YouSaid · the spoken record

Cal Flyn

lines on the record: 52
first: 2024-09-22
most recent: 2024-09-22
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“So, yeah, it's a real mix. It's just been really nice to be in touch with so many people, I guess, who care about the world around them and want to do the best thing. And I think the issue often with conservation is that everyone involved wants to do the right thing, but the right thing is not always obvious. And then you end up with sort of loggerheads at each other because you have these various competing philosophies. And so I think just like my main thing is trying to go into things with an open mind. And the more open the mind, the better. So my book is certainly not one that has easy answers. I don't think answers are easy. So let's talk.”
2024-09-22 · Intelligence Squared · Archive: The Allure of Abandoned Places, with Cal Flyn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, really mixed actually. Think I've had quite a few messages from people who've said that they've felt inspired to get involved in local conservation efforts to sort of save patches of ground that have been abandoned for a long time and are sort of facing redevelopment in one form or another. So that's really interesting to hear about. I've spoken to quite a few academics who sort of work in these various areas. For example, I'm talking to a group in America who are interested in forestry growth because that is something I talked about that a little bit earlier about the scale that is happening on across the world and so that's going to very much be an area of study.”
2024-09-22 · Intelligence Squared · Archive: The Allure of Abandoned Places, with Cal Flyn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A difficult situation, so I guess what we have to do is sort of look at examples of places that have gone into decline and see what we can learn and try and improve our reaction in future when we find other, I don't know, single industry cities going into decline or things like this, I don't know.”
2024-09-22 · Intelligence Squared · Archive: The Allure of Abandoned Places, with Cal Flyn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, yeah, of course. I mean, Detroit's a very powerful example of that. I think what that reflects, you know, I've talked a lot about how humans value Other species, and I think that this question is more waving towards the question of how humans value other humans Think the areas are sometimes allowed to fall into abandonment out of hopelessness. I think sometimes they are allowed to fall into abandonment. Because I don't know sort of economic forces and so on, but politics is right there at the heart of it. And sort of, I think certainly, sorry, I'm not going to have a very clever answer to this, but certainly politics plays a very important part. And when we are facing, I'd say, urban decline, but also rural decline, there are going to be better ways of dealing with it than others. And the”
2024-09-22 · Intelligence Squared · Archive: The Allure of Abandoned Places, with Cal Flyn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think climate change is the big gun spoken thing in every discussion of the environment at the moment. And I think just the way that I think about it moves so much from day to day, just sometimes I'm full of despair and other times I've got this sort of weird hope and then other times it's despair again. And I think I feel like that sort of in answer to your question, which is that sometimes I think we don't matter and then other times it feels like we matter more than anything else and I can't seem to settle on a single. position.”
2024-09-22 · Intelligence Squared · Archive: The Allure of Abandoned Places, with Cal Flyn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, and no. I mean, we certainly have an impact. It all depends on what skill you're looking at. You know, so if you're looking at the world and... Context of deep time, then maybe we don't matter if you're looking at the world in the context of what might happen to the world because of humans in the next hundred years, then we're the dominant force at play. I find It's very difficult to.”
2024-09-22 · Intelligence Squared · Archive: The Allure of Abandoned Places, with Cal Flyn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think we're rightly anxious about it just because it's playing with fire and the time scale, the damage that radioactive damage can. Be on is of a whole other plane, whereas as we're seeing at the moment, our social and political landscape changes a lot in the space of a single human's lifetime. And so I think we have to be very careful about playing with things which last much longer and have much longer impact. Sorry, I've forgotten the other aspect of that question.”
2024-09-22 · Intelligence Squared · Archive: The Allure of Abandoned Places, with Cal Flyn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Little bit, I do brush onto it. I think it's probably a little bit beyond the scope of my project just because it's a different way of thinking. I talk a little bit about the recovery of the bikini atoll, but that's very much in sort of passing because it's an interesting example of how places can flourish when they fall out of, well, not the bikiniate ever fell out of our attentions exactly, but our disturbance of the site was very minimal after one incredible huge disturbance. And so like seeing recovery there is very interesting. But I think probably the answer to that is no, sorry.”
2024-09-22 · Intelligence Squared · Archive: The Allure of Abandoned Places, with Cal Flyn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Characterize, for example, like gray versus red squirrels, we're often very unkind about grey squirrels, which is fine. You can love red squirrels and want them to survive, but I think if you speak to people who work in this, they have to be really careful not to demonize them. That's a weird role for us to play.”
