Neil Hopcroft

[Read aloud to Adelle]

Islands of Abandonment – Life in the Post-Human Landscape by Cal Flyn

When I bought this book the woman behind the till told me to look out for the cows, they’re amazing. She wasn’t wrong.

This book is a tour of sites abandoned by humans, left for nature to reclaim because we have made such a mess we no longer feel we can live there.

What is astounding is the sheer number and variety of abandoned sites described in this book, each visited and recorded, along with significant research into related science and human behaviours. There are so many traumas we wreak upon this world only to retreat once we understand the true scale of the trauma.

The most well known is the exclusion zone around Chernobyl, but the most fascinating are those on a smaller scale, the slag heaps where discarded shale was piled, once considered dead ground now teeming with biodiversity, and the island abandoned, with the cattle left to roam, their gates opened almost as an afterthought with the departure of the last inhabitant. Where they now have reverted to their natural temperament, without the cycle imposed by husbandry. Unwittingly finding themselves at the top of the food chain, with the run of the closed environment of the island.

I was expecting a depressing read, to the contrary this is an invigorating catalogue of the triumph of nature over the misdeeds even we could face no more, filling the vacuum left by human vacancy first with resilience, then diversity. Mow three times and it is grass. Hyperaccumulators leeching metals from polluted soils, captured to concentrations suitable for mining, chemical resistant fish thriving in spoiled acidic waters.

We end the journey in Slab City, where the nature reclaiming the land is human, people who have themselves been abandoned.