There was a lot of good, thought-provoking, and intriguing content here. But taken as a whole, it felt disjointed, abruptly shifting from one primary site to another. Only at the end does Flyn make clear the underlying pattern for her choices and the ways they correlate. It is as if she buried the lede, aiming for revelation only at the end. IMO, she should have been more clear and reinforced the pattern more frequently. It is only for this unsatisfactory feeling that I am giving 3 stars; otherwise, I would probably have given 4. ( )

Cal Flyn’s book is a wonderful account of the resilience of nature, and its capacity to reclaim and at least start to repair some of the most heavily damaged tracts of land. Flyn visits various regions around the world that had previously borne the ravages of industrialisation, and sees how wildlife is gradually reasserting itself, despite the severest of challenges. I have to pause here, because reading the preceding sentences, I realise that the book might be misconstrued as a denial of the threats that the environment and planet face, and I am sure that nothing could be further from the author’s mind.

She does, however, extend some degree of hope that, if the colossal rate of endemic environmental damage can be slowed, then there may be scope for some natural healing. She begins with consideration of slag heaps in West Lothian, just fifteen miles south west of Edinburgh caused by the extensive (though ultimately short lived) mining of shale oil, which produced up to 600,000 barrels annually. Known as ‘the Bings’, the red hills look like something one might expect to find on Mars. Originally heaps of shale (six tons of which were created for every ten barrels of oil recovered), they were left towering over the countryside, and wholly barren. They are now being reclaimed by nature with the ponds around their bases now teeming with life, and rare wildflowers scatted all over the man-made hill. Deer, badgers and grouse wander at large across the landscape, and they Bings sport more species of plant than Ben Nevis.

Flyn analyses several other locales that have suffered such potentially catastrophic damage, including the land around Chernobyl, and offers similar reports from all of them. Nature is starting, very slowly and very gradually, to re-establish a foothold. It is, of course, a painfully slow process. The Bings have been barren for almost a century, and the signs of life around Chernobyl are still meagre, nearly forty years after the meltdown.

Flyn writes with great clarity augmented by occasionally beautiful imagery. While her concern for the environment and the planet are evident, she does not seem to preach, and puts her arguments fairly and compellingly. This was a fascinating, enjoyable and thought-provoking book. ( )

Este libro es una hermosa exploración de lugares donde la naturaleza florece en nuestra ausencia. Algunas de las únicas reses verdaderamente asilvestradas del mundo deambulan por una isla abandonada desde hace tiempo en el extremo norte de Escocia. En los terrenos irradiados de Chernóbil ha resurgido una variedad de vida silvestre que no se había visto en mucho tiempo. En la estrecha zona desmilitarizada de la península de Corea, un exuberante bosque alberga miles de especies extinguidas o en peligro de extinción en cualquier otro lugar. Flyn visita los lugares más sombríos y desolados de la Tierra que, debido a la guerra, la catástrofe, la enfermedad o la decadencia económica, han sido abandonados por los humanos. Lo que encuentra en cada ocasión es una «isla» de nueva vida: la naturaleza se ha apresurado a llenar el vacío más rápido y con mayor profundidad que las proyecciones más optimistas de los científicos. Islas del abandono es un recorrido por estos nuevos ecosistemas, como lugares de inesperada importancia medioambiental, donde el mundo natural ha reafirmado su poder salvaje.

What happens when we humans stop intervening in a place that we've previously been exploiting in some benign or (more often) harmful way? Bad things, you would expect, as our poisons and displacements of nature continue to take their effect, and a lot of the time that's clearly true, but Cal Flyn sets out to show in this book that nature is often a lot more resilient than we give it credit for. Or, to put it another way, that the simple presence of humans is usually more destructive to the ecology of a place than any nastiness we leave behind. She shows us the exceptional biodiversity to be found in places like Scottish oil-shale spoil heaps, the Cyprus ceasefire line, the Chernobyl exclusion zone, or abandoned agricultural land in the former Soviet Union. Rare species can sometimes recolonise a place astonishingly quickly on their own, and more effectively than happens in some managed nature reserves. Of course, that doesn't happen everywhere, and there are some poisons so harmful that it's very unlikely that life will ever find a way to work around them.

