Islands of Abandonment: Life in the Post-Human Landscape

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To access your ebook(s) after purchasing, you can download the free Glose app or read instantly on your browser by logging into Glose. Now for the bit that was new to me: in some abandoned sites invasive species initially run rampant to then fall victim to native diseases or pests years or decades later.

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. She introduces Greg Garrard’s notion of disanthropy: “ the yearning for the absence or negation of humans” (p.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. Elsewhere, she travels to Estonia and the land that was once the site of Soviet-era collective farms, and to Plymouth in Montserrat, a town entombed under 40 feet of mud and lava save for the tops of the buildings.

Guardian Australia acknowledges the traditional owners and custodians of Country throughout Australia and their connections to land, waters and community.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.

Abandoned places are like magnets to a certain group of people, yet the underground world of urban explorers does not feature in this book.

Flyn wields the pen of a poet but never loses sight of the importance of getting the biological details right. 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? I went to an area that had been the front line during the First World War and they had burnt a lot of chemical weapons in a particular, well what is now a clearing in the woods, and the soil has become impregnated with heavy metals. Author and journalist Cal Flyn explores thirteen such locations and here reports their sights, sounds, and smells. I know that when I think about the environment when I think about climate change and all the damage that's been done, it is overpowering and I think to move on and to keep going every day it is important for us to have that sense of hope and optimism.

Aside from the basic premise, which is interesting enough, the element of the book I found most fascinating was the back-stories to all the locations covered, detailing the many and varied. In this time, nature has been left to work unfettered – offering a glimpse of how abandoned land, even the most polluted regions of the world, might offer our best opportunities for environmental recovery. 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.Devoid of self-indulgence or decadent ruin porn, I instead found Islands of Abandonment a thoughtfully written and utterly spellbinding book. Filled with understanding and adventure … Written with a beautiful attention to detail and a generous and imaginative frame of mind. Previously she has been a reporter for both The Sunday Times and The Daily Telegraph, and a contributing editor at The Week magazine.