2024-09-22 · Intelligence Squared · Archive: The Allure of Abandoned Places, with Cal Flyn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't think it's very healthy for us to put these sort of moral judgments on them. Saying that you can use them as a measure, like an indicator species of what an environment might be like. So if something like rats are doing really well, it might be because they have relatively recently arrived and are bursting all over the place and that's the signifier of an environment being out of whack. So that is still very freshly being impacted by humans, if you see what I mean. And often over time these environments settle down. So they can be seen as a kind of indicator as to the health of environment certain species like rats. But I think it's very healthy for us to learn not to sort of hate species on site and not to feel that they're sort of forces of good versus evil, which we see often in the way that we carry.”
2024-09-22 · Intelligence Squared · Archive: The Allure of Abandoned Places, with Cal Flyn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, great question because I think this waves towards something else which is like I just find so fascinating, which are like the moral value that we often place in other species. So instinctively we tend to dislike species like rats, especially black rats and urban foxes and so on. Pigeons, we find kind of gross and disgusting. And that's not because there are necessarily any more gross and disgusting, but there is a sort of a familiarity that we have with them that makes us disapprove of them. And I think it's a little bit like Tall Poppy Syndrome. So they do so well from the environments that we create that we feel that we can be kind of careless about the value of their lives. And so I think often people don't like them because they seem to be doing well at the expense of other rarer or more fragile.”
2024-09-22 · Intelligence Squared · Archive: The Allure of Abandoned Places, with Cal Flyn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Pierce called a trillion trees when he talks about the benefits of farming, particularly in tropical countries where you might be farming but also have a strip of trees along the side of every field or something like this and how much that can add to it. So I think we need to not be too purist when we think about steps forward with the environment and actually continuing on with activities like farming, but just allowing a bit more space. If you do that in every field that adds up to a huge amount and so it helps, I think for us to understand that there is a porosity between sort of human controlled landscapes and Non human controlled landscape.”
2024-09-22 · Intelligence Squared · Archive: The Allure of Abandoned Places, with Cal Flyn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Might be not biodiverse enough because actually thick forest does not particularly biodiverse when you compare it to, for example, sort of, I don't know what you'd call it, sort of like open grassland with some trees and so on and so forth. So they were sort of experimenting with having low-level cattle grazing there to try and make these places as rich as possible. That's still quite a controlled environment, but that's not to say that it's not what I mean. It's not necessarily a controlled environment. It's a human impacted environment, but that's not to say that's a bad thing, you know, places where we've had these sort of almost like low level or non-intensive farming, especially if that's lasted for centuries, that often comes hand in hand with lots of species that have adapted to these conditions and do really well there. For example, hedgerows are very rich in different species. So you see almost like wildlife positive farming. And I've seen a really interesting book by Fred.”
2024-09-22 · Intelligence Squared · Archive: The Allure of Abandoned Places, with Cal Flyn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, that's a really good question because what it does flag up us is this huge continuum within agriculture. So probably at the far end of most harmful you have these monocultural deserts really when you've only really got one species for enormous swathes of a place and also to create that you might have completely changed permanently the drainage of a whole landscape. That is where you see farming at. It's most harmful. On the other end of the scale you have sort of smaller scale farming which can be can sort of coexist with a lot of different species. So if you're interested in rewilding you probably know quite a bit about how people are now sort of bringing back things like long horn cattle and so on and in fact in Estonia on sort of the edges of some of the bad and farmland they were sort of anxious that the trees that were regrowing, these forests are sort of sweeping Estonia.”
2024-09-22 · Intelligence Squared · Archive: The Allure of Abandoned Places, with Cal Flyn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't know. It's always with these things, sort of a trade off. I keep coming back to that of sort of like, well, how much can I know about it before I get there? Do I know that this will definitely go somewhere? So I would really like actually to write about more places in the Arctic just out of a personal love for cold places.”
