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

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Because I felt it gave some really important insight into the human relationship with the natural environment. And then I just needed to find a place that sort of exemplified that. So, for example, I went to an abandoned botanical garden in Tanzania because I was looking for somewhere that sort of embodied this idea of invasive species settling into environments because that's a controversial area of ecology at the moment called novel ecosystems. I guess I got sort of interested in the subject. Initially because I went on a short trip to a place that didn't make it into the book, just off the west coast of Scotland, an area called the Slate Islands, they're quite near Auburn, if you know the area. And those are 19th century slate quarrying areas. And they've been flooded with seawater. I went there to go wild swimming, having seen some beautiful paintings of them. And then while I was there, I ended up thinking a lot about how post-industrial places can actually be sort of”
2024-09-22 · Intelligence Squared · Archive: The Allure of Abandoned Places, with Cal Flyn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sure, so islands of abandonment, the format of it is that it's 12 or 12 and a half different abandoned locations, kind of around the world, and each of them I felt acted as a sort of case study of a different aspect of the ecology and psychology of abandonment. So I went to places that included abandoned farmland in Estonia, to Detroit, to the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, which is in the news at the moment. I went to an abandoned island off the north coast of Scotland. The way that I found these places, it was a bit of a mixture of, I guess what I've been thinking of as top-down and bottom-up story creation. So some of them I knew that I needed to include them because they were a famous examples and it was more a matter of figuring out exactly why I wanted to write about them. And then for the others, there might be an issue, especially like a scientific issue that I wanted to talk about.”
2024-09-22 · Intelligence Squared · Archive: The Allure of Abandoned Places, with Cal Flyn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT