There is no fury or gnashing of teeth here; instead, her calmly hypnotic tones chime with the richly descriptive and atmospheric nature of her prose. But for me, I need to see that sort of glint of light and and, you know, the plants coming through the cracks in the pavement for me to understand what the route forward is. A haunting journey through the world’s abandoned places, Flyn’s wide-ranging and reflective meditation on how nature continues in humanity’s absence is an eerie yet ultimately optimistic account of ecological diversity.

And yet, Flyn sees the same everywhere; humans leave* and nature comes rushing back in like an unstoppable tide. 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. 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. Filled with understanding and adventure … Written with a beautiful attention to detail and a generous and imaginative frame of mind. I hope that it will make people focus on the future and when I say the future I mean not next year or the year after but possibly beyond our own generations.Flyn tentatively probes the buffer zone that splits Cyprus in two and discusses other examples past and present, such as the demilitarized zone between the two Koreas. 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? In West Lothian, Scotland, Flyn climbs enormous slag heaps of spent shale dating to Scotland’s 1860s–1920s heydays of oil production. Even a century later, the Place à Gaz in northern France that Flyn infiltrates remains a virtually sterile blemish on the land: an immense pile of unused chemical weapons was burned here after the war.

Surprisingly rich in ecological and biological detail, Islands of Abandonment is a poetic and spellbinding travelogue. 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. 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.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.

Flyn wields the pen of a poet but never loses sight of the importance of getting the biological details right. For all ebook purchases, you will be prompted to create an account or login with your existing HarperCollins username and password. She talks to the people who pass through or make their home here, sometimes by choice, but more often by misfortune. 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.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. 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.

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