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Islands of Abandonment
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Islands of Abandonment: Nature Rebounding in the Post-Human Landscape (February 2022)
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Yass! I'll be buying my copy tonight and hopefully getting into it then - I'm really looking forward to this one :)
Fiona wrote: "Lena wrote: "Woohoo, the library came through for me this month!"Yass! I'll be buying my copy tonight and hopefully getting into it then - I'm really looking forward to this one :)"
Mine is "in the mail", I'm told. Looking forward to it!
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Lena wrote: "Ooh, physical copies can add to the experience!"I'm a programmer by trade, so I look at screens enough during work time to always opt for physical copies. Using solar lighting, when possible. :)
I’ve just started this a little, and I think it is interesting so far. In parts it reminds me of The world without us. The books are not the same, but they seek out similar place to visit. The good thing is that I feel like Islands of Abandonment is a bit more hopeful.
Wow! I rushed out [okay, rushed online] and acquired a copy. I'm excited to read this, particularly fascinated with the changes around Chernobyl!
It looks like there'll be a crowd of us on this one. Nice. :)
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That introduction was a great start - it's really promising that the author actually travelled to these places and puts the effort in to get the feel of the place across, as well as just the facts and statistics. I was so absorbed, and the writing is gorgeous!
Lena wrote: "I finished the first chapter and am already enchanted and want to tour these blight to brilliant places!"Yes, the author is very good at making these places interesting.
Fiona wrote: "Unfortunately, being in NZ I have to really plan ahead or already have the physical copy - it takes about two months for the average book to get here, and it's unusual to find most of the genres I ..."I have the same problem here in Iceland. Amazon seems to be rather on the slow side at delivering books.
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Ahh, island life. Yeah, I tend to hold back on physical copies only for the ones I loved, and second hand stores wherever I can!
The chapter on waste lands was phenomenal, and that sense of the author imbuing an atmosphere into these places stayed strong. I think I've mentioned before (can't remember if it was this group) that a family friend led the rehabilitation of Ladycross Quarry in Northumberland - the birds that have returned there form important colonies, it's one of the last holdouts of red squirrels in that part of the UK, and you can also see a reseeding ecology in the process of growing. http://www.ladycrossnature.org.uk/lxn...
As usual, I'll gather my reading notes here, before looking at what everyone else thought about the book.Starting with:
~ Ah. So Paul Auster's dad wasn't the first to come up with this idea:
So isolated was it, and yet so continually in view from the Scottish capital—as a rocky mirage upon the horizon—that it is said to have taken hold of the imagination of King James IV of Scotland, who saw in Inchkeith the potential for a notorious language-deprivation experiment. He, a polymath with a roving mind, was much taken up with concerns of Renaissance science, and practiced both bloodletting and the extraction of teeth. James sank huge sums into research into alchemy, human flight, and—according to a sixteenth-century chronicler—transporting to Inchkeith two newborn infants in the care of a deaf nursemaid, in the hope that the children, sequestered from the corrupting influence of society, would grow up to speak the prelapsarian “language of God.”
~ "Invocation" describes the scope of this book:
What draws my attention, however, is not the afterglow of pristine nature as it disappears over the horizon, but the narrow band of brightening sky that might indicate a fresh dawn of a new wild as, across the world, ever more land falls into abandonment.
Partly this is a reflection of changing demographics, as birth rates across the developed world fall and rural populations leave for the cities. Birth rates in nearly half of all countries have fallen below replacement levels; in Japan—where the population is forecast to fall from 127 million to 100 million or lower by 2049—one in every eight properties are already abandoned, forecast to rise to nearly a third of all housing stock by 2033. (The Japanese call them akiya, ghost homes.)
Partly too this is due to changing patterns of agriculture. Intensive farming—despite its many environmental drawbacks—is more efficient, using less land to produce more. Huge amounts of “marginal” farmland, especially in Europe, Asia, and North America, is being allowed to revert to its wilder form. “Recovering secondary vegetation” (that is, former farmland and forestry) now accounts for around 7.1 billion acres, or more than twice the area of current cropland. It could rise to 12.8 billion acres by the end of this century.
We are in the midst of a huge, self-directed experiment in rewilding. Because abandonment is rewilding, in a very pure sense, as humans draw back and nature reclaims what once was hers. It has been taking place—is currently taking place—on a grand scale, while no one has been watching. This is, I think, an extremely exciting prospect. “The enormous and growing extent of recovering ecosystems worldwide,” wrote the authors of one recent study, “provides an unprecedented opportunity for ecological restoration efforts to help to mitigate a sixth mass extinction.”
