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. 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. To access your ebook(s) after purchasing, you can download the free Glose app or read instantly on your browser by logging into Glose. 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? Flyn sees the same everywhere; humans leave and nature comes rushing back in like an unstoppable tide.

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. Bridgerton’s Adjoa Andoh reads this bold imagining of the life of the medieval nun and poet Marie de France, half-sister of Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine.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? 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. Abandoned places are like magnets to a certain group of people, yet the underground world of urban explorers does not feature in this book.

The author brings so much insight and perspective to the abandoned areas discussed, it's incredibly moving.Abandoned ship scrapyards around New York hide a darker legacy of soil and sludge laced with lethal levels of dioxins, PCBs, and pesticides that is best left undisturbed.

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. Thus, she talks of ecological succession in abandoned landscapes when plants recolonize, including both human wastelands and sites of natural disasters. Previously she has been a reporter for both The Sunday Times and The Daily Telegraph, and a contributing editor at The Week magazine. Photograph: Chris Page View image in fullscreen Cal Flyn’s hypnotic tones chime with the richly descriptive and atmospheric nature of her prose.

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. Devoid of self-indulgence or decadent ruin porn, I instead found Islands of Abandonment a thoughtfully written and utterly spellbinding book. A vivid reflection on the “post-human landscape”, Islands of Abandonment finds its author embarking on a series of bold expeditions to examine the marks left on our land after humans have retreated. In West Lothian, Scotland, Flyn climbs enormous slag heaps of spent shale dating to Scotland’s 1860s–1920s heydays of oil production. 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.

Cal Flyn Has recently been shortlisted for the British Academy Book Prize for Global Cultural Understanding. 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. 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”. And yet, Flyn sees the same everywhere; humans leave* and nature comes rushing back in like an unstoppable tide.

For all ebook purchases, you will be prompted to create an account or login with your existing HarperCollins username and password. 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. 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.