Science & Math
Nature & Ecology
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Islands of Abandonment: Nature Rebounding in the Post-Human Landscape
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.
"[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.
Editorial Reviews
FINALIST FOR THE WAINWRIGHT PRIZE
A VULTURE "BOOK OF THE SUMMER"
"[A] riveting collection of essays…. Through lush and poetic language, [Flyn] captures the vital forces at work in the natural world. This is nature writing at its most potent." -Publishers Weekly (Starred)
"Brave, unflinching, and keenly observant….Flyn writes with the soul of a poet and the eye of a painter…" -Booklist (Starred)
"Bracing, eye-opening, comprehensive, and essential, Islands of Abandonment is an energizing and important work. It affirms that nature is resilient, given half a chance, and should motivate all of us to try harder, even for the habitats that seem broken or hopeless."
--Jeff VanderMeer, New York Times bestselling author of Annihilation and the Southern Reach Trilogy
"[Flyn] has an eye for the fresh facet and telling detail, delivered with a crisp lyricism…Islands of Abandonment is ultimately far more than a factual survey of liminal geographies, although it's a well-researched one. And it is more than an eloquent foray into landscapes of the mind. By mapping the ecological recovery now sweeping the globe, it celebrates the power of benign neglect in enabling nature to do the journeywork of regeneration…" -Medium
"There have been trailblazing nonfiction titles on rewilding: most famously, Isabella Tree's Wilding, George Monbiot's Feral and, more recently, Cal Flyn's Islands of Abandonment." -LitHub
"Full of surprise and hope, spiced with horror. A vivid guide to the strange and resilient life of seemingly ruined and waste spaces, one that calls us to new understandings of nature and beauty."
--David George Haskell, Pulitzer Prize finalist and author of The Forest Unseen and The Songs of Trees
"A beautifully crafted tale of shame, hope, and redemption, lyrical, rigorous, and thrilling."
--Charles Foster, New York Times Bestselling author of Being a Beast
"At times desperately sad and in others desperately hopeful – but nowhere losing faith in this beautiful world. Perfect reading for the crisis."
--Will McCallum, author of How to Give Up Plastic and head of Oceans Greenpeace UK
"fascinating and brain-energising...full of detail and colour"
--The Times of London
"Scintillating…Flyn's research is meticulous, but what makes the book so extraordinary is the originality of her thought…she scatters observations like seeds, and you find them taking root in your brain."
--The Herald Magazine
"an exhilarating look at som...
A VULTURE "BOOK OF THE SUMMER"
"[A] riveting collection of essays…. Through lush and poetic language, [Flyn] captures the vital forces at work in the natural world. This is nature writing at its most potent." -Publishers Weekly (Starred)
"Brave, unflinching, and keenly observant….Flyn writes with the soul of a poet and the eye of a painter…" -Booklist (Starred)
"Bracing, eye-opening, comprehensive, and essential, Islands of Abandonment is an energizing and important work. It affirms that nature is resilient, given half a chance, and should motivate all of us to try harder, even for the habitats that seem broken or hopeless."
--Jeff VanderMeer, New York Times bestselling author of Annihilation and the Southern Reach Trilogy
"[Flyn] has an eye for the fresh facet and telling detail, delivered with a crisp lyricism…Islands of Abandonment is ultimately far more than a factual survey of liminal geographies, although it's a well-researched one. And it is more than an eloquent foray into landscapes of the mind. By mapping the ecological recovery now sweeping the globe, it celebrates the power of benign neglect in enabling nature to do the journeywork of regeneration…" -Medium
"There have been trailblazing nonfiction titles on rewilding: most famously, Isabella Tree's Wilding, George Monbiot's Feral and, more recently, Cal Flyn's Islands of Abandonment." -LitHub
"Full of surprise and hope, spiced with horror. A vivid guide to the strange and resilient life of seemingly ruined and waste spaces, one that calls us to new understandings of nature and beauty."