2024-09-22 · Intelligence Squared · Archive: The Allure of Abandoned Places, with Cal Flyn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, so many. I keep learning about more and more interesting places. I think one thing that I feel maybe is kind of missing from the book. I didn't get to Asia really and I didn't get to South America. So just generally like whole geographical areas are missing and I would like to write more about. I was really keen to go to Possibly just fall barred because there are some quite well photographed former mining settlements there and I know in certain areas of Siberia along the sort of border with permafrost there are some settlements which are sort of increasingly abandoned I think I didn't find out a huge amount about them and”
2024-09-22 · Intelligence Squared · Archive: The Allure of Abandoned Places, with Cal Flyn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And also, just generally because rewilding has become a really sort of popular watchword, one wonderful thing that's come from that is that lots of people think almost in terms of like rewilding on tiny scales like in their garden and I think that's only a good thing so like leaving things to be untidy you know not putting away clippings all of this kind of stuff is actually especially when it's done on this mass scale which I think lots of people are doing then that can only be a good thing so sure sure great”
2024-09-22 · Intelligence Squared · Archive: The Allure of Abandoned Places, with Cal Flyn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it's just so hard actually to express opinions on rewilding because the word rewilding means such different it has so many different definitions and I think generally I'm sort of pro this idea of allowing natural mechanisms to come back into play like generally I think that one could say that this is what rewilding is am I pro sort of the return of different species generally yes I think it's something that I personally don't want to get too caught up in if it's individual species I like to keep that sort of wider look would I like to see things like wolves return sure it's that to me like I think also that's not necessarily the only sign of a healthy environment and that there are lots of other things as well so yeah I'm generally pro-rewilding it's kind of difficult to to comment more specifically after that”
2024-09-22 · Intelligence Squared · Archive: The Allure of Abandoned Places, with Cal Flyn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Out of the rubble. And I think that that was a warning note that one has to end. And yet, you know, we are playing with a dangerous game with our own habitat, our own world, and it doesn't necessarily have a happy ending. And I think that from a responsibility point of view, I did kind of had to end with that sort of note of anxiety.”
2024-09-22 · Intelligence Squared · Archive: The Allure of Abandoned Places, with Cal Flyn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Stuff, you know, there's lots of chemicals, there's lots of when it as it's drying out, it leaves the dust and the sort of mud and then that gets wiped up in the desert air and it causes lots of problems of asthma. So that is not really, I mean, I don't think I could really describe it as an ecological success story. It's still notable for the birds, but the more poisonous the water comes out, the more problems they have with things like botulism. So no, that's kind of a vision of a bad future, you know, I think that's kind of why I ended the story there. It is, you know, dryness, aridity is a serious problem. It's something that is a sort of looming problem with climate change in these hotter regions of the earth. Biodiversity doesn't really thrive in areas of dryness. And so that is something that we must all be concerned about. And there I find this sort of mad Max future of people building things.”
2024-09-22 · Intelligence Squared · Archive: The Allure of Abandoned Places, with Cal Flyn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, in fact, probably the final chapter I go to Neric called The Sultancy. I think that ties quite closely with your area of interest. So this was, I guess you should call it a man-made lake. It was created by accident when an irrigation canal sort of opened and it poured waters into what had been like a big flat playa. And it created for a few decades this really beautiful freshwater sea or lake. It was really popular for holidaymakers. quite close to Palm Springs on the scale of things and it is really beautiful sort of desert area but over time it's been evaporating away and the problem now is well a it's stream temperatures it's still very much a desert even though there's still water left and then all of this sort of agricultural runoff they were using the water to irrigate the area and then the the runoff returned to the water it's become sort of full of toxic”
2024-09-22 · Intelligence Squared · Archive: The Allure of Abandoned Places, with Cal Flyn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There were two tropical botanists who were there to study and spread the word about invasive species, which meant that they gave me all of the research that I needed. It was just one of those trips when it felt like the stars aligned. I saw chameleons, I saw glowworms, the whole thing was rather wonderful and sort of dreamy. And you don't get that many research trips when things just fall into place like that. So that was a really good trip.”
2024-09-22 · Intelligence Squared · Archive: The Allure of Abandoned Places, with Cal Flyn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Probably that abandoned botanical garden in Tanzania. I think every time that anyone asked me this, I always give a different answer, but I think that was very cool just because I had such a fun time there. I turned up really not knowing what I was going to find. This former, it had been a botanical garden and then it had become like, so the German imperial forces created it as a botanical garden, British colonial forces turned it into a malaria lab and now it's been absorbed into a forest park and a lot of the plantations started by the Germans have sort of fallen into, well, they've just been left. And so it was really interesting from a scientific point of view, but also just like personally, I just sort of had to turn up. I took like 10 different modes of transport to get there. It was really at the top of a mountain and going from like the hot, dry plains in Tanzania right up to the top of the cloud forest. And then when I got there,”
2024-09-22 · Intelligence Squared · Archive: The Allure of Abandoned Places, with Cal Flyn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Terms of the sort of loss of rural culture, rural history, all of that kind of thing. So I think there's no easy answer, but I think certainly if you're coming from an ecological perspective, you might see opportunities there.”
