Islands of Abandonment: Life in the Post-Human Landscape

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Flyn sees the same everywhere; humans leave and nature comes rushing back in like an unstoppable tide. 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. 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.

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?

In West Lothian, Scotland, Flyn climbs enormous slag heaps of spent shale dating to Scotland’s 1860s–1920s heydays of oil production.

She has studied the scientific literature (carefully referenced in endnotes) and acknowledges the input of two scientists.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. Whether due to war or disaster, disease or economic decay, each extraordinary place visited in this book has been left to its own devices for decades.

Some locations Flyn visits have almost become popular attractions, such as the decaying boomtown of Detroit, but most are not places you want to be. 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. 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. 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.Dotted around our planet are numerous areas now devoid of human habitation: ghost towns, conflict zones, pollution hotspots, and areas wrecked by natural forces. Guardian Australia acknowledges the traditional owners and custodians of Country throughout Australia and their connections to land, waters and community. Her first book, ‘Thicker Than Water’, was a Times book of the year and dealt with the colonisation of Australia and questions of inherited guilt.

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. 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. 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. 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. Martin Chilton, The Independent “Bracing, eye-opening, comprehensive, and essential … An energizing and important work.An abandoned botanical garden in Tanzania offers the chance to talk invasive species and make several sharp observations. Islands of Abandonment: Life in the Post-Human Landscape is available on William Collins, 9hr , 6min. 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.