Dear Reader,
Happy Halloween! I’m coming to you a day late this week due to the press of other projects. Thank you for your patience, and please enjoy this spooky tree that I found yesterday in the woods of Hamilton, Massachusetts.
We had a big storm this week. Peak winds for our fall Nor’easter clocked in at 71 miles per hour at Thacher’s Island, at the tip of Cape Ann. Vineyard Haven saw 88. The roaring of it made me shrink back instinctively when I went out on the porch. In the darkness, our brave sycamore danced like an upside-down Cossack, the top branches bending like knees and the trunk staying strong and steady. We lost power at 9 PM. The reason became clear when dawn came, and wires were seen sagging down by the road under the weight of cracked-off maple branches. Tides were astronomically low, a saving piece of luck, though Nantucket Island saw flooding downtown nonetheless. The power has been on and off here since, but mostly on. It could have been much worse.
Review
Islands of Abandonment: Nature Rebounding in the Post-Human Landscape
Cal Flyn
Viking, 2021
372 pages
$27.00
Ah, middle age. That moment in a life when dawn light, bird nests, copper beeches, and family history transform themselves from items that are incidental and easy to ignore into subjects of fascination and reverence. Maybe historic battlefields are like this too. Traveling through Maryland and Virginia constantly as a child, I noted the historical battlefield signs, like diacritical marks along the roadside. They inflected the countryside with an otherwise unseen history of organized violence. I noticed briefly, and then attended to other things. Colleges often offer alumni trips to Gettysburg. I have never wanted to sign up for one, until recently. But these sites of historical rupture, of mass suffering and death, call to me now: places that will never be the same again as they were before the killing. They beckon partly because of my time in life, but also because I wonder whether they might help me to understand our war, the war we are—all of us—waging on the biosphere.
In her admirable new book Islands of Abandonment, Scottish writer Cal Flyn has taken on this challenge in a more specific and highly useful way: she has visited sites around the world that humans have been forced to leave, and she investigates what happens to the local ecosystems in the aftermath. As I’ve discussed in previous issues of Frugal Chariot, so much of what we are dealing with today results from H. sapiens overrunning our ecological niche: we are now practically everywhere, living too heavily on the land. Thus Flyn’s are somewhat rare and fascinating case studies. From mountainous slag heaps in Scotland, to the exclusion zone around Chernobyl, to poisoned industrial sites in New Jersey and abandoned swaths of Detroit, to the buffer zone between the Greek and Turkish territories in Cyprus, to a Caribbean village buried by a volcanic eruption, Flyn reports on what happens when we humans clear off and let nature get on with evolution in our wake.
Flyn is no stranger to topics of rupture and repair. Her previous book, Thicker than Water, takes on the life of her ancestor Angus McMillan. He was lionized as a pioneer by whites in Australia for generations, but now he is known to have been a violent colonist, who personally oversaw mass killings of indigenous people. That book seems to have equipped her with a capacity for seeing how things—including our sense of history and of our identities—might change in unexpected ways.
Islands of Abandonment is a tingling read, and not only because it contains good news. Flyn’s dispatches from these far-flung and deserted sites also contain plenty of drama, as she enters forbidden places and risks encounters with hazardous environments and the unusual humans who are drawn to them. Her prose is syncopated and full of surprises—sometimes funny, sometimes eerie. Entering a church in an uninhabited buffer zone near a volcanic eruption that buried most of a town on the Caribbean island of Dominica, Flyn finds:
. . . bare pews empty and stained with guano. A dozen of what I tentatively identify as velvety house bats hang from the blades of a ceiling fan. They stir as I enter, twisting their heads toward me, some clambering over the bodies of their neighbors out of what looks like curiosity. They are cast in an amber tint, as the low sun streams through stained glass at the gable end in the shape of a cross.
About that good news. Flyn argues that she has found “a narrow band of brightening sky” in the fact that non-human species are capable of rebounding rapidly, even in devastated areas. She notes that the blaes, slag mountains in Scotland, now host more plant species (including rare orchids) than does Ben Nevis. In the Chernobyl exclusion zone, “[a] decade later, every animal population had at least doubled in number. By 2010, the wolves had increased sevenfold. In 2014, brown bears were spotted in Chernobyl for the first time in over a century.” A herd of 30 endangered Przewalski’s horses from a captive breeding program were released in the Chernobyl exclusion zone in 1998, and they now number over 150.
