Amazing book about the various places abandoned by humans. DMZ in Cyprus. Meltdown in Ukraine. Toxic waste near Staten Island.
Japan - where the population is ofrecast to fall from 127 million to 100 million or lower by 2049 - one in every eight properties is already abandoned, forecast to rise to nearly a third of all housing stock by 2033. (The Japanese call them akiya, ghost homes.)
The Bikini Atoll, a ring of coral islets encircling a turquoise lagoon, was used by the United States as a nuclear weapons testing site during the 1940s and '50s - most notably for the 1954 Castle Bravo test, when a thermonuclear device more than seven thousand times the force of that dropped on Hiroshima was detonated, producing an explosion of such unexpected force it shocked the scientists that designed it and ultimately prompted a worldwide ban on atmospheric testing. [...] But in 2008, when an international team of researchers returned to the atoll to inspect the lagoon, they found to their surprise that a thriving underwater ecosystem had formed in the blast crater over the intervening decades. It looked, as one coral scientist commented in wonder, 'absolutely pristine'.
Rebecca Solnit once wrote of the 'blue of distance', the colour of hills that recede layer upon layer unto the horizon. Well, this is the green of time. The green that grows from nothing, anything, if left for long enough. It comes at first as mildew or mould. A misting of green-gray, or mustard-green, the green of decay. But then it grows and grows into the verdant palette of new life: leaf green, lime green, the green of fresh new shoots.
As Jeffrey McNeely, former chief scientist at the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), has noted, the buffer zones between warring, prestate societies serve as refugia for wild game and thus have 'helped contribute to the rich biodiversity found today in many tropical forests'. Fear, therefore, is a force that shapes the world.
The plants shift in their seats, trade places, multiply and disappear - but only when we are not looking. To stand in the field and consider its progress is to confront the eerie sensation of having been elected the unwitting judge of a game of musical statues; the trees and plants frozen in comic poses, their riffling leaves giving them away as effectively as the shallow breath of the stilled by living body.
Coney Island Creek [...] For it is this mud, or rather the poisons held within it, that is the true legacy of this region's industrial past. [...] Tanneries used sulphuric acid to strip hides, arsenic to preserve them, lead acetate to bleach them and chromium to tan them. Hat-makers used mercury nitrates to turn fur into felt. And like the dye works in Paterson, they all dumped their waste straight into the water. [...] Originally a factory where cow bones were ground down to make fertiliser, the Lister Avenue plant was converted into a chemical works producing DDT in 1940, and later a manufacturer of phenoxy herbicides - specifically, the two chemicals that, when mixed into a 1:1 cocktail, constitute the notorious defoliant Agent Orange. [...] But the property's true notoriety centres around a byproduct of phenoxy herbicide production: dioxin - an extremely toxic family of compounds, exposure to even tiny quantities of which, in any form, is carcinogenic. In humans, it causes every type of cancer there is, as well as stunting the development of unborn babies and afflicting wholesale damage to the human immune system. TCDD, the dioxin produced at the Diamond Alkali works, is the most toxic of all.
It was only years after production was halted that the public health risks associated with dioxins were fully appreciated. There is no truly 'safe' level of dioxin contamination; it's one of the most toxic substances known to man. It is 170,000 times more deadly than cyanide. The US Environmental Portection Agency considers water with dioxin levels of 31 parts per quadrillion (that is, 31 in 1,000,000,000,000,000) too contaminated to drink. [...] once accumulated in soil or sediment (or the bodies of living things), scientists estimate dioxin's half-life to be at least a century. Some, including the United States Department of Agriculture, go further, describing it as 'virtually nonbiodegradable'.
