Cal Flyn: the next Robert Macfarlane?

I'm always delighted when a woman gets to write a book like this, but I haven't given five stars for that reason. It's quite similar in format to Gaia Vince's 'Adventures in the Anthropocene', but where Vince's book attempted to raise the reader's optimism about individual efforts to combat climate change, and failed at this in my opinion, Flyn makes few promises of hope and yet, I was left uplifted.

Flyn blends environmental and human history as she takes us to places all around the world, from Chernobyl, to a WW1 battlefield in France, to a desert in the USA. There is a lack of "representation" of the Global South, but I wonder if that's because time hasn't yet worked its strange magic to return life - or new versions of it - to places there that have been ecologically devastated more recently than counterparts in the Global North.

Chernobyl has been written about exhaustively, though Flyn still finds fresh material (she visits all the places that are focused on in the book, with the exception of a few additional examples such as reef recovery in the Bikini Atoll). Where Flyn truly excels is in finding and writing about places that many readers are likely to have never heard of. Slab City in the US desert; the arsenic-ash pool in France; or the West Lothian 'bings', mining waste heaps now flourishing with rare plantlife.

Another quality of the book that stands out is its balance of focus on the human and the non-human. While much nature-writing these days is criticised for an almost egotistical use of animals purely as a means to examine people, Flyn gives attention to both. Slab City is more of a human study, for example, while Harris Island off Scotland is a fascinating vignette of species self-rewilding (I am keenly interested in rewilding and have read many books on the subject, and I hadn't come across the cattle of Harris before).

Flyn describes her explorations in assured and beautiful prose. Very occasionally, there were too many similes and metaphors in short succession, but that's a bit of a nit-pick. What matters is that the author captures the chiaroscuro that her "islands of abandonment" have created - the terrible cost of their destruction, but also the unanticipated joy of life that has managed to find a way. That is where Flyn's message of hope comes in. She is under no pretence that the coming consequences of climate change will bring untold suffering to humans and non-humans alike, but examples like the ones in her book provide tangible hope that some kinds of life will again rise from the ashes - and more quickly and more successfully than we might imagine.

(With thanks to NetGalley and William Collins for this ebook, in exchange for an honest review)