w/CS: Islands of Abandonment: Nature Rebounding in the Post-human Landscape, by Cal Flyn

September 2023

Islands of Abandonment: Nature Rebounding in the Post-human Landscape, by Cal Flynn, 2021.* This book looks at how nature — fungi, plants, animals – are re-colonize landscapes that have been destroyed and abandoned by humans. Examples include massive slag piles, nuclear test grounds, etc. It examines both how primary succession occurs in unpromising circumstances, and how the absence of human presence facilitates re-wilding. In the introduction, the author notes that we are now in the midst of a vast self-directed experiment in re-wilding, driven in part by the concentration of people in cities (and a soon-to-be-decreasing population), and in part by the depletion of non-sustainable natural resources that leave ‘waste lands’ behind.

Post-reading comment: There are three or four chapters in the book that are great, and really align with the aims laid out above. Unfortunately, more of the chapters, particularly as one progresses in the book, are more in the line of what I would call disaster tourism: lyrical descriptions of degraded environments and terrible situations, with little or no mention of how the ecosystem has adapted or not.

* Reading with CJS, fall of 2023

Nice Phrases

As I think Flyn is a really excellent writer, I am trying to capture sentences and phrases I appreciate:

• “There’s a trace of movement that scuffs the leaves that lie in low drifts…” p. 1
• “…wings pressed tight together like hands in prayer…” p. 2
• “…every species taking up its station in the strata of life…” p. 3
• “xxx”…a knuckled red fist rises from a soft green landscape…” p. 15
• “The old parking lot was an open expanse, quilted with soft brown moss and frothy gray and peppermint linens which shimmer like the surface of an impressionistic pool, whipped up in some places, lying still in others.” p.29
• “The sky bright and dark all at once…” p.43
• “…where paint flaked like petals onto hardwood floors…” p. 52
• “Outside, the wreckage of a jet, crash-landed, lies like a deer being dressed, guts spilling across the rough ground…” p. 54
• “…his nights there were punctuated with the base drum of explosions…” p. 59
• “…a dead-eyed village of houses…” p. 60
• “Tiny insects drift above like ash in smoke…” p. 64
• “…a lure only for the birds, who squeeze through the shards only to find themselves trapped in a tunnel of light.” p. 66
• “…the low winter sun casts shafts of light though freezing fog.” p. 89
• “I pass down dark corridors crisscrossed with shadow and light.” p. 113′
• “A fine spray rising, like ‘a thin body of smoke,’ that drifted away on the breeze. p. 134
• “The road lifts and falls, on and off, ramps rise and meet in midair; smooth sculptural ribbons of road plaiting briefly then peeling away.” (p.155)
• “the brine a smooth-blur mirror of the watercolor sky…” (p. 159)
• “Bamboo sweeps the path like a curtain, loose-weave, the color of straw.” (p. 202)
• “I touch one with my fingertip and its tiny leaves cringe. I walk on with an apologetic gait, and see the shockwaves travel from the plants closest to my feet outward – villagers fleeing indoors from a blundering giant – pulling closed their shutters and battening down doors.”(p. 225-226)
• “[The ash] shimmered down over everything, like pollen.” (p. 263)
• “Carmine, amber, indigo, and a pale, sweet green move through the sky in soft overlapping bands, sinking to the ground as if spent, slipping behind the mountains with the last of the day’s light.” (p. 291)
• “…taking on the dizzying significance of a dream.” (p. 291)
• “…the dry hills of the opposite coast rise, arid and sculptural, as a ribbon along the horizon, all that separates vast prismatic sky from the looking-glass sea.” (p. 292-293)
• “…a trembling percussion that I can’t place fills the air…” (p. 302)

Invocation

Argues that the way in which land responds to abandonment is worth looking at, both for what it teaches us about ecosystems, and also because with demographic changes and the increasing concentration of people in cities, more and more land will be taking the route. “We are in the midst of a huge self-directed experiment in re-wilding.”

