Deciding to be Hopeful about our Future
This summer I’ve been watching a former hay field return to what it was when we first moved to New Hampshire decades ago: a gorgeous meadow, filled with perky daisies, regal lupine waving in the wind, slender foxglove, golden columbine, corydalis with its blue and yellow heart-shaped flowers. Recently, the wild blueberries on the fringes of the hayfield have begun to explore the interior.
I decided to help things along, planting taller blueberries bushes, milkweed for the butterflies, more wildflowers for the bees. Every day this spring I watched the meadow, counting every butterfly, roaming bee, nesting sparrow or chickadee or bluebird as a victory. I yearned to see the wilding replace the hay, taking over the whole meadow. I picture it in a few years abloom in color with butterflies fluttering, bees doing their work, and the return of larger animal life. Perhaps the bobcat who occasionally visits will return more regularly and bears will sample the blueberries.
Since my partner is the gardener in the family, she was puzzled at my fervor. She watched me planting bushes, seeding wildflowers, musing about cutting back the incessant perennial hay stalks that appear. What was this all about?
I suppose my “meadow lust” comes from a desire for some Good News. You likely know what I mean. The Southwest is burning up, bees and butterfly populations—the engines of our pollination—are declining rapidly, and the polar icecaps…Well. It often feels like too much. I wanted a visceral feeling of doing something. Not just protesting, writing letters to politicians, and worrying. Something concrete that I could see. Watching the meadow bloom is a felt moment of relief and hope.
Amidst my meadow lust, I came across a new book in our town library: Cal Flyn’s Islands of Abandonment. An investigative reporter and author from the Highlands of Scotland, Flyn is interested in what happens in areas of the world that humans have abandoned, usually because of our destructive impact on the natural environment. Think Chernobyl. Or Arthur Kill, Staten Island, where the legacy of industrial contamination from the Passaic river has created a toxic environment filled with PCBs and dioxin.
Flyn visits twelve such areas around the world, and in each of them she finds that nature rebounds, a “fresh dawn of a new wild.” Seventy percent of the Chernobyl exclusion zone (an area roughly the size of Rhode Island) is now forest. Rare animals returned: lynx, boar, wolves, elk, beaver, eagles, owls. Species declining in the rest of Russia found refuge in the exclusion zone and thrived. In the toxic stew of the Arthur Kill, blue claw crabs have thrived and several species of fish (including the Atlantic tomcod) have adapted to the noxious water. One striking example of the value of human abandonment is the Cold War “buffer zone,” often miles wide, that stretched hundreds of miles from the Baltic sea to Czechoslovakia, where East confronted West with barbed wire and armed guards. This “death zone” became a green highway 860 miles long—a wildlife corridor where more than a thousand endangered species have taken refuge and rebounded. Even the Bikini atoll—site of thermonuclear weapons testing in the 1950s—has evolved a thriving underwater ecosystem in the blast crater, with an impressive, “absolutely pristine” coral reef.
How wonderful. Except then, Flyn points out, things get complicated. Much of the plant life in the Chernobyl exclusion zone is radioactive. Disturbing mutations have occurred and there is some question whether the returning animals live shorter lives. The Arthur Kill blue claw crabs are carcinogenic. The Bikini atoll remains uninhabited, with even the coconuts radioactive; twenty-eight preexisting species of coral are still missing from that impressive reef.
Nature is not restored from human predation—it returns different. Nature rebounds but is not the same.
What to make of this—can we be hopeful about our future amidst the frightening possibilities of the present day? Flyn makes a decision to be hopeful. “Faith, in the end, is what environmentalism boils down to. Faith in the possibility of change, the prospect of a better future…(E)verywhere I have looked, everywhere I have been—places bent and broken, despoiled and desolate, polluted and poisoned—I have found new life springing from the wreckage of the old, life all the stranger and more valuable for its resilience.”
Flyn herself is perhaps the strongest argument for hope. She has chosen to go into places where many of us would not go. We would turn away. She describes slipping under fences into and out of fearfully polluted abandoned sites, she listens to her radioactive dosimeter ping as she walks in the deserted town of Pripyat in Chernobyl, she explores decrepit factories to evidence the returning opportunistic plant life and nesting birdlife.
At a book talk I ask her about her risk tolerance and willingness to go into areas that most of us would avoid. She smiles and says that the risks were low (“my guide told me that the areas of Chernobyl we visited in our two-day stay would result in no more radiation exposure than a flight from London to NYC”). Still, the dosimeter pinged. She goes on to say that she was scared a lot in her two years of research and she did a constant interrogation of that fear to reprogram herself to be less scared. That’s true bravery—doing what needs to be done even though you are very, very scared. She went into the places we don’t want to go and found that life goes on, even thrives. That’s pretty hopeful.
In the book Flyn urges us all to see how much we can do, even in our daily lives: “it is not only big, structured conservation projects that offer a return to the wild, but the scrappy, abandoned parking lot at the end of your road. Consider it and every one like it a tiny islet in an archipelago stretching over the whole world. Stepping stones for species as they recolonize what land was lost.”
Her bravery is contagious. I return to the meadow, walking among the glorious returning wildflowers, the busy bees and butterflies, noting the flattened grass where deer have been spending the night, watching the wonderful diversity of life returning right outside my window.