(...) In the coming chapters I offer you the stories of twelve locations around the world, each of which embodies a different aspect of the process of abandonment and natural reclamation. These various locations, very different in climate, culture, and history, each offer their own flavor of melancholy and hope: they show us how every site, no matter how devastated, can come to recover in its own way, but also how human impacts can leave a long shadow for many years—decades—centuries—after these sites have fallen into disuse.
And its aspiration:
I have spent two years traveling to places where the worst has already happened. These are landscapes wracked by war, nuclear meltdown, natural disaster, desertification, toxification, irradiation, and economic collapse. This should be a book of darkness, a litany of the worst places in the world. In fact, it is a story of redemption: how the most polluted spots on Earth—suffocated by oil spills, blasted by bombs, contaminated by nuclear fallout, or scraped clean of their natural resources—can be rehabilitated through ecological processes. How the hardiest ruderal plants can find their toeholds, colonizing concrete and rubble as they might sand dunes; how the palettes of ecological succession change as moss turns to golden grass, to the bright flags of poppies and lupins, to woody shrubs, to tree cover. How, when a place has been altered beyond recognition and all hope seems lost, it might still hold the potential for life of another kind.
I am excited. I mean, VERY.
~ What happened to the Bikini Atoll?The Bikini Atoll, a ring of coral islets encircling a turquoise lagoon, was used by the United States as a nuclear weapons testing site during the 1940s and ’50s—most notably for the 1954 Castle Bravo test, when a thermonuclear device more than seven thousand times the force of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, producing an explosion of such unexpected force it shocked the scientists that designed it and ultimately prompted a worldwide ban on atmospheric testing.
The blast gouged a crater more than a mile across and 260 feet deep, vaporized two islands, and formed a vast mushroom cloud of steam, superheated air, and pulverized coral, a luminous globe of fire like a second sun, and turned the sky scarlet. It rose 130,000 feet into the atmosphere, before the fallout snowed back down upon the Marshall Islands in a blizzard, burning everything it touched. The waters of the lagoon flash-boiled as temperatures rose to 99,000ºF, and rushed outward as waves 100 feet high, which stirred up a million tons of sand that smothered any coral that had survived the initial explosion. It left a barren underwater wasteland, grossly contaminated and utterly devoid of life.
But in 2008, when an international team of researchers returned to the atoll to inspect the lagoon, they found to their surprise that a thriving underwater ecosystem had formed in the blast crater over the intervening decades. It looked, as one coral scientist commented in wonder, “absolutely pristine.” While above water the island remained eerily abandoned—uninhabited except for the caretakers of a tiny tourist initiative*—and its groundwater and coconuts unfit for human consumption, the lagoon below was a whirl of kaleidoscopic life. Less so than before—twenty-eight species of coral were still missing—but, nevertheless, now as one of the most impressive reefs on the planet, where corals grew as huge rocky cushions the size of cars, or as dendroids twenty-six feet tall, with slender branching fingers.
A team from Stanford University dived the crater again in 2017 and found it was even more densely embroidered with life. Hundreds of schools of fish—tuna, reef sharks, snappers—flashed through limpid waters. It was, reflected project lead Professor Stephen Palumbo, “visually and emotionally stunning.” In a strange way, he said, the new reef had been protected by the atoll’s traumatic history—as a direct result of the lack of human disturbance, the fish populations were bigger, the sharks more abundant, and the coral more impressive.
~ Another huge surprise for me:
(...) according to the conservation trust Buglife, “the invertebrate rarity and diversity of some brownfield sites is only equaled by that of some ancient woodlands.” A remarkable feat, given that most brownfield sites have usually been in existence for only a few decades—when a woodland might take hundreds of years to come to full maturity and ecological complexity.
