that is not going to return to any sort of ‘pristine’ condition. It’s sometimes called the Anthropocene age , where human endeavor has entered nature and done possibly irreversible things to it. Flyn has decided to go to places where, for one reason or another, the landscape is no longer sustainable for human life and, as may be, for many other forms of life too. The book asks us to consider ‘What is the consequence of all this ruination? What is it likely to do to us as well as to nature?’ The result is an intriguingly twisted and adjusted form of nature writing, applied to sites of catastrophe, slow or sudden, where nature and a few strangely resilient people may be finding their way into a new kind of existence. She goes to an intriguing collection of places, including the Exclusion Zone at Chernobyl, where she wanders about and looks and reads and researches what’s been going on since those dreadful events which presaged the end of the Soviet Union. It’s a familiar story, but Flyn is characteristically clever about it. She thinks about Tarkovsky’s film, Stalker (1979), which is about a “zone” that people have to enter, this alarming, dangerous, unpredictable place, which came to be associated with the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone via a computer game. She goes to some seriously toxic land at Verdun, still contaminated from the First World War , to Monserrat, where life has been fundamentally disrupted by volcanic explosion, to the city of Paterson on the Passaic, a super industrialized and heavily polluted river in New Jersey, which eventually oozes out into a coastal strait flowing out near New York City. She finds another example closer to home (which, for Flyn, is the Orkneys) on a little island called Swona, which has been abandoned by people and where the cattle have been ‘rewilding’ for long enough to have become rare objects of study. Detroit is the perfect city for this – and, incidentally, a place where ‘white flight’ intensified the slide into dereliction, reminding us that this is not just a story about industrial pollution and global warning. We’ve got books on the shortlist that follow a more academic approach, outlining an argument and drawing it to a considered conclusion. That’s not really how Flyn chooses to work. There is lots about the book that shows she has been reading and thinking about her theme conceptually, and not just observing it superficially. She tends to present us with considered situations and images rather than abstractly formulated conclusions. She closes by heading out into the desert from Palm Springs in Southern California. She passes an increasingly dried up inland sea at a place called Salton. Caused by a man-made breach in the Colorado river in 1905, the floodwaters settled sufficiently to turn the town into a popular resort, the ‘Salton Riviera.’ A century later, all that is left is a hyper-salted and algae-clogged dead sea in a stinking and poisoned dustbowl. Heading east, she finds another eerily dismal place in an area where a lot of nuclear testing and military training were done. Many of her closing images come from a long-closed Marine base called Camp Dunlop, now known as Slab City thanks to the outcasts—hippies, drifters and ‘meth heads’—who’ve chosen to move in. You get this more than a little dystopian picture of a new kind of life improvised in a depleted place where even the cactuses might as well be glowing. It’s an image of the world in serious trouble, but it comes with this unexpected sense of ‘raw splendour’ too. Flyn shows a world full of danger and alarm and threat: you never feel at ease in any of these places, and it is clear that great damage has been done to people as well as the flora and fauna. However, the book is not just another depressing ‘end of the world’ narrative. Flyn finds various forms of natural recolonization and adjustment, many of them very surprising, which give you an indication that, once humans are no longer just churning along in their accustomed ways, other possibilities do emerge in unexpected places. So the book’s sense of disaster comes with a strong sense of possibility and resilience too."

"This is so beautifully written, it’s poetic. She takes us to a variety of places that we have, frankly, mucked up and then abandoned, or just abandoned. So, Chernobyl where we mucked it up and then ran away; Detroit where the economy collapsed, and there are just all these empty properties; Scottish slag heaps, ‘bings’ they call them, and they’re made from ‘blaes’ which are small bits of shale gravel; a Scottish island where the last people left in 1974, leaving their cattle behind. She then charts what happened next, how nature recovers and copes and, in some cases, invents something else, something that will put up with radiation, say. She doesn’t let us off. There’s no suggestion that ‘it’s okay, whatever we do, nature will survive it.’ You do realize it’s very bad, but it’s a beautiful book."

"I have to admit that because I work as a reviewer and a critic, I’m a little bit sick of nature writing . It’s just been so huge. I wasn’t thinking ‘Oh good, some nature writing!’ when I opened this book. Which just tells you how extraordinarily good the book is—because I was just blown away by it. What makes it different is that while it’s certainly not a pollyannaish book—it’s not ‘don’t worry about the environment, it’s all going to be fine’—she does find a counter-narrative. She takes us to these desolate places where man has retreated, having apparently spoiled the place for good: Chernobyl , a World War One arsenic factory in France, Bikini Atoll. She goes to these eerie places, these unattractive places, these broken places, places that you wouldn’t wish on your worst enemy, and finds that nature has seeded itself there and is doing interesting things. She starts off with ‘bings’, which are these mountains of oil shale residue in Scotland. She tells the story of how some of these bings were saved by environmental people, who tried to make them look nice, planting them with special grasses. They haven’t done very well compared with the bings that were just left alone, which are now much, much more diverse and doing much better than the ones that were slightly landscaped to make them look pretty. The book is full of these counterintuitive moments that I just found fascinating. The takeaway message is that when we try and get involved—even when we try and make things better—we make things worse. There’s a sense in which nature is wiser. Also, although it’s very beautiful writing, the lyricism is really kept under control, for which I’m eternally grateful. Nature writing can become so performative. This is very disciplined. Yes, she can write a beautiful sentence, but it is always in service of what she’s trying to tell us. I thought that was great."