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Join us on Zoom for a conversation with author Cal Flyn.
This event will be broadcast live on Zoom. Registration and an email address are required to receive the link to participate.
Order your copy of Islands of Abandonment from Mac’s Backs – Books on Coventry: macsbacks.com/book/9781984878199
About the author:
Cal Flyn is an author, an investigative journalist, and a MacDowell fellow from the Highlands of Scotland. She has worked as a reporter for The Sunday Times and The Telegraph and has contributed to publications including Granta, The Guardian, The Times, The Observer, and others. Her first book, Thicker Than Water, was one of The Times‘s best books of 2016.
Islands of Abandonment: Nature Rebounding in the Post-Human Landscape is a beautiful, lyrical exploration of the places where nature is flourishing in our absence. Visiting the eeriest and most desolate places on Earth that due to war, disaster, disease, or economic decay, have been abandoned by humans, Cal Flyn finds “islands” of teeming new life: nature has rushed in to fill the void faster and more thoroughly than even the most hopeful projections of scientists.
Some of the only truly feral cattle in the world wander a long-abandoned island off the northernmost tip of Scotland. A variety of wildlife not seen in many lifetimes has rebounded on the irradiated grounds of Chernobyl. A lush forest supports thousands of species that are extinct or endangered everywhere else on earth in the Korean peninsula’s narrow DMZ.
Islands of Abandonment is a tour through these new ecosystems, in all their glory, as sites of unexpected environmental significance, where the natural world has reasserted its wild power and promise. And while it doesn’t let us off the hook for addressing environmental degradation and climate change, it is a case that hope is far from lost, and it is ultimately a story of redemption: the most polluted spots on Earth can be rehabilitated through ecological processes and, in fact, they already are.
This program is presented in partnership with the Cleveland Museum of Natural History.
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