Islands of Abandonment: Life in the Post-Human Landscape

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This book explores the extraordinary places where humans no longer live – or survive in tiny, precarious numbers – to give us a possible glimpse of what happens when mankind’s impact on nature is forced to stop. Photograph: Chris Page View image in fullscreen Cal Flyn’s hypnotic tones chime with the richly descriptive and atmospheric nature of her prose. Bridgerton’s Adjoa Andoh reads this bold imagining of the life of the medieval nun and poet Marie de France, half-sister of Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine. Thus, she talks of ecological succession in abandoned landscapes when plants recolonize, including both human wastelands and sites of natural disasters.

Cal Flyn’s Islands of Abandonment is a book about abandoned places: ghost towns and exclusion zones, no man’s lands and post-industrial hinterlands – and what happens when nature is allowed to reclaim its place. Author and journalist Cal Flyn explores thirteen such locations and here reports their sights, sounds, and smells. I definitely think nothing can top this for my non fiction reads this year, just wish I had gotten to it. This sees her engage with the Ehrlichs and the Scrantons of this world who believe it is already too late, that the geological forces put into motion will run their course no matter what, and that the best we can do is brace for impact. She has studied the scientific literature (carefully referenced in endnotes) and acknowledges the input of two scientists.

Abandoned ship scrapyards around New York hide a darker legacy of soil and sludge laced with lethal levels of dioxins, PCBs, and pesticides that is best left undisturbed.

Flyn sees the same everywhere; humans leave and nature comes rushing back in like an unstoppable tide. Even a century later, the Place à Gaz in northern France that Flyn infiltrates remains a virtually sterile blemish on the land: an immense pile of unused chemical weapons was burned here after the war. She introduces Greg Garrard’s notion of disanthropy: “ the yearning for the absence or negation of humans” (p.A vivid reflection on the “post-human landscape”, Islands of Abandonment finds its author embarking on a series of bold expeditions to examine the marks left on our land after humans have retreated.

By turns haunted and hopeful, this luminously written world study is pinned together with profound insight and new ecological discoveries that together map an answer to the big questions: what happens after we're gone, and how far can our damage to nature be undone? In Detroit, once America's fourth-largest city, entire streets of houses are falling in on themselves, looters slipping through otherwise silent neighbourhoods. I hope that it will make people focus on the future and when I say the future I mean not next year or the year after but possibly beyond our own generations.

For all ebook purchases, you will be prompted to create an account or login with your existing HarperCollins username and password. A dark howl of decay and human hubris, shot through with the inevitable rebirth of nature, this book haunted me long after I finished it. Shortlisted for this year’s Baillie Gifford prize for nonfiction (the winner is announced on 16 November), the book describes the isolated and often eerily dystopian fortress islands, irradiated exclusion zones, abandoned towns and shuttered industrial sites that have been recolonised by the natural world. Exploring some of the eeriest, most desolate places in the world, Cal Flyn asks: what happens after humans pick up and leave? Dotted around our planet are numerous areas now devoid of human habitation: ghost towns, conflict zones, pollution hotspots, and areas wrecked by natural forces.

From Tanzanian mountains to the volcanic Caribbean, the forbidden areas of France to the mining regions of Scotland, Flyn brings together some of the most desolate, eerie, ravaged and polluted areas in the world - and shows how, against all odds, they offer our best opportunities for environmental recovery. Because her forays have shown her the power of nature to rebound—albeit damaged, changed, and with great time and effort—she ultimately cannot accept their conclusions. These abandoned sites offer many case studies of how our actions affect evolution in animals and plants. Surprisingly rich in ecological and biological detail, Islands of Abandonment is a poetic and spellbinding travelogue.By turns haunted and hopeful, this luminously written world study is pinned together with profound insight and new ecological discoveries that together map an answer to the big questions: what happens after we’re gone, and how far can our damage to nature be undone? And that chapter for me was very magical, it was almost like a fairy story the way that these plants change and colour change and grow or shrink if metal's in their bodies and I just love that. Exploring extraordinary places where humans no longer live – or survive in tiny, precarious numbers – Islands of Abandonment give us a glimpse of what nature gets up to when we’re not there to see it. That's what we as humans find very difficult to think about and that we can often be very impatient when we have conservation projects because we want to see results now.