The fact that abandoned land is so quickly re-colonized by wild life also pays testimony to the many ways in which human habitation is inimical to nature: “the absence of people proving, startlingly, more beneficial than contamination or minefields are deliterious.“

We have written ourselves into the DNA of this planet, laced human history into the very earth. Every environment bears a palimpsest of its past. Every woodland is a memoir made of leaves and microbes that catalog its “ecological memory.” We can learn, if we want, to read it to observe in the world around us the story of how it came to be. In England, for example, one might spot the ghosts of ancient woods no longer extant by looking for shade-loving species like bluebells, wood sage, honeysuckle, creeping soft-grass – the flora of dappled glades now left stranded in gardens and on the shoulders of roads: indicator species pointing into the past. This memory, as with our own, affects how an ecosystem behaves in the present.

–Cal Flyn, Islands of Abandonment, p. 10

C1: The Waste Land: The Five Sisters, West Lothian, Scotland

A very interesting chapter discussing how gigantic waste heaps of slag, often contaminated with pollutants, can serve as a site for a new sort of ‘feral ecosystem,’ that is particularly hospitable to plants and insects.

The Five Sisters are five gigantic bings (slag heaps) 15 miles southwest of Edinburgh, waste heaps produced by late 19th Century oil shale mining. Abandoned for fifty years, a 2004 ecological survey showed it to be an ecological hotspot, with great diversity and even sheltering a number of rare species. “The regrowth we see now, then, began from absolute zero – no soil, no nothing – as part of a process called primary succession.” This process only takes place rarely in nature — in freshly formed dune fields or newly erupted volcanic mounts – but is perhaps increasingly common as a human-generated condition: slag heaps, no-man’s lands, bombed sites, contaminated areas.

First came the pioneers: lacy foliose lichens, curling at the edges and growing in coral-like reefs; Stereocaulon, the snow lichens, forming up in crusts. Green mosses laid over the gravel like a picnic blanket, soft and welcoming. Then, the ruderal plants – from the Latin, rudera: of the rubble the wildflowers and deep-rooted grasses that colonized the loose chutes of scree, stabilizing them like marram grass on sand dunes. Kidney vetch and toadflax, bluebells and plantain, yellow rattle, pearlwort, speedwell, sweet cicely. In the damp clefts, seeds of the hawthorn and the rosehip and the birch caught purchase, took root.

All these materialized as if by magic: blown in on the winds, or spread by birds, or left in the droppings of animals (what ecologists call, poetically, “seed rain”. They are the few survivors of a much greater experimental program, the hardy few who found a toehold in the spoil heaps and made it work for them. The more there are, the easier it becomes for others, as organic matter builds up as leaf mold and deadwood and algae, and acts as a compost for the next generation. To begin with, the bings would have been species poor, and then a fluctuating assemblage of species would have played across their faces as each tried out new forms of what they might become. Montane species, common weeds, escaped ornamentals. But over time, species accrue, bed down. And now, the bings come to act almost as an archive of biodiversity for the local area.

–Cal Flyn, Islands of Abandonment, p. 22

Similar stories, mutatis mutandis, can be told about the Bikini Atoll (after the 1954 nuclear test explosion), post-war Berlin, Canvey Wick* near London (abandoned after being used as a dredging material dump and oil refinery), and Scotland’s Ardeer peninsula (abandoned after being used to house Alfred Nobel’s dynamite production facilities).

*Determined to be the most biodiverse site in the UK.

The chapter also describes an attempt to “restore” some bings, and notes that it did not work well: the crests were rounded off, soil was added, and plants were planted — but after a few years the soil washed away, and the plants did not survive. If one wants sustainability, one will do better to work with the characteristics of the system that is in place. It is interesting to note that in more than one location, locals are campaigning against restoration attempts.

Though we enthusiastically embrace our self-appointed role as steward of the planet- -pruning here, planting there, tidying messes, and getting “pests” under control–we are not always successful. Gardens, parks, and farmland are often ecologically dull, their continued existence precarious and dependent upon our benevolence, while hedgerows, road shoulders, and the terrain vague of cities might be vibrantly biodiverse and deeply rooted. We weed out plants well suited to the ground and conditions, and insist on propping up expensive, ill-suited, ornamental ones. Better, perhaps, to resist the impulse. Step back.