Flyn also looks at social effects of abandonment: the way "blight" spreads in a declining city like Detroit, damaging the physical and mental health of the community. But also at the way abandoned sites can provide a haven — albeit not a very safe one — for artistic and political expression by people who don't feel they belong in bourgeois society. She meets junkies in abandoned mills in New Jersey and survivalists on a former military base in the California desert, and tries to show us what they are about, even though she herself clearly doesn't feel very comfortable in their company.

Flyn makes it clear that she doesn't want to be read as an apologist for environmental recklessness, and that it is always better not to break things in the first place than to hope they will repair themselves, but she does seem to be arguing that an unrelieved pessimistic note in discourse about the environment can be even more damaging than false optimism. If we are convinced that life on earth is doomed anyway, there's not much incentive to change things. Flyn is clearly sure that life on earth will continue, with or without us, and that the best way to improve the odds is to stop whatever it is we are doing... ( )

For me, the vivid descriptions of deserted landscapes are what elevate this connected series of essays about geography and ecology. These descriptions resonate with my “romantic” experience of ruins and changed “post-human” landscapes, abandoned crofts on rugged hillsides and abandoned industrial buildings. But Flyn starts each chapter with a beautifully described landscape, proceeding to then examine similarities and differences of ecological “recovery”.
• The Waste Land of post-industrial spoil heaps in West Lothian, Scotland, where oil used to be extracted from shale, closest to a newly volcanic landscape, slowly growing vegetation, starting with lichen
• The relatively narrow strip of no-man’s land in Cyprus running between the Greek south and Turkish occupied north, now populated by rare species after forty years without human occupation
• Starting in fall of Soviet collective farming in Estonia, Flyn considers “succession” of grassland to forest and carbon sequestration of abandoned farmland - Mongol invasion and Black Death, post-Columbian population deaths from disease in the Americas
• Exploration of the deserted villages around Chernobyl. Exclusion zone around Fukushima is still 140 square miles
• Urban “blight” of Detroit, gradually depopulated since about 1950, with a population of 1.85 million reduced to about 670,000 in 2019, because of the reorganisation and decline of the automobile industry.
• Paterson, New Jersey - more industrial decay, in perhaps the birthplace of American capitalism, within view of Manhattan. Humans move through this space, as dropouts from normal society, but perhaps obtaining a freedom (with consequent danger) not available elsewhere. Again the man made landscape is gradually broken down by nature, grass, weeds, shrubs and trees.
• Arthur Kill, Staten Island illustrates rapid evolution, or unnatural selection, as pesticides and chemical waste, DDT and PCBs (Polychlorinated biphenyls), kill the vast majority of wildlife, except for a very few species such as killifish that are numerous, diverse and lucky. Killifish have evolved to tolerate far higher levels of PCBs than other creatures, and so have filled an otherwise unoccupied niche in the environment.
• Zone Rouge, Verdun, France - heavy metal waste burned on a WW1 battlefield leaving a barren, toxic area, now being slowly populated by heavy metal tolerant plants, with references to Tarkovsky’s Stalker film
• Amani, Tanzania - a nineteenth century botanical garden and research station created by Germans and then British, largely underused since the 1970’s, although there is still minimal maintenance to the buildings. This chapter explores the unintended consequences of invasive plant species.
• Swona, Scotland - an island off the north coast of Scotland, uninhabited since the 1970’s where the cattle have been left to become feral, which explores the concept of losing domesticity in domestic animals
• Plymouth, Monserrat - a town destroyed by volcanic activity and ash, rather like a modern day Pompeii, looks more at the psychological impact on those residents who remain close to the town.
• Salton Sea, California - an enormous lake created by flooding from the Colorado river in 1905 (and on multiple previous occasions), which is slowly evaporating to create a toxic saline environment. This final chapter explores both the physical changes to the environment and the changes from a recreational resort until the 1990’s to a shanty town, recalling descriptions in Nomadland (or Mad Max).
The book ends considering the ecological outcomes, mainly overall negative, but also positive, discussed. An enjoyable, thought provoking, well written and engaging book. ( )