2024-09-22 · Intelligence Squared · Archive: The Allure of Abandoned Places, with Cal Flyn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Happening by itself and on a grand scale is abandoned farmland, which again I talk about in the context of the former USSR, largely because huge tracts of farmland have just fallen into disuse. But we see this pattern all across the world. We saw it in North America, particularly in the 20th centuries, people are moving sort of to the Midwest and much of New England, for example, became incredibly forested in a way it probably hadn't been before. So places like Maine is now like 80% forest, which it wasn't before. And so I think places, marginal farmland, so quote-unquote marginal farmland is across much of the world already falling into disuse. So I think if people are choosing to leave areas, there might be an opportunity there for conservation, whether that's just sort of buying up the land. As ever, it comes with the trade-off, you know, that means that you're seeing inhuman.”
2024-09-22 · Intelligence Squared · Archive: The Allure of Abandoned Places, with Cal Flyn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, that's really similar to Eo Wilson. I had the half earth theory, which was that we should sort of hand over half the earth to itself, I suppose. And so this is a way of thinking that exists. I guess the problem with the issue comes down to like, well, what half? You know, like who has to give it up? And I think I'm certainly not pushing for more land to be taken from people. You know, if you look at the history of things like national parks or strict nature reserves, it is almost like a roll call of terrible practices of pushing mainly indigenous people off their land. And so this is where people don't sort of respect the ownership of other people because they perceive it to be wild. So it is sort of laced with these, I don't know, terrible sort of logistical questions. I think one area where this is on.”
2024-09-22 · Intelligence Squared · Archive: The Allure of Abandoned Places, with Cal Flyn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Scale of yourself in comparison to the rest of the world, the non human world, and all of time is, yeah, it helps you feel a little bit better about your minor crises.”
2024-09-22 · Intelligence Squared · Archive: The Allure of Abandoned Places, with Cal Flyn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, in places like that, I think, yeah, you have this sense of horror, though the disaster is on such a large scale, really the only touchdown I had, the only thing I could relate it to, I suppose, were things like disaster movies. And in a strange way, we're sort of weirdly familiar with these scenes because we've seen them imagined for so long. But the changes that that feeling of the presence of other species, the way that other species step into a gap as we move away from it. And I think that that is very reassuring. I don't know why exactly it is, but it's the sense that I don't know, one day all this will be dust, you know, like our problems, what we do to the earth, all of these things, you know, one day perhaps we won't matter so much. And I think that there's something really oddly, perversely, morbidly reassuring about all of that and understanding the tiny”
2024-09-22 · Intelligence Squared · Archive: The Allure of Abandoned Places, with Cal Flyn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think it's a really interesting question. I think perhaps it depends on your own personal psychological makeup. I think generally I came away feeling quite optimistic inasmuch as the places I visited often felt much more vividly alive than I thought we had any I don't know reasonable hope to consider them to be so as I said you know Montserrat was a really good example it's not been So this is around half of the island, certainly the southern portion of the island is within a strict exclusion zone. Other parts of it are in sort of looser exclusion zones you can enter during the day but sort of large suburbs are I suppose open to the elements a many areas of that now feels like quite dense jungle these sort of iguanas and all sorts of animals running around and it feels quite sort of rich with life.”
2024-09-22 · Intelligence Squared · Archive: The Allure of Abandoned Places, with Cal Flyn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, definitely. I mean, Verdona's a really good example. I think it was something like 10,000 years of natural erosion happened during the space of the First World War there. And if you look at pictures of what happened there, I mean, the entire landscape is pulverized. So yeah, these two things go together. Human aggression often impacts far more than ourselves. And I think that that's, I don't know, it adds another layer of sorrow onto these human disasters that we are seeing unfolding in front of us.”
2024-09-22 · Intelligence Squared · Archive: The Allure of Abandoned Places, with Cal Flyn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Especially things like persistent organic pollutants, these sort of chemical traces that we're going to leave forever on the planet, but also things like climate change as well, because that is a permanent change. So I think that that helps. It's not that everything's fine and we should just go on sort of polluting and killing and digging things up. It does help us also prioritize what we need to stop as soon as possible.”