Cal Flyn, Islands of Abandonment, p. 35

Following this theme it also touches on New York’s High Line. It notes that before it was restored, New York’s High Line contained a flourishing array of plants, and that post-restoration, while beautiful, it require a consistent input of energy and maintenance to support the new artificial ‘ecosystem’ that has been designed for it. In contrast, the author holds up the Scottish Development Agency’s employment of conceptual artist John Lantham, to re-envision the bings, and his recommendation that nothing be done, except to reimagine them as giant earthworks called Niddrie Woman. While I appreciate and agree with the aim of Latham’s proposal, I must also say that I think the ‘restored’ High Line, is beautiful and obviously successful (in terms of human traffic).

C2: No Man’s Land: The Buffer Zone, Cypress

My first reaction was that this chapter spends far too much time on describing the Cyrus war, and the ensuing division/abandonment of land, and the plights of exiled Cypriots – and not very much on the particulars of the re-wilding. In revisiting the chapter, I’ve decided that this is a little harsh: I do think there is an overemphasis that strays from the intent of the book, but the chapter provides a lot of interesting examples of eco-recovery in ‘no man’s lands’ beyond Cypress, as well.

One of the most interesting examples beyond Cypress comes from Lewis and Clark’s 1804-06 expeditions. They describe encountering an ecologically flourishing region of 46,000 miles that served as a buffer zone between at least eight warring tribes:.

In entering Shoshone territory, the Corps of Discovery had – perhaps unknowingly – left a vast disputed territory, a debatable land of around forty-six thousand square miles separating at least eight warring tribes. Such regions were an established feature of intertribal relations in America before European settlement; buffer zones of an unmarked kind, well known to the inhabitants of neighboring nations. Hunters would not dare to trespass inside these lawless no-go zones. Only war parties, moving fast. As a re-sult, numbers of prey animals would rebound hugely in the absence of hunting pressure.

In Wisconsin, the Chippewa and Sioux were almost continually at war between 1750 and 1850, forming a buffer zone of up to thirty-eight thousand square miles. In a bitter quirk of nature, it was the reserve-like quality of the zone itself that fed their war-fare: in the absence of hunting parties, the wildlife inside recovered to such an extent that the tribes now wealthy and comfortable-could afford to be magnanimous. Once a treaty was agreed, hunting resumed, deer numbers crashed, and a war over resources recommenced as famine gripped both nations.

These invisible territorial demarcations continue to be a feature of traditional tribal societies today, in the Amazon Basin and Papa New Guinea, among others- also, and not coincidentally, some of the world’s richest and most valuable habitats. As Jeffrey McNeely, former chief scientist at the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), has noted, the buffer zones between warring, pre-state societies serve as refugia for wild game and thus have helped contribute to the rich biodiversity found today in many tropical forests.” Fear, therefore, is a force that shapes the world.

Cal Flyn, Islands of Abandonment, p. 46-47

Other examples:

• Six-year cessation of fishing in the North Sea due to WWII: fish stock rebounded for next decade before being depleted again…
• Iran-Iraq border with landminds => resurgence of endangered Persian Leopard
• Yorke beach in the Falkland Islands
• “Death Strip” border between East and West Germany — turned into nature reserve, and expanded into European Green Belt movement that has created more than 40 reserves along the former iron curtain.
• 1959 Antarctic treaty resulting from cold war
• Creation of “Peace Parks” as a solution to territorial disputes (e.g., 1998 treaty between Peru and Columbia)
• DMZ between North and South Korea: UNESCI biosphere reserve establish by SK in 2019.

…reading break…

C3: Old Fields, Harju, Estonia

This is an interesting chapter that discusses the phenomenon — both present and past — of abandoned agricultural land, and how it reforests over the next century. The extent of abandonment and reforestation is quite large, such that the global forest cover has been expanding for several decades. If we look at the historical record, it appears that in the wake of the centuries of global plagues, abandonment and reforestation was so widespread that it effected atmospheric CO2 levels and resulted in detectable climatic cooling.