--David George Haskell, Pulitzer Prize finalist and author of The Forest Unseen and The Songs of Trees
"A beautifully crafted tale of shame, hope, and redemption, lyrical, rigorous, and thrilling."
--Charles Foster, New York Times Bestselling author of Being a Beast
"At times desperately sad and in others desperately hopeful – but nowhere losing faith in this beautiful world. Perfect reading for the crisis."
--Will McCallum, author of How to Give Up Plastic and head of Oceans Greenpeace UK
"fascinating and brain-energising...full of detail and colour"
--The Times of London
"Scintillating…Flyn's research is meticulous, but what makes the book so extraordinary is the originality of her thought…she scatters observations like seeds, and you find them taking root in your brain."
--The Herald Magazine
"an exhilarating look at som...
Readers Top Reviews
Christine Brownwilli
In her book Islands of Abandonment, Cal Flyn tells us we will travel ‘to some of the eeriest and most desolate places on Earth’. She is not joking. Her writing is beautifully descriptive, informative and easy to follow meaning we are there alongside her as she contemplates the sinister beauty of the golden grass ‘wisp thin like spun sugar’ that surrounds La Place a Gaz in the Forbidden Forest of Verdun, listens to the clicking of her dosimeter as she picks through the ruins around Chernobyl or revisits the other worldly landscape of the Five Sisters (West Lothian) characterised by the ‘Martian red and violet-grey’ of the ‘bings, to name just a few. Her research, alongside the fact that Flyn visited all of the locations described in the book, is immaculate, enabling us to be informed witnesses as we stand and watch the Armageddon like experience of Castle Peak (Montserrat) erupting and spewing out ‘avalanches of superheated rock, steam, ash and fumes’ or gaze at the heavens ‘black velvet shot through with stars’ above Chernobyl. Don’t be mistaken though, this book is not about disaster. It is about rejuvenation, hope and beauty. I was entranced by the descriptive quality of this book, the language is that of poetry, and by the tenderness with which Flyn writes for us as humans and for the planet we inhabit.
sophy Roberts
I've read two brilliant books this year. The first: George Saunders, 'A Swim in the Pond in the Rain', in which he digs into the art of writing. He writes: “A good story is not about a conclusion but alteration in the mind of the reader along the way.” Then I read Cal Flynn's 'Islands of Abandonment', and I knew that I'd entered the territory of a modern classic. Her writing — visceral, lyrical, honest — has shifted the way I will look at the world. I was made to sit up and think about humanity, landscape, nature, travel, time and space from a completely different perspective. Is it literary? Absolutely. Will it appeal to a wide readership? Yes. My 14-year-old son nicked my advance copy, and thinks it's really good. He finds it a little scary — WHAT HAVE WE DONE TO THIS EARTH? — but ultimately, the author is a cautious optimist, and the book, a song for redemption. I cannot recommend it highly enough. Just brilliant.
Courtney Sartin
What an incredible book- she demonstrates nature’s resilience in the face of incredible trauma in a very engaging, readable format. Highly recommend!
Eric MaroneyStreet S
Cal Flyn’s Islands of Abandonment: Nature Rebounding in the Post-Human Landscape is a fascinating study of the places where humans once lived, left, and are now seeing, as the sub-title informs us, a rebounding natural world. Flyn masterfully threads a fine line between acknowledging the extraordinary damage our species has done to our planet while at the same moment highlighting the very real and incredible ability of the earth to heal. This is seldom discussed in environmental debates. When people leave an area, whether it be the Red Zone in Verdun, the area around Chernobyl, or the expanses of blighted Detroit, nature does what it does best – break down the remains of human structures, and through the actions of water, wind, and encroaching plants and animals – conquer. There is something satisfying about the earth conquering us for a change - once we get the hell out of the way.
