Book Review: Islands of Abandonment
Flyn, herself a resident of a remote Scottish area, takes us on a journey through places as diverse as the blaes (huge spoil tips) of West Lothian, the "Green Line" DMZ in Cyprus, the vast abandoned collective farms of the former Soviet Union, and of course the Chernobyl exclusion zone (what book about humans brutalising the environment would be complete with it?) We visit the Place a Gaz in France (which is polluted by war detritus heavy metals), the contaminated mouth of the Passaic River in New Jersey (which is stuffed full of dioxins), the urban decay of Detroit, the environment catastrophe of the Salton Sea in California (honestly one of the most horrific of all the places she goes, it literally reads like a dystopian novel on steroids), the species escape disaster that arose from an abandoned research station / botanical garden in Tanzania, the abandoned Orkney island of Swoma.
In every chapter, Flyn's description of the problem is utterly compelling, but equally engrossing is her discovery that in *every single case*, these environments that have been ruined by humans then left literally for dead are finding ways to un-ruin themselves, or at least, stubbornly assert that life will continue (even if it looks completely different to what was there before). This kind of self-driven rewilding is more resilient and much more successful than any attempted human-led rewilding, which certainly supports the idea that the world does its best work when we just get out of the damn way.
My favourite two chapters both focused on the ways in which rewilding builds something that isn't the same as the pre-human pristine environment, but rather is a successor to it, with a vibrancy and potency all its own. The chapter on the spontaneous reforesting of eastern Europe on the old abandoned Soviet farms, which are forming a vast carbon sink that is offsetting the forests lost to deforestation in South America, is particularly fascinating, and particularly heartening. And the Swoma chapter, which looks at a herd of cattle left behind on the island that are now feral (effectively rewilded), had me mesmerised, with Flyn's observations about the herd's behaviour and how different it is to what we think of as "natural" cow behaviour (turns out, what we've been observing is the behaviour of domestication, not the instinctual behaviour of the animal).
Flyn does not elide the scope of the problem or the danger that we as a species and all other animal species are in, and nor does she suggest a Pollyanna approach of just sitting back and trusting that Gaia will take care of us all. She spends a sobering half-chapter on the notion that the earth as a planet may be more Medean than Gaian - utterly ready to casually wipe out life, maybe close to all life, if things get too far our of whack. As she points out, it's happened before, although last time it was a comet rather than a cocky little over-evolved simian species that was responsible.
That said, while Flyn's book is not a sugarcoat, it is, I think, ultimately not a dystopia either. What it is, rather, is a contemplative and quite thrilling journey into how complex the earth, and its life forms, really are, and how the capacity for rebuilding and going on is present in even the most dire and desperate circumstances.
It brings me great comfort to think that it is still very possible that life on earth will survive us, even if it looks quite different from now. And that's my takeaway from this book - humans are probably cooked as a species (unless we start moving offworld, assuming that is possible, I suppose), but the earth is probably not, and other life forms still have a fighting chance, even if it's via weird and wonderful adaptations to our comprehensive fouling of the nest. There's a real hope in that idea.
9/10 for me. Loved it, would heartily recommend.
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