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. 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. This is a book about abandoned places: ghost towns and exclusion zones, no man’s lands and fortress islands – and what happens when nature is allowed to reclaim its place.

Posted in ecology, environmental issues, wildlife conservation and tagged book review, evolutionary biology, HarperCollins, invasive species, nature writing, pollution, post-industrial sites, radioactivity, urban environments, warfare, wastelands, William Collins on September 8, 2021 by inquisitivebiologist. Flyn reveals how “when a place has been altered beyond recognition and all hope seems lost, it might still hold the potential for life of another kind”. 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.According to the IUCN, more than half of the worst invasive plant species are escapees from botanical gardens, though she is also balanced enough to discuss the arguments put forth in Inheritors of the Earth about invasive species not always causing disruption. 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. Whether due to war or disaster, disease or economic decay, each extraordinary place visited in this book has been left to its own devices for decades.

But what we need to be thinking about is what are the results in 50 years, and 100 years, what are the results of withdrawing from an area and allowing nature its head? On Montserrat, the village of Plymouth was buried by the eruption of a volcano that “ is a known erratic, a drunken lout known to stir into destructive rage even after years of troubled sleep” (p. 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. 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.Islands of Abandonment: Life in the Post-Human Landscape is available on William Collins, 9hr , 6min. This has been particularly well-studied in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone but is in no way exclusive to it. And yet, Flyn sees the same everywhere; humans leave* and nature comes rushing back in like an unstoppable tide. The author brings so much insight and perspective to the abandoned areas discussed, it's incredibly moving.