Short Excerpt Teaser
THE WASTE LAND
The Five Sisters, West Lothian, Scotland
Fifteen miles southwest of Edinburgh, a knuckled red fist rises from a soft green landscape: five peaks of rose-gold gravel stand bound together by grass and moss, like a Martian mountain range or earthworks on the grandest of scales. They are spoil heaps.
Each peak rises along a sharp ridge from the same point on the ground, fanning outward in geometric simplicity. Along these ridges, tracks once bore carriages aloft, bearing tons of steaming, shattered rock: discards from the early days of the modern oil industry.
For around six decades from the 1860s, Scotland was the world's leading oil producer, thanks to an innovative new method of distillation which transformed oil shale into fuel. These strange peaks stand in monument to those years, when one hundred and twenty works belched and roared, wrestling six hundred thousand barrels of oil a year from the ground in what had been, shortly before, a sleepy, agricultural region. The process was costly and effortful, however. To extract the oil, the shale had to be shattered and superheated. And it produced huge quantities of waste: for every ten barrels of oil, six tons of spent shale would be produced. In all, two hundred million tons of the stuff-and it had to go somewhere. Hence these enormous slag heaps. Twenty-seven of them in all, of which nineteen survive.
But to call them slag heaps is to understate their size, their stature, their constant presence in the landscape; unnatural both in form and scale. Locally, they are called "bings"-from the Old Norse, bingr, a heap, a tip, a bin.
This particular formation, the five-pronged pyramid, is known as the Five Sisters. Each of the sisters slopes gradually to its highest point, then falls steeply away. They rise from a flat and otherwise rather unremarkable landscape-muddy fields, pylons, hay bales, cattle-to become the most significant landmarks of the region: some pyramidal or square; some organic and lumpen; others still rising raw-flanked and red to plateaus like Australia's Uluru.
Mere tips at first, they grew into heaps that shifted and reformed like dunes. Then hillocks. Then, finally, mountains made from small chips of stone-each the size of a fingernail or a coin, with the brittle texture of broken terra-cotta. These mountains grew and spread, as barrow after barrow was dumped upon the heap. They rose from the land like loaves, swallowing all they came into contact with: thatched cottages, farmyards, trees. Under the northernmost arm of the Five Sisters an entire Victorian country house-stone-built and grand, with wide bay windows and a central cupola-lies entombed beneath the shale.
Oil production continued on a massive scale here until the Middle East's vast reserves of liquid oil came into ascendancy. In Scotland, the last shale mine closed in 1962, bringing to an end a local culture and way of life, leaving mining villages without the mines to employ them, and only the massive, brick-red bings as souvenirs. For a long time the bings were disliked: barren wastes that dominated the skyline, fit only to remind the region's inhabitants of an industry gone bust and an environment pillaged. No one wants to be defined by their spoil heaps. But what to do about them? That wasn't clear.
A few were leveled. A few later quarried afresh, as the red stone flakes-"blaes" as they are technically known-found a second life as a construction material. For a time blaes turned up everywhere: fashioned into pinkish building blocks, used as motorway infill, and-for a time-surfacing every all-weather pitch in Scotland, including the one at my high school. Blaes stuck in grazed knees, collected in our gym shoes, left a telltale dust across the sweaters used as goalposts-and generally formed the brick-red backdrop to our communal coming of age. But mainly the bings lay abandoned and ignored. After a while, the villages in their shadows grew used to their silent presence. To enjoy them, even.
It's easy to find the bings. You can see them from miles off. Just drive until you can't get any closer, and hop the fence. There's no fanfare. They are spoil heaps the size of cathedrals or hangars or office blocks, rising from the fields in artificial formations.
My aunt and uncle live in West Lothian, not far from the Five Sisters and even closer to their even larger cousin at Greendykes. Last time we went to visit my relatives, my partner and I took a detour to climb the sleeping giant. The light was flat and silver, the sky gray and cottoned over with cloud. We parked in a semi-derelict industrial estate, be...
