Islas del abandono. La vida en los paisajes posthumanos

Cal Flyn (2021). Capitán Swing. 320 pp. ISBN 978-84-125539-5-6

Resumen

The review of Islands of Abandonment by Cal Flyn explores how the author portrays landscapes devastated by human activity that, over time, have been partially regenerated by nature. With lyrical prose, Flyn describes war zones, ruined industrial cities, and polluted lands, suggesting that even in devastation, a promise of life can sprout. However, the review highlights a key tension: by aestheticizing ruin and emphasizing its ecological potential, the book tends to depoliticize these spaces and omit the historical and structural processes—such as colonialism, resource extraction, or environmental racism—that often underpin these disasters, particularly in the Global South. By presenting ruin as an abstract or accidental phenomenon, power relations and mechanisms of dispossession that have deeply impacted territories and communities in the southern hemisphere are rendered invisible. Thus, nature emerges as a redemptive protagonist, while human voices—especially the most vulnerable—are silenced. The review appreciates the beauty of the essay but warns of the risk of turning suffering into scenery and of reproducing, from a Northern aesthetic gaze, narratives that exclude the memories and resistances of the South.