Mother Earth, so the environmentalists love to remind us, would get along fine without Homo sapiens. Better than fine: She would thrive. Mankind is a blight, like Dutch elm disease on a global scale. “Nature is healing,” ran a popular meme of the COVID-19 pandemic whenever a wild animal was glimpsed playing boulevardier on a deserted city street. Few participants in this grim triumphalism seem to register the paradox. Neither “healing” nor “thriving” means anything of itself. These categories belong to human judgment. If nature is indifferent to the fate of humans, it is equally indifferent to the fate of polar bears or tree frogs. Indifference in this case is not an attitude but the absence of one. Nature cannot punish, heal, or thrive but only change.
This isn’t a very attractive position to take. It seems to invite environmental quietism. Yet anyone who doubts it should consider that a world “in balance,” cured of the virus of human life, could still be destroyed by an asteroid strike or the eruption of a supervolcano such as the Yellowstone caldera. “Destroyed” is, of course, another human category. It’s shorthand for a condition inimical to life as we know it, as we have experienced and appreciated it. This is the provocative contention at the heart of Cal Flyn’s Islands of Abandonment: Nature Rebounding in the Post-Human Landscape. We conceive of our planet, Flyn writes, “as if it were one giant botanical garden to tend.” But absent our stewardship or our rapine, it would behave like one big vacant lot. There is no “way” that it is “supposed” to be.
Islands of Abandonment is a tour of such “vacant lots,” places where neglect, migration, disaster, warfare, and climate change have given us a look at unimpeded biological and geological processes. (“Unimpeded” is further shorthand. Unimpeded by one set of parameters just means impeded by a different one.) Flyn, in her capacity as a fearlessly curious travel writer, takes us to Cyprus, Estonia, France, Montserrat, Scotland, Tanzania, Ukraine, and all over the United States, criss-crossing from Staten Island to the Salton Sea and from Paterson to Detroit. Wherever she goes, she finds some version of nature “breeding lilacs out of the dead land,” otherworldly demonstrations of evolution’s relentless strength and ingenuity.
Flyn’s globe-trotting provides a guide to different patterns of abandonment and to the site-specific processes of “succession, recovery, and reclamation” that follow them. The “bings” of West Lothian, Scotland, are slag heaps “the size of cathedrals or hangars or office blocks,” left over from Scotland’s decadeslong run, in the 19th century, as a world leader in shale oil extraction. Estonia is full of agricultural land collectivized by the Soviet Union and then abandoned with its collapse. Chernobyl, Ukraine, site of the nuclear disaster synonymous with man’s despoliation of the natural world, boasts an exclusion zone that is now 70% forested. (If you can’t pay it a visit, you can see the landscape eerily prefigured in Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker, one of Flyn’s many artistic lodestars.)
Political and military conflicts can create huge swaths of no man’s land in no time at all. Though Flyn touches on the ecological fortunes of the world’s most famous DMZ, on the Korean Peninsula, it is the less frequently discussed one on Cyprus that she actually gets to explore. These spaces, she tells us, function “not unlike strict reserves.” Some areas are so comprehensively ruined by military action that they must be made off-limits to humans. Primary succession, or “regrowth from absolute zero,” occurs in settings such as the Zone Rouge in Verdun, France, where discarded First World War munitions and incinerated chemical weapons have resulted in staggeringly arsenic-polluted soil. It beggars belief that, even here, life finds a way, in the form of lichens and mosses that can absorb and store heavy metals. These “hyperaccumulators,” cleaning soil for future vegetation, are one of nature’s unexpected tricks for enlivening dead zones.
In the U.S., Flyn visits Detroit, so hollowed out by economic disaster that 24 square miles of it (an area, Flyn notes, larger than Manhattan) are abandoned, “urban prairie” where “tumbledown clapboard houses are grown over by the feather-leafed ailanthus, the ‘ghetto palm,’” and where a corpse is discovered about once a month. This horror-movie atmosphere is a common denominator in many of Flyn’s accounts: the abandoned mill in toxic Paterson, New Jersey, where Flyn encounters an MS-13 gang member; a beach made entirely of fish bones on California’s hypersaline Salton Sea; the “rust-red, spectral ruins” of Staten Island’s Arthur Kill Ship Graveyard. The tension and menace do much to churn up the doldrums in which even the sharpest nature writing can find itself.
Scattered among Flyn’s capsule travelogues are fascinating tangents, side trips to Bikini Atoll or New York City’s High Line. There are detours into the journey of Lewis and Clark’s Corps of Discovery, into the land art of Robert Smithson, into the contagion theory of “urban blight.” Flyn’s book is a generous catalogue not only of trauma and ruin but also of living things and how they interact with each other and their environments. Her chapter on invasive plants, such as the giant hogweed with its burning, blinding sap, yields a thoughtful inquiry into the concept itself. What makes a species “invasive” rather than evolutionarily successful? At what point are our botanical interventions, our curatorial preferences, subverting the natural order of things? What, if anything, excludes human activity from that order?
Islands of Abandonment may cock a skeptical eye, may even roll an eye, at our prejudices about the way the natural environment ought to be. But it is anything but an apathetic or nihilistic book. Rather, it is an optimistic one. It preaches a gospel of inexorable reforestation, of carbon sequestration, of animal populations left alone to increase their numbers. It punctures assumptions about nature’s fragility to encourage hope, not further recklessness, and to cultivate deeper thinking about environmental ethics and our place in the world. It is not going too far to call it a philosophical book.
Islands of Abandonment is, among many other things, a treatise on aesthetics. At every turn, it questions how we come to value some versions of “nature” over others. Flyn notes that in the 17th century, the term “wasteland” was “applied not to sites of dereliction but to fens, swamps, and marshes.” Now, such areas enjoy pride of place as protected wetlands. “The lesson in this, I think, is that what feel like self-evident truths about the world around us can, in fact, be culturally specific — moral judgments we are imposing upon the world around us.”
Flyn’s descriptive prose is so dependably beautiful, recalling Henry David Thoreau’s journals or Annie Dillard’s essays, that it makes the reader wonder if anything in the natural world can really be called ugly. Flyn’s “islands of abandonment” are at worst “pretty-ugly,” a term she borrows from the French. (If a swimsuit model is tres jolie, a high-fashion model is jolie-laide.) Hence, we get Flyn’s “scraggy toilet-brush trees” or a crumbling parking lot “quilted with soft brown moss and frothy gray and peppermint lichens” or “mint green paper … slipping from the plaster like silk.” We may come to recognize beauty in surprising forms. Our environment may change in ways we can neither anticipate nor control. We’d better get used to that. As one Detroit resident, stubbornly refusing to be scared off, tells a reporter: “It’s nothing like it used to be. But it is home. This is home.”
Stefan Beck is a writer living in Hudson, New York.