The Five Sisters, West Lothian, Scotland
Fifteen miles southwest of Edinburgh, a knuckled red fist rises from a soft green landscape: five peaks of rose-gold gravel stand bound together by grass and moss, like a Martian mountain range or earthworks on the grandest of scales. They are spoil heaps.
Each peak rises along a sharp ridge from the same point on the ground, fanning outward in geometric simplicity. Along these ridges, tracks once bore carriages aloft, bearing tons of steaming, shattered rock: discards from the early days of the modern oil industry.
For around six decades from the 1860s, Scotland was the world's leading oil producer, thanks to an innovative new method of distillation which transformed oil shale into fuel. These strange peaks stand in monument to those years, when one hundred and twenty works belched and roared, wrestling six hundred thousand barrels of oil a year from the ground in what had been, shortly before, a sleepy, agricultural region. The process was costly and effortful, however. To extract the oil, the shale had to be shattered and superheated. And it produced huge quantities of waste: for every ten barrels of oil, six tons of spent shale would be produced. In all, two hundred million tons of the stuff-and it had to go somewhere. Hence these enormous slag heaps. Twenty-seven of them in all, of which nineteen survive.
But to call them slag heaps is to understate their size, their stature, their constant presence in the landscape; unnatural both in form and scale. Locally, they are called "bings"-from the Old Norse, bingr, a heap, a tip, a bin.
This particular formation, the five-pronged pyramid, is known as the Five Sisters. Each of the sisters slopes gradually to its highest point, then falls steeply away. They rise from a flat and otherwise rather unremarkable landscape-muddy fields, pylons, hay bales, cattle-to become the most significant landmarks of the region: some pyramidal or square; some organic and lumpen; others still rising raw-flanked and red to plateaus like Australia's Uluru.
Mere tips at first, they grew into heaps that shifted and reformed like dunes. Then hillocks. Then, finally, mountains made from small chips of stone-each the size of a fingernail or a coin, with the brittle texture of broken terra-cotta. These mountains grew and spread, as barrow after barrow was dumped upon the heap. They rose from the land like loaves, swallowing all they came into contact with: thatched cottages, farmyards, trees. Under the northernmost arm of the Five Sisters an entire Victorian country house-stone-built and grand, with wide bay windows and a central cupola-lies entombed beneath the shale.
Oil production continued on a massive scale here until the Middle East's vast reserves of liquid oil came into ascendancy. In Scotland, the last shale mine closed in 1962, bringing to an end a local culture and way of life, leaving mining villages without the mines to employ them, and only the massive, brick-red bings as souvenirs. For a long time the bings were disliked: barren wastes that dominated the skyline, fit only to remind the region's inhabitants of an industry gone bust and an environment pillaged. No one wants to be defined by their spoil heaps. But what to do about them? That wasn't clear.
A few were leveled. A few later quarried afresh, as the red stone flakes-"blaes" as they are technically known-found a second life as a construction material. For a time blaes turned up everywhere: fashioned into pinkish building blocks, used as motorway infill, and-for a time-surfacing every all-weather pitch in Scotland, including the one at my high school. Blaes stuck in grazed knees, collected in our gym shoes, left a telltale dust across the sweaters used as goalposts-and generally formed the brick-red backdrop to our communal coming of age. But mainly the bings lay abandoned and ignored. After a while, the villages in their shadows grew used to their silent presence. To enjoy them, even.
It's easy to find the bings. You can see them from miles off. Just drive until you can't get any closer, and hop the fence. There's no fanfare. They are spoil heaps the size of cathedrals or hangars or office blocks, rising from the fields in artificial formations.
My aunt and uncle live in West Lothian, not far from the Five Sisters and even closer to their even larger cousin at Greendykes. Last time we went to visit my relatives, my partner and I took a detour to climb the sleeping giant. The light was flat and silver, the sky gray and cottoned over with cloud. We parked in a semi-derelict industrial estate, be...