2024-09-22 · Intelligence Squared · Archive: The Allure of Abandoned Places, with Cal Flyn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One more point to make there is also we have to think about the different types of damage we can do. Sometimes we are damaging things aesthetically, so often things like leaving, I don't know, wreckage or litter is a fairly sort of surface level of damage and it upsets us because we can see it. On the other end of the scale, we have things like very long-term radiation poisoning. So this will be the kind of radioactive elements that take a very long time to decay. And we have things like persistent organic pollutants, which essentially, at least from a human point of view, will last forever. These are not flesh wounds. These are serious injuries we're inflicting on the environment. So I think it also helps for us to understand when it comes to understanding what can be quote unquote forgiven by the earth. We really need to zero in on the long-term impacts of things.”
2024-09-22 · Intelligence Squared · Archive: The Allure of Abandoned Places, with Cal Flyn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I suppose the answer to that is a sort of yes and so it's it's you know if you are insisting on doing this A, it takes time for things to recover, and so if you are damaging environments on a grand scale, as we have been doing for centuries now, there is a limit to how fast things can recover and there's a limit to how extensively things can recover. Undisturbed spaces are particularly good for wildlife. When I talk about the islands of abandonment, I'm talking often metaphorically. And this idea of an island of land is one that pops up again and again in ecology. And essentially, if you're looking at sort of huge islands, whether that be like one giant forest or, I don't know, grassland or something like that, the bigger it is, the more different species it can support. And so if you are damaging these islands of landscape, then that means that you're sort of chipping away at what they can support. So tiny islands of recovery is not really making up for the damage that you're doing.”
2024-09-22 · Intelligence Squared · Archive: The Allure of Abandoned Places, with Cal Flyn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Probably plummeted. I mean, in terms of biodiversity, it will be high, but that's because lots of exotic plants have been planted there. And in terms of how many plants are actually keeping themselves alive, probably much less. And so value these sites in different ways because now if you happen to live there, you probably really like the space. But if your value wild habitat and these sort of uncontrolled spaces, then maybe it was better what it was before. So it's always a trade-off. And I think this book is full of these sort of uncomfortable trade-offs, whether something is happening at the expense of the inhabitants or the expense of these places being polluted. And then something else is gaining. But that helped me, I think, understand that in nature, that's almost always the case. It is dynamic, you know, something that suits one species, one suits another. And so as things change, different species come to the fore. And I don't know. I just find that sort of interesting.”
2024-09-22 · Intelligence Squared · Archive: The Allure of Abandoned Places, with Cal Flyn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I suppose it's kind of mixed, right? Because in many ways the reason that we're not attracted to them is what has allowed them to thrive. They become something interesting through that process. And so I don't know how I feel about it. You know, it's the example that I look at in the book is the Heinlin in New York, which this was...”
2024-09-22 · Intelligence Squared · Archive: The Allure of Abandoned Places, with Cal Flyn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Urban ruins in Patterson and New Jersey. And that was much more about how, I suppose, abandoned places feel wild to us how they allow us to act out, how they allow us to sort of question who we really are. And I think that that's very similar to what we're talking about right at the beginning when you talk about people haunting these strange sites in and around our daily lives. And often, you know, if you're not interested in that, your eyes will just slide over these places. But if you are, for example, lots of us will have done this as teenagers, you know, you know all of these sites. You know where they abandoned house in town is where you can go hang out and smoke or whatever it is. You know, these are important places for us. These are sort of weird crucibles for the human psyche. And I think that that's important to dig into as well. So I ended up having a whole sort of section of the book that ended up looking at how we feel about abandoned places, how they make us feel and why we might choose to seek them at.”
