“Islands of Abandonment” and The World We Cannot Repair

The author’s copy of “Islands of Abandonment”. The cover photo of this version is of an abandoned and overgrown railroad in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. Photo credit: Aspen Hickman

Aspen Hickman, Junior Editor and News Desk Lead for The Powderhorn

There is something enchanting about abandoned places. Whether it’s a derelict bridge covered in ivy or a ghost town nearly overrun by the forest, there is something that draws one’s attention to these places. There is some obsession within us concerning endings and what they mean for our own ends.

This is the basic premise of Cal Flyn's 2021 book “Islands of Abandonment: Nature Rebounding in the Post-Human Landscape,” a lyrical journey into all the places humanity has ravaged and left to rot. From famous sites like Chernobyl and Detroit to more obscure destinations like the mountains of Tanzania and vast swathes of fallow farmland left behind after the fall of the USSR, Flyn explores the ways nature is returning to destroyed lands.

The book discusses a variety of topics surrounding conservation and ecology. In a particularly striking note, while visiting the Scottish island of Swona, where one of the only feral herds of cattle resides, Flyn discusses another similar herd. A herd on another island, this one tropical, numbering almost 2,000, was “shot dead by conservationists,” as Flyn puts it. This note comes just after Flyn describes the mourning rituals of the cattle, how they return to the bodies of their fallen again and again, like elephants, until the rot takes them.

In our efforts to conserve what may already be ruined, Flyn posits, through killing invasive species, plant and animal alike, we are destroying these strange and unique ecosystems we created by accident. And though we may want to return these places to what they were before, there is no way to truly return any of them to the way they were before. At least, no easy way. No bloodless way. 

It is through this book that Flyn illustrates the inherent tension of these places. Almost all of these environments are tainted, in a thousand irreparable ways, by radiation or arsenic or oil. They exist only because of us. And they exist, also, in spite of us. They show us the perhaps terrifying truth that we may drive ourselves to extinction, that we may have already crossed that threshold, but that we will not take the world with us. 

“Islands of Abandonment” is both hopeful and depressing. It is undoubtedly hopeful for nature as a whole. It is quite depressing for those of us concerned about the continuing survival of humanity. Throughout Flyn’s tour of our species’ great ruins, it is hard for the reader not to imagine the entire world in a similar state. 

At least Flyn gives the reader some hope on the subject of climate change. She hypothesizes that the known “gap” between the carbon that is being released and the carbon present in the atmosphere is because of the millions of acres of farmland in Eastern Europe. All of this land is in the process of returning to the primordial pine forest it once was, perfect for sequestering carbon. It is a slow process, but the relative ease with which nature reclaims the world we leave behind is comforting.

The other hope one stumbles across in the book is that, for all Flyn talks of these sites as “post-human”, she is rarely alone in her travels. Almost wherever she goes, be it the abandoned factories and dry sluices of Paterson, New Jersey, or the irradiated fields and towns of Chernobyl, there are people. They are living strange, marginal lives, ones most of us would not choose, but they are living. If some cataclysm comes to pass, be it a solar flare, a nuclear winter, or a more mundane collapse, there will likely be people eking out lives in the rubble.

In “Islands of Abandonment” Flyn has crafted a hard but important story. It is perhaps the most necessary book of the decade, beautifully written and melancholy, it is a book for anyone who cares for the earth, future and past alike.