Cal Flyn’s rich, poetic prose takes us into the world’s wastelands, places that have been abandoned, whether because of nuclear disaster, human conflict or economic decay. Flyn travels to the irradiated nuclear sector surrounding Chernobyl, the strip of no man’s land that makes up Cyprus’s buffer zone, former mining towns and islands once filled with people and domesticated animals that have now turned feral, and in every one she explores how nature not only has reclaimed these spaces but has in fact thrived in the hulking ruins that still bear a fading trace of human’s impact. It is a lesson in humility and even faith: human interference in nature, such as landscaping, cultivating and carefully planning gardens like New York’s High Line can stifle ecological diversity and create a sterile green environment.

Nature works before and around human intervention; it comes back once we are gone. We can trust that the smouldering carcasses of human-built structures will make homes for the nature that comes to reinhabit it, for the species that grow wild and liberally between its limbs and in its open spaces. Flyn’s premise is that abandonment can lead to rewilding. Not just rewilding, but healing: the Earth is indulgent, gracious with us, despite our ongoing destructiveness. After nuclear tests at Bikini Atoll in the Pacific Ocean in the 1940s and 1950s, coral reefs grew back more ecologically diverse than before. In some cases, destruction has led to a richer renaissance. This is a manifesto for seeing our abandoned spaces differently, helping them become part of the landscape, allowing for possibility where before we may have thought there is none.

Catherine Benett