2024-09-22 · Intelligence Squared · Archive: The Allure of Abandoned Places, with Cal Flyn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Early on in the book, I quote Henry James talking about what he described as ruin questioning, which was, I suppose, very similar to urban exploring today. And he said it could be a heartless pastime if you, well, he said it was a heartless pastime. And I feel that's not necessarily the case, but for it not to be a heartless pastime, you have to think about these human stories. Who's there? Why are they there? Why did these places come to be abandoned in the first place? And in Detroit, it became a kind of different story. It was about how people locally push back against the forces of destruction. They talk about it almost as a physical force, this abandonment. They call it the blight. And so I sort of dig into that concept a little bit. And then I talk about the attractions of abandonment elsewhere in a chapter really about urban explorers or homeless people who choose to live in”
2024-09-22 · Intelligence Squared · Archive: The Allure of Abandoned Places, with Cal Flyn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Tend to be elderly people who couldn't adjust to life outside, especially in the more urban life that they were given. And so they sort of trickled back into the zone to try and regain their old life, even though it had somehow changed. In an urban environment, I had to sort of ask that question of what does it mean for something to be abandoned if it's still peopled, you know, like Detroit, of course, as a city is actually still very large, still populous. In fact, many areas are doing very well. But it's a sort of patchy picture in Detroit. There are sort of neighborhoods which are marked by very high levels of dereliction, abandonment, even areas where buildings have been completely knocked down and they're left as what's called locally as urban prairie. And that is quite a strange environment. And so I did field it qualified as abandonment, but I really had to interrogate exactly what that meant and talk to people on the ground. You know, I thought that was very important.”
2024-09-22 · Intelligence Squared · Archive: The Allure of Abandoned Places, with Cal Flyn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I thought it was quite important, I suppose, to look at the psychology of abandoned places, how they affect us, because to be honest, when I first started writing on this subject, I didn't really expect to be writing about humans at all. I sort of thought that by looking at abandoned places that by definition meant it wasn't really about humans. But then as I explored abandoned places, even the most extreme examples, I realized that there are actually very few places in the world where there are truly no people, even places which are, quote, unquote, abandoned. So people might be living in the ruins of buildings. They might be living in the wreckage of some kind of disaster. People choose on purpose to move back to places even after they have changed a great deal. So for example, within the Chernobyl exclusion zone, there is certainly was a population of they're called self-settlers.”
2024-09-22 · Intelligence Squared · Archive: The Allure of Abandoned Places, with Cal Flyn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think I think it's not so much that I'm calling for more sites like this to exist. I think the point of these sites, the point of studying them is that they tell us something important about our place in the world. As you sort of talk there, we have this sense of considering ourselves to be sort of stewards somehow in control of the world and controlling how it even recovers from damage that we've done to it ourselves. And these places, I characterize them as sort of forbidden experiments. It would definitely be immoral for us to create them, but because they have been created and they have been ignored, it tells us a lot.”
2024-09-22 · Intelligence Squared · Archive: The Allure of Abandoned Places, with Cal Flyn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There are bears, there are storks, there are all sorts of animals which really don't like to be disturbed by humans and in the zone they have been finding safe haven.”
2024-09-22 · Intelligence Squared · Archive: The Allure of Abandoned Places, with Cal Flyn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Some areas of the zone are as low as, for example, the city of Aberdeen because Aberdeen is built of granite and granite is ever so slightly radioactive. But it varies a lot according to where exactly you are in the zone, what the sort of history of where the dust blew in the immediate aftermath of the blast. And also there is a little bit of controversy over it scientifically speaking, so there are a number of scientists who are much more alarmed by how the radiation has been impacting on particularly things that might, I don't know, digest leaf litter and so on, or small insects, things that are not so mobile. And so there's a little bit of back and forth, but I think the majority of scientists are more optimistic and certainly to visit the zone in a normal time, it was to be in a place that felt very much wild. I saw dear almost the second that I passed over the boundary into the area. There are wolves. They've returned after more than 100 years.”
2024-09-22 · Intelligence Squared · Archive: The Allure of Abandoned Places, with Cal Flyn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Don't mind radiation, they will grow quite happily in areas that often kill pines. And so the pine forests, which previously predominated in the Chernobyl region, have sort of died away and are now replaced by especially silver birch. And also you have larger mammals. They move around, which means that even if they do pass through the very dangerous areas because it's very unevenly spotted pattern, they describe this sort of leopard pattern spotting of the radiation there. So they might pass through areas which are, in our opinion, sort of dangerous levels of radiation, but then they might pass out the other side and be relatively unharmed. The majority of the zone provided that the dust and so on is not being kicked up is in the main fairly safe for humans to travel through. In fact, when I was there, they said it might be the equivalent of taking, for example, a transatlantic flight. And background levels in”
2024-09-22 · Intelligence Squared · Archive: The Allure of Abandoned Places, with Cal Flyn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, absolutely. And I think I better preface anything I say about Chernobyl's, which is, of course, actually the future of the site at the moment is very much up in the air. We're not entirely sure of what's happening there at the moment. So this is sort of commenting from as it was when I visited, what had happened in the zone was that over a period of 35 years since the accident, the radiation which had come in a number of different forms according to the different isotopes had sort of begun to decay. And so a lot of the isotopes that we as humans are most frightened of, especially iodine, that's the stuff that gets lodged in our thyroid gland and causes cancer, a lot of that has been sort of decaying away, I think iodine has a half-life of 14 years. So it does change the conditions on the ground change. And some species are more sensitive to radiation than others. And that might be for a number of reasons. For example, birch trees are really hardy.”
