Islands of Abandonment Quotes

“In so many places, we are so busy playing at being stewards of the Earth, deciding who gets to live and who gets to die. Once we have left our mark on an ecosystem, we show no hesitation in throwing open the hood again later to fiddle with its workings. We run the Earth as if it were one giant botanical garden to tend; passing judgment on species, playing God. I”
― Cal Flyn, Islands of Abandonment: Nature Rebounding in the Post-Human Landscape

“Time is, after all, the great healer. The question is: How long does it need?. Then, How long have we got'. It may not be long”
― Cal Flyn, Islands of Abandonment: Life in the Post-Human Landscape

“The neuroscientist David Eagleman once proposed that we have three deaths: the first at the point at which the body ceases to function, the second upon burial, and the third being “that moment, sometime in the future, when your name is spoken for the last time.”
― Cal Flyn, Islands of Abandonment: Nature Rebounding in the Post-Human Landscape

“Again—this latency of life. It drifts around us all the time, invisible, like an ether. It’s in the air we breathe, the water we drink. Savor it: each breath, each sip, is thick with potential. In this cup of nothing is the germ of everything.”
― Cal Flyn, Islands of Abandonment: Nature Rebounding in the Post-Human Landscape

“This is a corrupted world, yes - one long fallen from a state of grace - but it is a world too that knows how to live. It has a great capacity for repair, for recovery, for forgiveness - of a sort - if we can only learn to do it so.”
― Cal Flyn, Islands of Abandonment: Life in the Post-Human Landscape

“Knowledge deepens appreciation.”
― Cal Flyn, Islands of Abandonment: Life in the Post-Human Landscape

“The neuroscientist David Eagleman once proposed that we have three deaths: the first at the point at which the body ceases to function, the second upon burial, and the third being ‘that moment, sometime in the future,”
― Cal Flyn, Islands of Abandonment: Life in the Post-Human Landscape

“But the unplanned nature preserves that have formed up in the buffer zones have come to serve as a focus for bilateral cooperation after hostilities are over.”
― Cal Flyn, Islands of Abandonment: Life in the Post-Human Landscape

“Further back, cooling ponds strewn with rusted pipes were busy with teals and moorhens. An old concrete streetlight stood incongruously in the woods beyond: some ravaged Narnia. Jays catcalled overhead.”
― Cal Flyn, Islands of Abandonment: Life in the Post-Human Landscape

“Ahead, the dry hills of the opposite coast rise, arid and sculptural, as a ribbon along the horizon, all that separates vast prismatic sky from looking-glass sea.”
― Cal Flyn, Islands of Abandonment: Life in the Post-Human Landscape

“My feet sink into the soft gravel of war, the precipitate of man’s self-annihilating impulse. A circle of barren ground left like a fingerprint at a crime scene, evidence of a war unprecedented in its scale and destruction, in its reckless devastation.”
― Cal Flyn, Islands of Abandonment: Life in the Post-Human Landscape

“The road lifts and falls, on and off ramps rise and twist to meet it mid-air; smooth, sculptural ribbons of road plaiting briefly together then peeling away.”
― Cal Flyn, Islands of Abandonment: Life in the Post-Human Landscape

“An organic process, ruination: these artificial structures are just as vulnerable to decay as we are – they need constant attention, maintenance, occupation. Our presence is their beating heart.”
― Cal Flyn, Islands of Abandonment: Life in the Post-Human Landscape

“The new forest that invades the city rumples the road, pushing its roots under the asphalt like limbs beneath a bedspread.”
― Cal Flyn, Islands of Abandonment: Life in the Post-Human Landscape

“The Arcadian dreamscape celebrated by the colonial pioneers was, in fact, a post-apocalyptic one.”
― Cal Flyn, Islands of Abandonment: Life in the Post-Human Landscape

“It is much harder to recognise the value of lead when it sits so pale against the flash of silver or gold.”
― Cal Flyn, Islands of Abandonment: Life in the Post-Human Landscape

“Over the space of a half-century, these once-bare wastelands had somehow, magically, shivered into life.”
― Cal Flyn, Islands of Abandonment: Life in the Post-Human Landscape

“among them the exquisite brown shield-moss, whose thin tendrils loft targes to the sky like an army in miniature.”
― Cal Flyn, Islands of Abandonment: Life in the Post-Human Landscape

“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.”
― Cal Flyn, Islands of Abandonment: Life in the Post-Human Landscape

“All that the Earth may need to soak up enormous, climate-altering quantities of carbon is to be left alone.”
― Cal Flyn, Islands of Abandonment: Nature Rebounding in the Post-Human Landscape

“Inhabitants of sites of mass abandonment, most notably in the city of Detroit, have come to characterise the aestheticising of their predicament – the presentation of its photogenic results without social context – as a form of voyeurism, even ‘ruin porn’.”
― Cal Flyn, Islands of Abandonment: Life in the Post-Human Landscape