~ I didn't know about that particular legacy of the Cold War:During the Cold War, for example, the heavily guarded Inner German border—stretching from the Baltic Sea to the border with Czechoslovakia—became a favored haunt of birders on both sides. Though the “death strip” itself was plowed bare and spotlit (not to mention tripwired, booby-trapped, and patrolled by East German soldiers with a shoot-to-kill policy), a restricted area of between one hundred feet and several miles in width was maintained by the East Germans along the entire inner perimeter of the border, and thus given a reprieve from the otherwise intensive agriculture in the region. Black storks, nightjars, and red-backed shrikes nested in the branches between control towers. Lady’s slipper orchids blossomed along the forest edge. Moor frogs spawned and otters paddled in the anti-vehicle ditches. Ecologists often refer to “wildlife corridors,” strips of wild land that serve as links between habitats: here was a green highway 860 miles long, offering safe passage through an entire country. Over the forty-five years of its existence, this contested hinterland—much of which had previously been valuable farmland—was colonized by more than a thousand species from Germany’s “red list” of endangered species.
During German reunification, three hundred amateur ornithologists from both sides of the border organized an emergency meeting in a tavern, where they hammered out a manifesto for conserving the death strip as a nature reserve. Their success went on to inspire the wider “European Green Belt” movement, which now takes the form of forty linked reserves in twenty-four countries that fall along the course of the former Iron Curtain, taking in dense boreal forest along the Finland–Russia border; the sand dunes, cliffs, and lagoon of the Baltic coast; and a belt of mountainous uplands through the Balkans, where lynx roam and imperial eagles soar overhead.
~ When the totalitarian regimes across Eastern Europe collapsed and dragged along collectivist agriculture, there was an amazing side effect:(...) tree cover in Estonia has been fairly constantly and quite rapidly increasing: from only 21 percent of the country in 1920 to 54 percent of the country by 2010, in all gaining around two thousand square miles of forest since the fall of the Soviet Union. Estonia is now one of the most forested countries in Europe—and 90 percent of that forest has “naturally regenerated.”
The same pattern has been borne out across the former Soviet Union. One 2015 analysis of satellite images estimated at least forty thousand square miles of forest regrowth in eastern Europe and European Russia alone—noting that only an estimated 14 percent of the abandoned farmland had yet converted, thus raising the prospect of large-scale carbon sequestration well into the future.
Which ties into the larger picture:
Those who work in the field of Earth systems have spent many years attempting to balance the global carbon budget. To do this, they calculate the total carbon emissions generated from the burning of fossil fuels, and attempt to match that figure to the carbon known to be held in the atmosphere, on the land, and in the ocean. But the sums don’t work—essentially, the carbon levels of the atmosphere have not been rising as quickly as we expected, and almost certainly because carbon is being sequestered on an enormous scale somewhere in the terrestrial or oceanic spheres.
Various theories have been proposed since the problem was identified in the early 1990s—recent suggestions include: the carbon is stored in massive aquifers under the ground; that carbon is sitting at the bottom of endorheic basins in desert lands; and that the rising carbon dioxide levels of the atmosphere and attendant rise in global temperatures have stimulated plant growth, and thus elevated carbon storage—a negative feedback loop of the sort proposed in James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis’s famous Gaia hypothesis, in which the biosphere is essentially proposed to function as a complex, self-regulating superorganism.
Lovelock and Margulis named their theory for the Greek goddess of the Earth, and though it is a powerful metaphor, they do not mean to suggest that the planet is imbued with deific powers. Still, it can be hard for those of a poetic disposition not to interpret the apparent drag on atmospheric carbon levels as anything other than divine providence: an act of forgiveness on a planetary scale, or of self-sacrifice, as the Earth shields us bodily from our worst excesses.
But the authors of the 2019 study believe that abandoned Soviet farmland might account for at least “a considerable part” of this missing carbon. Certainly, much of it is in the optimal climatic zone for sequestration: recent research suggests that young forests growing in temperate climates absorb and fix carbon at higher rates than in the tropics or subarctic.
And it's not just Eastern Europe:
More recently, rural abandonment has become a significant trend in China, Latin America, and Europe. In the European Union alone, an area roughly the size of Italy is expected to be abandoned between 2000 and 2030. In rural Spain, for example—most notably in picturesque Galicia—so many have been trading their ancestral homes for the city that an estimated three thousand ghost villages, in various stages of dereliction, lie empty. Spain has tripled its forest area since 1900. And abandoned farmland has been a significant factor in the startling and largely self-directed return of large carnivores to western Europe: populations of lynx, wolverines, and brown bears have spiked. In Spain, the Iberian wolf has rebounded from four hundred individuals to more than two thousand, mostly to be found haunting the empty villages of Castilla y León and Galicia and feasting upon the wild boar and roe deer, whose numbers too have ballooned. In early 2020, a brown bear was spotted in Galicia for the first time in a hundred and fifty years.
