Book Review: Islands of Abandonment
This is an outstanding reflection on the complex and often surprising things that happen when humans completely destroy a landscape and then abandon it, for reasons as diverse as "used up all the resources", "irradiated it ooops", "poisoned it ooops again", "political structures collapsed so we didn't need it anymore", "economic forces shifted away", and "failed to account for natural disasters in a compellingly obtuse human way". 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 R...