There is an astonishing amount of abandoned land — according to a 2018 study in Nature, the natural reforestation of abandoned farmland is now more prevalant than deforestation. The global forest cover has grown 7% since 1982…

Rural Abandonment today:

• abandonment of collectivized land in 1991 when the soviet union collapsed: an estimated 245 million acres, and area the size of France.
• Abandonment of US farmland began in the 1860’s as farmers moved out of New England; while it continued to decline into the early twentieth century, forests now cover significantly more of the US than before. American forests grew by 1,400 square mile every year between 1910 and 1979.
• More recently rural abandonment has become a trend in China, Latin America and Europe.
• Even in the Amazon, deforestation rates have fallen by 80%, excepting a recent downturn in Brazil due to Bolsonario.

Historic Abandonment. In the past, widespread disease, first the plague, and then the raft of diseases unleashed by Columbian globalization, lead to massive deaths followed by land abandonment. There is evidence that as reforestation bollowed in its wake, atmospheric CO2 concentrations dropped enough to impact the climate, possibly contributing to the little ice age. Atmospheric CO2 levels dropped to their lowest levels in 1610, about a century after the depopulation of the new world would have led to reforestation of abandoned fields.

The Arcadian dreamscape celebrated by the colonial pioneers was, in fact, a postapocalyptic landscape.

–Cal Flyn, Islands of Abandonment, p. 85

C4: Nuclear Winter, Chernobyl, Ukraine

There was not much to this chapter. It lists a number of sites contaminated with radioactive waste, provides striking descriptions of their deterioration, and observes how wildlife has generally prospered since their abandonment.

There are a surprising number of sites that are abandoned due to the presence of nuclear waste:

• Chernobyl (Ukraine)
• Fukushima (Japan)
• Mayak (Russia)
• Hanford (Washington, USA)

As was the case with sites polluted and demolished by mining and other industrial activity, the absence of humans appears, overall, to be much more of a positive than the radioactivity is a negative.

It would be interesting to understand why organisms are not more effected by radioactivity. Is it due to relatively short life spans?

…reading break…

C5: The Blight: Detroit, Michigan

I didn’t care for this chapter. It describes the abandoned areas of Detroit in the wake of economic collapse. There are some beautiful phrases describing ruin, but there is almost nothing about the resurgence of nature, nothing that sounds a hopeful note, or that even suggests that in the wake of humanity nature might arrive at some balance. This comes close to what might be described as ‘disaster porn.’

Much is made of “blight” as a metaphor:

Blight is broken windows, listing porches, fallen beams. It too is a distillation of the ways in which abandonment affects the psyche of the humans left behind, as an insidious force that pushes them from their homes- a psychological current that they must struggle against, else lose their grip.
[…]
To talk of urban blight, therefore, is to talk of a socioeconomic malaise drifting through the streets like a miasma, slipping in through the windows or the gaps under the doors. Ripping through neighborhoods like influenza. In some places, like the plague.

—Cal Flynn, Islands of Abandonment, p. 116; 123

C6: Days of Anarchy: Patterson, New Jersey

I didn’t care for this chapter either. Whereas the previous chapter is about ruin resulting from abandonment, this has that with pollution thrown in, and humans dwelling in anarchy amidst the rubble.

She tries to make an argument that dwelling in a ruined, abandoned area represents a sort of freedom, but I don’t really buy it. A sample:

This space filthy and broken as it is-represents to both Wheeler and Cesar the kind of freedom they don’t get anywhere else. George Monbiot once wrote of a “rewilding of the soul,” and it is this same phenomenon that I sense amid the chaos and the grime. In a marginal space such as this, disordered and unclaimed, the unspoken expectations of society and its rules, however petty or important, fall away. To exist here is to renounce something. But it is to claim something too.

