Cal Flyn’s Islands of Abandonment was so tantalisingly reviewed in the NS a couple of months ago that I immediately bought a copy. Granted, it doesn’t take much to tempt me into a reckless book purchase. But this one certainly didn’t disappoint. It tells the stories of places after humans have left – abandoned farmland, warzones, nuclear exclusion zones, polluted rivers, volcanic landscapes, and the like. It’s sparklingly written, elegantly structured, meticulously researched, and healthily balanced between arresting realism and genuine optimism. Flyn explores both the marvellous process of ecological ‘succession’, in which landscapes metamorphose gradually as different species flourish in a recently changed environment, and the drawn-out death throes of once vibrant ecosystems tainted by human activity, as well as plenty in between. She decides that what ‘should be a book of darkness, a litany of the worst places in the world’ is actually ‘a story of redemption’ (pp.10-11), as even the most blighted corners of the world have hope for an improved future.
What struck me almost from the beginning is its copious use of Christian1 metaphor – redemption, eschaton, resurrection, atonement, desolation. Surely Flyn is right to reach for divine categories – climate change is a cosmic phenomenon virtually unmatched in its disturbing scope and severity, and how better to capture its urgency and magnitude than to sprinkle the prose with religious language? There was, however, something about the way these are used throughout that made me pause on this theme. To give you a flavour, here’s one such time:
‘… cloaked within the terror of the eschaton […] lie perverse desires: the thrill of danger, and the reassurance that disaster might be averted should certain strictures be followed; or that a selected few might hope to survive the onslaught to build a better, truer life on the other side.’ (p315)
H. Richard Niebuhr famously summarised liberal theology as describing how ‘a God without wrath brought men [sic] without sin into a kingdom without judgement by the ministration of a Christ without a cross.’ I have no interest in engaging in theological polemic here. I raise this rather because Flyn’s narrative arc is the other way around – she describes wrath without a God, judgement without a kingdom, and, most disturbingly, a cross without a Christ. This is certainly effective in capturing the (cosmic, totalising) stakes of the future of the earth, but there are very disturbing implications. On whom, for example, does a godless wrath fall in a Christ-less world?
The comforting humanist answer would be: on us all, collectively. And we’ll come out of the adversity stronger, as we always do, in the great human march towards Progress. The hard reality is surely different. This wrath is one that falls on the margins. The brunt of environmental costs will fall, in the medium term, on those areas affected by forest fires, desertification, rising sea levels, chemical spills, confluences of marine plastic waste. Those of us who can afford the luxury of living in temperate zones in the global north, far from smoke-belching factories and streams of effluent will, for now, be sheltered from this great desolation. The ‘elect’ identified by Flyn, who hope to survive this tribulation, will not be the upright or the blameless or the plaintive recipients of God’s mercy but the monied and the powerful, who can flee the rising tides and compete successfully for dwindling supplies of food and water.
There needn’t be an elect, of course. With no Sustainer and no Father, and no One whose words will never pass away, the sprung ecological booby-traps of the world – melting carbon-heavy permafrost, the fiery destruction of vital rainforest in increasing heat, the cessation of ocean current flow, the spiralling ‘greenhouse effect’ – could issue in so great a destruction as to obliterate the whole world: its forgotten corners and leafiest suburbs alike. A ‘resurrection’ (Flyn’s word) may follow, but who knows whether any of us will be there to see it? And who’s to stop the whole grim cycle from simply repeating? And what is there to blame but the greed, neglect, and ignorance of us and our ancestors? Can a leopard change its spots?
Admirably, this is a problem that Flyn confronts. Although, as she points out, ‘every major extinction event… has been succeeded by a burst of evolutionary creativity’, it is unavoidably true that ‘we – as individuals, certainly, but perhaps even as a species – may not be around to see it’ (p329). Her earlier confidence that the grand narrative is one of redemption seems in jeopardy, and yet she exhorts us to ‘find faith to fight’ (p330). There is a tension here honestly displayed, but not resolved. A path must be trodden between therapeutic nihilism and naive paternalistic overtreatment. Can redemption be successful? Will it be worthwhile? And can ‘faith’ (in what?) sustain the dizzying costs?
I think this tension arises partly from a mismatch of metaphors. Theological metaphors are, as I’ve said, surely appropriate to such a wide-angle issue. But do they make sense – do they compel – without connection to a real God with real power and purpose? Or is the ecological story Flyn tells with them doomed to frustrate and fall short?
‘Redemption’ is an appealing word to describe the emergence of a Good Thing out of a Bad Thing, but that’s not exhaustive of what it means in the Christian usage. There, it’s the payment of a price to set a captive free. Good and beautiful as it is when butterflies thrive on a slag heap, this is no fulsome and eternal liberation. No one has paid the price. Beauty has asserted its right to exist but the enemy – human greed – is not defeated. Flyn describes with unsettling matter-of-factness the inadequacy of good intention – even well-meant conservation can be cosmetic, unnatural, and ultimately self-serving. Or even in the worst-case scenario, where humanity collectively pays the highest price (of our own extinction), we surely cannot enact a moral transformation of the universe to ensure that greed will not triumph again in the next stage of evolution and extinction. No – full redemption needs a free and perfect and transformative liberator.
Or take ‘apocalypse’. In its Christian sense, this is prophecy ‘in which the secrets of the universe are revealed’ (Morna D. Hooker: The Gospel according to Saint Mark, p297). An unfurling environmental catastrophe, however frightening and existential, causes neither ‘all the starry host [to] fall like withered leaves from the vine’ nor the ‘son of man [to come] with the clouds of heaven’. It might impel a sense of moral urgency and even the thrill of the unknown, but the Bible’s view is bigger. The image is an appropriate one to imbue the issue with gravity – but there is mileage in the ‘apocalypse’ besides. The eschaton in biblical terms will mean the fabric of the world not just falling apart, but being torn like a curtain, revealing the God who lies behind all things, and who remains when they decay. And surely the hope of the gospel is not that an immunised elect can build a better life on the other side, but that the eternal God counts His people grafted to Himself. There’s a place to find faith to fight.
1I use this term in the full awareness that other belief systems have some comparable concepts. I engage with the specifically Christian understandings of the terms both because of my familiarity with them and the fact that it seems to be primarily Christianity which is in view for Flyn. Christians have no monopoly on big worldviews!
Yikeiatry 