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Islands of Abandonment: Life in the Post-Human Landscape

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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.

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. 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. 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. 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.The rock elder statesman brings wit and warmth to his reading of his memoir, in which he traces his beginnings from the Virginian suburbs, to playing drums in Nirvana and filling stadiums in his band, Foo Fighters. 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. Maybe painstaking is the wrong word, she opines, for it “ implies slow deliberate travel in a single direction. 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. Flyn ponders what lessons this holds for our intensive, hands-on conservation efforts that often include culling, “ one of the biggest ethical quandaries at the heart of comtemporary conservation” (p.

In Detroit, once America's fourth-largest city, entire streets of houses are falling in on themselves, looters slipping through otherwise silent neighbourhoods. Dotted around our planet are numerous areas now devoid of human habitation: ghost towns, conflict zones, pollution hotspots, and areas wrecked by natural forces. I was very pleased (though I am, of course, biased) to see her discuss evolution this much—and get it right. Surprisingly rich in ecological and biological detail, Islands of Abandonment is a poetic and spellbinding travelogue. 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.

Author and journalist Cal Flyn explores thirteen such locations and here reports their sights, sounds, and smells. I definitely think nothing can top this for my non fiction reads this year, just wish I had gotten to it. 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. According to the IUCN, more than half of the worst invasive plant species are escapees from botanical gardens, though she is also balanced enough to discuss the arguments put forth in Inheritors of the Earth about invasive species not always causing disruption. Cal Flyn takes us on a mercurial expedition into the strange lands of human surrender … Thoughtful, careful, fascinating, poignant, mysterious, surreal, compelling, pace pitch-perfect.

To access your ebook(s) after purchasing, you can download the free Glose app or read instantly on your browser by logging into Glose. 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.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.

Abandoned places are like magnets to a certain group of people, yet the underground world of urban explorers does not feature in this book. 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.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.

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