Which leads to the next real shocker:
Worldwide, though deforestation remains a serious, pressing issue in the tropics, a major survey based on thirty-five years of satellite imagery, and published in Nature in 2018, contradicted long-held assumptions of decline by suggesting that global forest cover has actually grown by around 7 percent, or roughly 860,000 square miles, since 1982. Not all of this is due to abandonment—industrial plantations also count toward the total—but so marked has the recent reversal in the fortunes of the forest, in so many disparate regions, that geographers have started to describe a country displaying large-scale reforestation as having passed through its “forest transition.”
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What forest regrowth offers us is a chance to pay our debts, to atone for past sins. It is not a pardon, but a reprieve.
The fall of the Soviet Union became a carbon sink letting them technically meet the Kyoto treaty by abandoning farmland to reforest itself! There have been an awful lot of fires in the past couple years through.
~ "Unnatural selection" highlights--yet again--the resilience of life:Killifish are little slips of fish, which eat worms and mosquito larvae and serve in turn as foodstuff for a great many bigger fish. Despite their daintiness, they are extremely hardy. They don’t mind if the water is fresh or salty, warm or cold, and in winter they simply burrow into the mud to escape the ice. NASA sent them to space, to see if they could swim in zero gravity. (They could. They spawned there too.)
And it wasn’t only the Passaic. Killifish were popping up in other pollution hot spots. Because they don’t migrate, the killifish are usually seen as an indicator species as to the environmental health of its home—a canary in the coal mine. Usually killifish are very sensitive to dioxin and PCBs, which interfere with embryo development. And yet, here they were. Although some were showing signs of physical distress—one study found that 35 percent of the killifish living in the creosote-soaked sediment at the bottom of Virginia’s Elizabeth River had cancerous tumors—the fact that they were surviving in such places at all, never mind breeding, seemed remarkable.
In 2016, a paper published in Science pinpointed the manner by which the killifish had done it. A team of scientists led by the University of California, Davis, caught and genetically sequenced killifish from four contaminated harbors across the United States, including Newark Bay. They then compared the genomes with those from uncontaminated sites. They found the pollution-tolerant populations had each evolved similar adaptations that allowed them to live in toxic environments that would normally kill them.
Having adapted to their radically altered habitat, the little killifish were now up to eight thousand times more resistant to industrial pollutants than other fish. All this must have taken place in a few short decades, the authors surmised, since the most harmful pollutants (like dioxin and PCBs) had been released in the 1950s and 1960s. The killifish is not the only fish to have managed this feat; the Atlantic tomcod, a green-mottled bottom-feeder living in the polluted Hackensack River (a neighbor of the Passaic, which also empties into Newark Bay), is known to have evolved a gene that renders it immune to the harmful effects of PCBs.
The process almost certainly worked like this: of the massive killifish and tomcod populations that live on the eastern seaboard of America, a few individuals harbored genetic mutations that made them less sensitive to extreme toxicity. Most of the time this had little impact on their prospects, but should they live near a polluted site, they would find themselves at a distinct competitive advantage compared to their peers.
They breathed more freely, bred more successfully, and generally lived to pass on their mutation to their offspring, who did the same. And thus a new pollutant-tolerant strain of killifish staggered into existence. You might call it unnatural selection. Scientists call it “rapid evolution.”
Just started (my book arrived!), and so far so good. My word, but this woman has a vocabulary on her.
Rossdavidh wrote: "Just started (my book arrived!), and so far so good. My word, but this woman has a vocabulary on her."Yes, I agree, she has a way with words. A very good writer in my opinion.
~ "Forbidden Forest" introduced me to metallophyte species:Because of their strange and beguiling qualities, metal hyperaccumulators—of which there are known to be around five hundred—are of enormous scientific interest. Thanks to their thirst for otherwise toxic materials, they have great potential as tools in the recovery of highly polluted sites. By sucking heavy metals from the earth and hoarding or redistributing them, they might prepare the ground for other, more sensitive organisms. In this way, nature begins to heal over her scars.
Already I could see this process at work. In the Place à Gaz, the bare surface of chemical ash had clearly declined since the German scientists’ 2007 study, and perhaps even since a French follow-up paper in 2016, which noted with relief “progressive revegetation of the site.” Whatever these plants were doing—and particularly the nodding thread moss—was slowly turning the chemical burn in the landscape into a habitable place to grow.