“remind myself: if one goes in search of nature in its wildest forms, you shouldn’t expect it will be pleased to see you.”
― Cal Flyn, Islands of Abandonment: Nature Rebounding in the Post-Human Landscape

“After a certain amount of time, feral animals become wild beasts, no matter their domesticated past. By then they will be evolutionary works of art all their own.”
― Cal Flyn, Islands of Abandonment: Nature Rebounding in the Post-Human Landscape

“For many months after a death, the cattle will visit and revisit the bodies of their fallen—the way elephants are said to do in the African savannah. They sniff them, touch them. As months pass and the flesh slips away and the skeletons are laid bare, they will unintentionally step upon them and break them apart. In this way, over time, the bones will be ground down and returned to the earth. An ancient ritual of the cattle that otherwise we might never see.”
― Cal Flyn, Islands of Abandonment: Nature Rebounding in the Post-Human Landscape

“became aware that the old black bull was lying on his side on the ground some distance from the herd. He looked dead but the odd twitch of his tail indicated that there was still some semblance of life . . . About an hour later when passing Rose Cottage we became aware that a number of the cattle, being led by the young black bull, had left the main herd and were making for the old bull who was obviously in a distressed state. The group certainly gave the impression of being genuinely concerned and were nudging and making physical contact, providing some form of comfort to him in what was a dire situation . . . [I]t is difficult to find the language that can touch that experience . . . Their behavior expressed compassion, grief, comfort and a willingness to afford assistance. I can only describe the actions of the cattle as reverential. Such glimpses into the unseen, unrecorded culture of the cattle that has formed up on Swona in our absence afford us insight into the true nature of an animal too often dismissed as a dim-witted, cud-chewing automaton. They give us insight into the weight afforded to death among a species we farm and slaughter on an industrial scale. If we do not see the remnants of this behavior among those more carefully tended, it is because we do not give them the chance: they have not the freedom to demonstrate it; they do not typically see out their lifespans to their natural conclusions.”
― Cal Flyn, Islands of Abandonment: Nature Rebounding in the Post-Human Landscape

“Generally, critics feel that by embracing novel ecosystems, we are abandoning hope of undoing the damage done by humans, or offering a free pass to companies or governments that damaged them in the first place. Still, with around a third of all ice-free land now thought to be covered by novel ecosystems, it grows increasingly important to wrestle with what these mongrel, immigrant communities mean for the future of our planet as a whole. And it is in abandoned places, where human-impacted land is not being managed—where non-native species and native species alike are left to their own devices, without heavy-handed but well-meaning intervention—that we might begin to view alien invasions over a longer period of time, and perhaps come to to appreciate that, in time, an ecosystem might start to adapt to its new citizens and find a new sense of balance.”
― Cal Flyn, Islands of Abandonment: Nature Rebounding in the Post-Human Landscape

“The fear is this: a surge of foreign invaders into an isolated ecosystem will disrupt food chains, alter soil chemistry, upset bacterial communities and mycorrhizal networks beneath the ground, outcompete slower-moving natives, carry in diseases.”
― Cal Flyn, Islands of Abandonment: Nature Rebounding in the Post-Human Landscape

“This is Amani, high in the Usambara Mountains of Tanzania, but I could be anywhere at all. This abandoned botanical garden offers a cautionary tale of the dangers of transporting species around the world. But Amani may too show us a glimpse of something else: of the surprising ability of species to rub along with one another, even if they ought never to have met. Their success in finding novel ways of coexisting offers us hope that in Amani, and in so many other sites around the world, ecosystems may be more flexible than we have assumed.”
― Cal Flyn, Islands of Abandonment: Nature Rebounding in the Post-Human Landscape

“Human industry has changed, and is continuing to change the world. Even if we were all to be wiped out tomorrow—factories falling silent; generators shuddering to a halt; cargo ships drifting and colliding, sinking to the seabed, sending sediments billowing—we have set in motion evolutionary forces that will continue to act upon the genetic makeup of almost every other species alive on this Earth. They shape-shift and metamorphose, transmute and adapt, in ways that we cannot anticipate and certainly cannot control. They want to live, if they can.”
― Cal Flyn, Islands of Abandonment: Nature Rebounding in the Post-Human Landscape

“For more than a hundred and fifty years, Peru and Ecuador were locked in a bitter territorial dispute over the Cordillera del Cóndor, an offshoot of the Andes rising between the two countries, leaving large areas undeveloped as a result: pristine forests unlogged and rich gold and copper seams unmined. Environmental surveys in the 1990s revealed the region to be one of the most biologically diverse (and least-studied) habitats in the world; almost every visit to its slopes reveals yet more species unknown to science. This environmental storehouse became a key plank of talks—something of significance that the two countries now shared—and, as part of the 1998 peace agreement, both sides committed to creating extensive reserves on both sides of the border. Transnational reserves of this sort are known as “peace parks”—powerful demonstrations of the healing power of nature, in more ways than one. One”
― Cal Flyn, Islands of Abandonment: Nature Rebounding in the Post-Human Landscape