Islands of Abandonment: Life in the Post-Human Landscape

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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. I definitely think nothing can top this for my non fiction reads this year, just wish I had gotten to it. Previously she has been a reporter for both The Sunday Times and The Daily Telegraph, and a contributing editor at The Week magazine.

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? And yet, Flyn sees the same everywhere; humans leave* and nature comes rushing back in like an unstoppable tide. In Detroit, once America's fourth-largest city, entire streets of houses are falling in on themselves, looters slipping through otherwise silent neighbourhoods. That's what we as humans find very difficult to think about and that we can often be very impatient when we have conservation projects because we want to see results now. 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.Cal Flyn Has recently been shortlisted for the British Academy Book Prize for Global Cultural Understanding. 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. Martin Chilton, The Independent “Bracing, eye-opening, comprehensive, and essential … An energizing and important work. Guardian Australia acknowledges the traditional owners and custodians of Country throughout Australia and their connections to land, waters and community.

Flyn sees the same everywhere; humans leave and nature comes rushing back in like an unstoppable tide. This has been particularly well-studied in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone but is in no way exclusive to it. Shortlisted for this year’s Baillie Gifford prize for nonfiction (the winner is announced on 16 November), the book describes the isolated and often eerily dystopian fortress islands, irradiated exclusion zones, abandoned towns and shuttered industrial sites that have been recolonised by the natural world. 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.She asks whether these sites are portents of civilizational collapse when overpopulation, overconsumption, and climate change will finally take their toll. I think one of the reasons that people have responded to the book is that sense of hope and faith in the natural world that perhaps comes through in these locations. Thus, she talks of ecological succession in abandoned landscapes when plants recolonize, including both human wastelands and sites of natural disasters. Dotted around our planet are numerous areas now devoid of human habitation: ghost towns, conflict zones, pollution hotspots, and areas wrecked by natural forces.