A field of study, phytoremediation, has grown up around hyperaccumulating plants. It seeks to harness their surreal kind of superpowers for the greater good. Other species include the brake fern, which removes arsenic from the soil and stores it in its fronds (and is being tested as a natural filter for contaminated water in Bangladesh, following a decades-long arsenic-poisoning crisis), and sunflowers, which accumulate a wide range of heavy metals and are grown on sites of former mines and smelters in Australia.
~ Invaders and counterinsurgents:On Gough Island, for example, a remote and treeless outpost in the South Atlantic, the harmless house mouse has caused a bloodbath. Inadvertently introduced by sailors in the nineteenth century, the mice have grown super-sized in the absence of predators and developed a tasted for seabird chicks—including those of the Tristan albatross, three hundred times their size. Two million chicks are lost to the mice every year, and without intervention the albatross will likely go extinct.
On Guam, the brown tree snake threatens to bring down an entire ecosystem. The snake, introduced by accident in the 1940s, eats forest birds—ten out of twelve native species have been lost, the remaining two functionally extinct—and without birds to spread their seed, the trees too are thinning out. For the same reason, 61 percent of all extinct, and 37 percent of all critically endangered, species are from islands.
In non-abandoned sites, great effort is often invested in the control of such weeds and pests. Numbers are “managed”—that is, eradicated, killed off wholesale by way of weedkiller or poison pellets or sharpshooters. The question of “population control,” of culling, of extermination, is one of the biggest ethical quandaries at the heart of contemporary conservation. Charities and researchers often advocate an end to certain forms of wildlife in order to favor certain other forms of wildlife—killing gray squirrels in favor of their red cousins, to give a British example.
New Zealand, an island nation with many strange and vulnerable endemic species to protect, perhaps takes this further than anywhere else. It spends $42 million to $56 million on pesticides, bait, traps, and poison-dropping helicopters each year; in 2016, the country announced plans to eliminate all rats, stoats, and possums by 2050 in order to protect native birds like the kakapo and the kiwi in one mega-eradication—involving the deaths of many millions of small predators.
However—though widespread—the maesopsis uprising had failed to materialize in quite the way that had been anticipated. Once the first wave of maesopsis matured, it began to become clear that its reproduction rates had slowed. In the increasingly well-shaded forest floor at their feet, their own seedlings were losing ground to the natives, who now were spontaneously regenerating and reclaiming their land. In providing shade—it could be argued—it has served a useful role. It too feeds local fauna: hornbills, who feed on the maesopsis seeds, have boomed.
And it’s not the only alien carving out a role in their new home. Those frightening black-armored millipedes I saw earlier, imported from New Zealand, have made a seamless transition to the Usambaras, and serve a role not unlike that of a dung beetle. Even the detested lantana and clidemia have their fans: butterflies and the endangered Amani sunbird, with its iridescent green shoulders, gorge on their nectar.
That non-native species should be able to settle in—and even come to serve some helpful roles—does throw a little cold water over the idea of the ecosystem as the intricately wrought, carefully balanced product of millennia of coevolution, each species carving its way into the genes of the others’ as water sculpts rocks. Indeed, it is the success of aliens like maesopsis, all over the world, that has fed into a bold new perspective, one that seeks to reevaluate environments “tainted” by the proliferation of non-native species.
Such ecosystems, suggests this new school of thought, are “novel ecosystems”—created by man, but self-sustaining. And it is time to accept the fact that they have changed forever, cannot be returned to a previous “unspoiled” state—indeed, that the notion of their being spoiled in the first place may be incorrect—and appreciate them, for what they are now. It is, write its proponents, “the new ecological world order.” They quote Goethe: “[Nature] is ever shaping new forms: what is, has never yet been; what has been, comes not again.”
Sometime in the last ten or fifteen years, a strange growth began to appear on the smooth skin of the maesopsis trees. It was a bracket fungus—disk-like shelves protruding from the bark, rotting their hosts from the inside out. Initially few and far between, the fungi grew and spread, and is now killing maesopsis where they stand. It appears to be a native, says Pierre, although its true origins and the key to its sudden spread are not known. To some, it might look like revenge.