Visiting the toxic industrial “crime scene” of the Passaic River watershed in New Jersey, Flyn describes killifish, which have evolved in a matter of decades to thrive in waters poisoned with dioxin and PCBs. Invasive tree species taking hold in sensitive Tanzanian forests develop fungal blights that restrain their spread. Mosses and lichens around the world have the ability to feed on and hyperaccumulate heavy metals from contaminated soils.
Flyn also looks back to history. She cites scholars who believe that the Black Death in Europe and the Great Dying in the Americas of the 16th century may have caused so much farmland to revert to forest that the resulting carbon sequestration may have caused the Little Ice Age. Like Wangari Maathai, she sees a great age of reforestation lying before us, and posits that another 5 billion acres of cropland could revert to forest over the next 80 years, offering a huge carbon sink. Indeed, NASA has reported that Chinese reforestation programs have offset more than twenty percent of their recent emissions.
One of the graceful things about Islands of Abandonment is that Cal Flyn leaves plenty of room for the reader to question whether these case studies in regeneration could be replicated at the necessary scale to avert extreme climate change—or the sixth extinction—in the short time that remains. Indeed, a trip to her excellent footnotes reveals that one of the studies she cites, in her optimism about reforestation, is actually titled “Deficits of biodiversity and productivity linger a century after agricultural abandonment.” Recent precipitous drops in insect and bird populations do not bode well, nor does what looks to have been a pathetic showing from the G20 leaders in the runup to COP26.
The mostly deserted resort landscape of the Salton Sea in California, which Flyn visits, has recently been rechristened Lithium Valley, with massive lithium extraction projects on the boards to feed the demand for the batteries that will be needed to electrify the U.S. economy. An island of abandonment no more. Ultimately, Cal Flyn offers these places of regeneration to us as possible sources of faith, “faith enough to fight.” In a sense, the whole world is a battlefield for the fight against humanity’s destructive ways. History is being made. We can only wonder how the signs and markers will read a century from now.
Other Voices, Other Forms
I was interested to learn in Islands of Abandonment that the great land artist Robert Smithson was inspired by his childhood, when he was surrounded by the industrial landscape of New Jersey. He wrote an essay called “The Monuments of Passaic” that describes the area as filled with “memory traces of an abandoned set of futures.” A recent documentary about Smithson and the Land Artists, entitled Troublemakers, is available to stream on AppleTV+. Here’s a review and the official trailer.
Poem of the Week
Another discovery in Islands of Abandonment: William Carlos Williams was not only the great poet of Paterson, New Jersey. He was also Robert Smithson’s pediatrician, and a true source of inspiration. Here is a poem about an October storm.
Advent of Today
South wind
striking in — torn
spume — trees
inverted over trees
scudding low
a sea become winged
bringing today
out of yesterday
in bursts of rain —
a darkened presence
above
detail of October grasses
veiled at once
in a downpour —
conflicting rattle of
the rain against
the storm’s slow majesty —
leaves
rising
instead of falling
the sun
coming and going
toward the
middle parts of the sky
For Your Reading Radar
Since we are talking of biodiversity this week, I should mention the publication of Silent Earth: Averting the Insect Apocalypse. Author Dave Goulson is an esteemed British entomologist. Writing in the New Yorker, Elizabeth Kolbert says: “Goulson could be described as a naturalist turned post-naturalist; he decided to study insects because he found them enthralling, and now he studies why they’re in trouble.”
For Your Calendar
Here’s a novel about rupture and regeneration related to one of the landscapes Cal Flyn explored: Cyprus. The British-Turkish novelist Elif Shafak has a new novel called The Island of Missing Trees, about teenage lovers from Cyprus—one Greek, one Turkish—who are separated by war. In her review, Leone Ross writes, “This is a beautiful novel—imperfect, but made ferocious by its uncompromising empathy.” Shafak will be in conversation with writer Anna North via Politics & Prose on Monday, November 8th at 5 PM Eastern US time. Register here.
Bookshop of the Week
In Islands of Abandonment, Cal Flyn explores urban decay and regeneration in Detroit, Michigan. This week we are linking to Black Stone Bookstore, a thriving Black-owned bookstore in Detroit.
See you next week, for the best biography ever written about a Cocker Spaniel: Flush by Virginia Woolf. xo Nicie