– Cal Flyn, Islands of Abandonment, p. 145

…reading break…

C7: Unnatural Selection: Arthur Kill, Staten Island, NY

A journey through a shipyard abandoned for nearly a century, and the surrounding areas that are polluted with the residues of factories that manufactured DDT and other herbicides, in particular, dioxin, which is 170,000 times more deadly than cyanide.

Discusses organisms — blue crabs and killifish – that have somehow adapted to the presence of dioxin. Unfortunately, there is no information on how, other than that crabs contain incredibly toxic amounts of dioxin. Moves on to discuss the rapidity of evolution — at least when a population contains a diversity of genes that are favored or disfavored via natural selection — using the well-known case history of the pepper moth in industrial revolution era England. It took about fifty years for the moth population to shift from the white to black phenotype, and roughly the same amount of time to shift back. Brings in other example of evolution including female elephants lacking tusks, and finches evolving longer bills to take better advantage of bird feeders.

C8: The Forbidden Forest: Zone Rouge, Verdun, France

An exploration of the forests – well, primarily a particular forest – that have been allowed to grow up over sites in France that contain toxic residues of weapons, chemical and otherwise, and unexploded and decaying munitions. This chapter struck me as overwritten, as did the previous few chapters. I don’t really care for the term “disaster porn,” but the writing did bring that to mind; Carolyn suggested a term she has encountered – “dark tourism” – which I like better.

In particular this chapter describes a particular clearing in the forest, that apparently appears pleasant, where the ground is clear due to an incredible concentration of heavy metals in the soil: 17% arsenic, 13% zinc, 2.8% lead. I did not find a lot of hope in this chapter, but there were some interesting bits:

• There are a variety of flowers whose colors reflect the concentration of metals in the soil. And, in fact, some of these were known to the ancients — for example flowers that signify the presence of lead – and even flowers whose names come form the metals they indicate: kisplant (pyrite plant), and kupperblom (copper flower).
• It was also interesting to learn that plants that are resistant to heavy metals take one of two strategies: they avoid taking the up, or they take them and sequester them in particular parts of the plant. The latter are called “hyper accumulators,” and the book raises the prospect, but does not comment on the reality, that they could be used as a way of mining metals. One plant in New Caledonia, Picandra Acuminata, can apparently contain up to 27% Nickel in its sap. There are apparently about 500 species of hyperaccumlators, including the brake fern and sunflowers.

C9: Alien Invasion: Amani, Tanzania

An essay on an abandoned botanical garden in the cloud forests of Tanzania. Discussions about the ‘invasion’ of ecosystems by non-native species, and how it plays out (or does not) over time. Also discussion about the idea that an ecosystem has some ‘natural state.’

One of the interesting points was that sometimes, after an initial period of invasion, the invader fails to succeed, either because it exhausts particular nutrients, because the initial disruptions that advantaged it have lessened or vanished, or because controls – e.g., fungi – appear to limit and extinguish it. The moral, to the extent there is one, is that ecosystems may be more resilient to invasion than their initial responses might suggest.

C10: The Trip to Rose Cottage, Swona, Scotland

A visit to a cottage (and small town) on a remote Scottish Island that has been abandoned for decades. The cattle kept by the islanders were released upon their departure, and have been feral for generations. The chapter has some nice discussion, and alludes to some interesting research, on what it means for a domesticated species to go feral.

..reading break…

C11: Revelation: Plymouth, Mon Serrat

How the eruption of a stratovolcano affects a town/island. Very little about how the environment is adapting.

C12: The Deluge and the Desert: Salton Sea, California

Another description of disaster and desolation, with a community of weird unfriendly drifters grafted on. The history of the Salton Sea *is* interesting, from its inception as a large scale agri-infrastructural accident, through its period as the most productive fishery in California and as a tourist and resort destination , into its decline into an abandoned, desolate brownfield. There is a brief mention of how the endangered California pupfish are surviving and prospering here, but no attempt to explain why or even position it as hopeful. As the chapter (and book) approaches its end, there is an attempt to argue for climate and environmental activism, but it seems a bit hollow against the background of degradation that has characterized the last several chapters.

END