~ We've seen the hopeful and the inspiring. "The Deluge and the Desert" gives us a long hard look at the scary:During (...) the end-Permian extinction—when 99 percent of all life forms were wiped out—ice caps melted, sea levels rose, and ocean currents ground to a halt. The deep sea warmed, became anoxic (as the much shallower bottom of the Salton Sea does in summer, when organic matter decomposes faster), and then this deoxygenated water slowly drifted up through the sea column, killing almost everything in the ocean. Normal bacteria cannot survive in anoxic water; instead, it supports a totally different bacterial flora—sulfur-utilizers—which proliferated and formed ocean-wide blooms belching poison gas.
“Hydrogen sulfide kills animals even at low concentrations,” writes Ward, “and the rock record shows repeated episodes when large volumes of this gas came out of solution from the sea.” Free-floating in the heated atmosphere, it killed most Permian land life “gruesomely,” including plants. Such an event has happened at least eight times in the Earth’s history, he stresses. Hydrogen sulfide release “may have been responsible for the majority of mass extinctions, and it certainly could happen again.”
(...) Humans, of course, busy sloshing fertilizers into our waterways, and—worse—pumping the atmosphere so full of carbon dioxide as to risk the toppling of the entire planetary system, may yet prove the most Medean species of all. To trigger sulfide-bacterial blooms on a planetary scale, Ward estimates carbon dioxide levels would need to reach 1,000 parts per million (ppm). Before the industrial age, levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere sat at around 280 ppm. By 2019, that figure had risen to 411 ppm. Under the most optimistic forecast put forward by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, we might hope to drag concentration levels back under 400 ppm sometime in the next century. Under the most pessimistic, these numbers could easily overshoot Ward’s red line, spiking to a frankly horrifying 2,000 ppm by 2250.
I’ve finished the book, and I like it. I may even read it again sometime. I think Cal Flyn has a good writing style, not too technical, basically she is good at telling stories, and weaving them together. I don’t remember the name of the person, but close to the end she talks about man that claims we’ve already lost the fight against climate change, it will play out no matter what we do. When Cal Flyn rejects that idea, saying that it is not a helpful because then what would be the point of trying, I couldn’t agree with her more. It is in a way why I turned away from a certain kind of climate fiction and to solarpunk.
As a writer I have written two dystopian climate short stories that have been published, and I began writing a novel that was pretty much in same vain. It was a story about a trip from Australia to Iceland in a climate changed world, a burning world in a way. By far the best beginning of a novel I have ever written, but I got to a point in the story where I started to think: do I really want to write this, or read it for that matter, and the novel just died. I couldn’t get back to it.
What I like so much about solarpunk, and this book is that it doesn’t shy away from what is happening, it doesn’t shy away from the fact that mankind is in serious trouble, but it does still keep hope alive. I think that is a much better way to tell the story because then maybe one might actually like to try to do something about it.
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“…aversion methods—the more frightening and insidious the better—could be the most effective method of keeping people out of nature reserves.”
I had no idea about the Hanford site in Washington State. The Wikipedia article also says “Some of this land has been returned to private use and is now covered with orchards, vineyards, and irrigated fields.”
That combined with the earlier video I posted about farming around Chernobyl really impresses me with the need to know where my food comes from.
Lena wrote: "Finished chapter five. The best idea so far would currently be considered eco terrorism yet it has a logical appeal: “…aversion methods—the more frightening and insidious the better—could be the most effective method of keeping people out of nature reserves.” "
Yes, it sounds such a strange way to "conserve" nature, but it seems to work in some places at least.
I can't help wondering about the people in the earlier Chernobyl video you posted Lena, like that farmer, if he's going to loose everything for the second time in less than 10 years. It is such a bad situation.
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That hurt to read. Just finished chapter 7. The moth study was fascinating!
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This is my least favorite sentence of the month. It belongs in Fahrenheit 451 not in environmental policy.
"...my time studying colonialism in Australia has made me cautious. I know well the ways that interventionists with the best of intentions can cause as much harm or more than those with poor ones."Ouch.
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The chapter on feral cows reminded me of this book, which I might recommend to anyone who wants to read more on the topic of domestication: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
Lena sums it up well. Skimmed the last couple chapters, but prior to that it was quite interesting.
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Cal Flyn, an investigative journalist, exceptional nature writer, and promising new literary voice visits the eeriest and most desolate places on Earth that due to war, disaster, disease, or economic decay, have been abandoned by humans. What she finds every time is an island of teeming new life: nature has rushed in to fill the void faster and more thoroughly than even the most hopeful projections of scientists.