Faith in the possibility of change, the prospect of a better future. For green shoots in the rubble, fresh water in the desert. And our faith is often tested.
Everywhere I have looked, everywhere I have been – places bent and broken, despoiled and desolate, polluted and poisoned, I have found new life springing from the wreckage of the old, life all the stranger and more valuable for its resilience. 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 let it do so. Lands cleared for cultivation centuries before revert to forest in a matter of years. Environments stripped of their inhabitants can repopulate of their own accord. Even contaminated sites of the very worst kind can, when given the chance become ecosystems of singular importance.
The islands of abandonment in this book serve to remind us that not only big structured conservation projects that offer us hope for a return to the wild. The scrappy abandoned carpark at the end of your road. Consider it and every one like it a tiny islet in an archipelago stretching over the whole world. Stepping stones for species as they recognise what land was lost.
Places like Bikini Atoll, Chernobyl and the Lothian bings show us that the absence of man is often all the stimulus required to start the resurrection. Time is, after all, a great healer.
The question is: how long does it need? and then: how long have we got?
It may not be long. This is the time for the confessional, of the admission of sins. This is the time to pray if you know how: to God or to Gaia.
Extracted from: Islands of Abandonment
“What happens when humans foresake and ruin landscapes? They are never truly abandoned. Instead they are engulfed by the non-human world and they become teeming with many other foresaken wild lifeforms. The weeds, plants, insects, birds and large mammals move in and populate these places. Pushed to the brink of extinction elsewhere by the ever-expanding need for human progress – these ugly, abandoned fringes of our world are the places where these animals can finally breathe a sigh of relief.” ~ Cal Flynn
Islands of Abandonment is a book-length poem and an ode to the places humans have used, abused and then rejected due to pollution, war, or physical danger.
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Thanks dear friend for the share 😘
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