2024-09-22 · Intelligence Squared · Archive: The Allure of Abandoned Places, with Cal Flyn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Depend a lot on the climate, but you can see huge changes if you start thinking in terms of decades. I think that's the, we're sort of talking maybe a human time scale from somewhere feeling sort of just abandoned, just sort of vacant and moving through what I became to see as a continuum through abandoned into ruin, which is sort of the next step before it begins disappearing again. And so you begin to understand where different sites sort of exist on that continuum and I don't know it's sort of like when you learn more and more about wine, I began to feel like that about abandoned places. You learn to like appreciate the varying flavors that you have in different places of different ages and vintages.”
2024-09-22 · Intelligence Squared · Archive: The Allure of Abandoned Places, with Cal Flyn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So it varies quite a lot. I mean, you begin to see the first sort of plants taking hold within a couple of years and then after that it really does depend on the climate. So Cyprus in many ways the buildings are sort of within the no man's land are surprisingly well preserved mainly because of the climate. So if you go somewhere that's pretty wet and warm those places become very verdant, very grown over very quickly and any sort of not human remains, but human belongings artifacts don't tend to survive so well so I went to for example the former capital of Montserrat in the Caribbean. That's a very tropical environment, very humid. A lot of the places there had been abandoned either since the late 90s or early noughties and they were in much worse condition than places within the Cyprus no man's land where it is dry and much less sort of grown over and picked over by animals. So it does”
2024-09-22 · Intelligence Squared · Archive: The Allure of Abandoned Places, with Cal Flyn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I did, I guess, keep coming back to the idea of aesthetic and how we don't really value these places because, as you say, they don't look like picture postcard wildernesses. But in many ways they are wildernesses because they are going completely uncontrolled, which in the Western world and especially in Western Europe is actually now quite rare. We don't really have large areas of ground which are completely sort of untended and unlooked after. And so these places which appear to humans to be quite ugly, desolate.”
2024-09-22 · Intelligence Squared · Archive: The Allure of Abandoned Places, with Cal Flyn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of stuff, and if you are interested in plants and invertebrate life, you can often find really like unusual species in places like this because it's almost like a blank canvas to begin with and then something stick and some things don't and they're often things that you might never otherwise find together. They're sort of things brush shoulders with each other. So yeah, it's really interesting and I think that point you made about everyone knows a place like this is really important because I think these havens of wildlife become havens of wildness in all sorts of senses of the word. And if you're a teenager in a local area, you probably hang out in one of these places. It's sort of anarchic place in many different senses. And I think that that's something to celebrate.”
2024-09-22 · Intelligence Squared · Archive: The Allure of Abandoned Places, with Cal Flyn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, great. I was talking about the Bing's and West Lothian, and these are basically shale produced from oil shale mining 19th century as well. And when they were created, they were really sterile bits of gravel that just piled up. And you find equivalent habitats in, as you say, sort of places like former collieries, anywhere like that. When they start from zero and then over time, they grow into these interesting layered habitats through this randomization process of recolonization. And lots of different forces come into play. So for example, birds might fly through and drop seeds. Or there's this rather beautiful process called seed drain when seeds and small insects are sort of swept around up in the heavens and fall at random on different parts of the earth and some of them survive and some of them don't. So you end up with these, it's a real assertion.”
2024-09-22 · Intelligence Squared · Archive: The Allure of Abandoned Places, with Cal Flyn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Aesthetically beautiful, and I wrote an essay about the aesthetics of the post-industrial and a little bit about photographers like Edward Britinski and things like that. But the more I read about it, the more I realized that it wasn't only interesting from the aesthetic point of view, but that these places can have really important sort of ecological significance when you think about their biodiversity and so on.”
2024-09-22 · Intelligence Squared · Archive: The Allure of Abandoned Places, with Cal Flyn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT