This document discusses the concept of rewilding abandoned places through case studies. It provides examples of abandoned places that are being reclaimed by nature, including ghost towns, exclusion zones from conflicts or disasters, and areas where human occupation has ceased. Specific locations mentioned include the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone in Ukraine, the Five Sisters bings in West Lothian, Scotland, and slate islands in Argyll, Scotland. The document discusses the ecology and psychology of abandoned places and invites the reader to get involved in studying rewilding and sharing related case studies, vignettes, and artifacts.

1. Geographies of
Abandonment
Developing case studies around the rewilding of
abandoned places.
Alan Parkinson, HoD King’s Ely Junior
GA President 2021-2

2. Case Studies
Vignettes
Artefacts

3. Get involved…
Flinga.fi

4. The ecology and psychology of abandoned places: ghost towns
and exclusion zones, no man’s lands and fortress islands – and
what happens when nature is allowed to reclaim its place.
Drawing on the work of Cal Flynn

5. Starting ‘local’: The Five Sisters (Bings), W. Lothian
https://www.theguardian.com/travel/2021/mar/16/west-lothia
n-scotland-spoil-heap-wastelands-shivered-into-life

6. Scottish Locations
featured in the
book
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scot
land-scotland-politics-45733111#

7. & the Chernobyl ‘stalking’ of Darmon Richter

8. The beauty of abandonment - perceptions of place
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g5bkkfJM3TI

9. Slate Islands of Argyll - didn’t make the book...
“Anthropogenic landscapes”

10. “Anthropogenic creations called into being by the meeting of humans
and their environment. They are prominent among our contributions to
our time and space. We make what has been called patterned ground.
Place-making is a signal of our species. We make good ones and bad
ones, and plenty of neither-here-nor-there ones. Good, bad or
indifferent, they operate on all their constituents.”
Tim Dee, 2018

11. Alaric Maude (2020)

12. Endogenous
Exogenous
Examples leading to the abandonment of
places?

13. Wilderness and the Clearances
Cal talks about the influence of her background in the Highlands
Buying up land to rewild them - link to carbon storage - COP26

14. Slate Islands of Argyll
“Anthropogenic landscapes”
Anthroposcene
“Anthroposcenic” - David Mattless

15. Why wild?

16. Rewilding
All definitions: Oxford English Dictionary

17. Robert MacFarlane
SAGT 2013
https://www.slideshare.net/GeoBlogs/sagt-pr
esentation-13-backup-copy

18. Loch
Coruisk -
as a
sanctuary
Empty
places
Image shared under CC license: https://www.flickr.com/photos/ebothy/7327689558/sizes/l/

19. Danny
MacAskill -
Dubh Slabs
and ‘the
Ridge’
The remote Dubh Slabs
rising out of Loch Coruisk
in the heart of the Black
Cuillin ridge provided some
of the steepest terrain I
have ever ridden as well as
an amazing backdrop for
the film.

20. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XR4maEf-eCY

21. Places are dynamic and
subject to constant
change in their
material structure and
meaning.
Places are not isolated
or cut off from outside
influences and so as
people, ideas and
objects pass in and out
of a place in space and
time they change it.
They are therefore
changing places.

24. Rewilding
https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/387

25. Scotland’s UNESCO Trail - launched mid-October 2021

26. St Kilda - abandoned in 1930 - already a case study?
Population change and migration
https://www.nts.org.uk/visit/places/st-kilda

27. Ewen Gillies
http://livinggeography.blogspot.com/2017/03/a-curriculum-artefact-ewen-and-gold.html
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2012/mar/24/last-man-st-kilda-evacuation

28. St Kilda - a story that has already been told...
August 29th 1930 & ‘Harebell’

29. At around 7:00 a.m. on April 28, 1986, Cliff Robinson, a
twenty-nine-year-old chemist working at the Forsmark Nuclear
Power plant two hours drive from Stockholm, went to brush his
teeth after breakfast. In order to get from the washroom to the
locker room, he had to pass through a radiation detector, just as
he had done thousands of times before. This time was different,
though - the alarm went on. It made no sense, thought Robinson,
as he had never entered the control area, where he might have
absorbed some radiation. He went through the detector a second
time, and again it went on…

30. The story...
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/may/20/chernobyl-
history-of-a-tragedy-serhii-plokhy-review-death-of-the-soviet-
dream
26th April, 1986
“It was a very warm and
sunny day, very quiet and
still. Some birds could be
heard singing in the sky. It
was just an ordinary spring
day...”
Nadezhda Timoshenko

31. Chernobyl - HBO

32. The location…
CEZ

33. Can anyone make the Scottish connection?
Map: Digimap for Schools

34. ‘Dark tourism’
Image:
Sean
Gallup
/
Getty
Images

35. Kenopsia (noun):
The eerie, forlorn atmosphere of a place that's
usually bustling with people but is now abandoned
and quiet—a school hallway in the evening, an unlit
office on a weekend, vacant fairgrounds—an
emotional afterimage that makes it seem not just
empty but hyper-empty

36. Tim Dee - ‘Four Fields’
One is a field in the Cambridgeshire
Fens where I work.
One is in South Africa, where he
has a house, and has been seeing
out the pandemic - returned to the
UK a few weeks ago.
One is in Chernobyl...

37. Rewilding Europe: Chernobyl Exclusion Zone
https://rewildingeurope.com/
https://rewildingeurope.com/rew-project/rewilding-of-the-chernobyl-exclusion-zone/

38. Holly Morris - TED Talk
https://www.ted.com/talks/holly_morris_why_stay_in_chernobyl_because_it_s_home?language=en
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/
2014/09/the-stalkers-inside-the-you
th-subculture-that-explores-chernob
yls-dead-zone.html

39. And you have to remember, these women have survived the worst atrocities
of the 20th century: Stalin's enforced famines of the 1930s, the Holodomor,
killed millions of Ukrainians, and they faced the Nazis in the '40s.
So when a couple decades into Soviet rule, Chernobyl happened, they were
unwilling to flee in the face of an enemy that was invisible. So they returned
to their villages and are told they're going to get sick and die soon, but five
happy years, their logic goes, is better than 10 stuck in a high rise on the
outskirts of Kiev, separated from the graves of their mothers and fathers and
babies, the whisper of stork wings on a spring afternoon.
For them, environmental contamination may not be the worst sort of
devastation. It turns out this holds true for other species as well. Wild boar,
lynx, moose, they've all returned to the region in force, the very real, very
negative effects of radiation being trumped by the upside of a mass exodus
of humans. The dead zone, it turns out, is full of life.

40. Different narratives

41. David Farrier ‘Footprints’
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/apr/03/footprints-david-farrier-review-future-fossils

42. Convergence of narratives
“Curriculum
making”

43. Scottish Curriculum Links - not too many
Landscapes - landscape change
Ecosystems and plant succession
National 3:
Place making - comparisons with the local area
Mapping

44. Some abandoned places are
“home”
Explore notions of “home”
with students and how their
experiences are not typical
of the majority of the
world’s population.

45. Islands - some of you may teach / live on one…
They have a special geography. Exploit it, and teach about it.
Image: Alan Parkinson - CC licensed

46. Rewilding - example of upland landscape
https://www.rewildingbritain.org.uk/explore-rewilding/what-is-rewilding/rewilding-the-uplands?fbclid=IwAR2i5mTh
pbKGfAcBN_EPQBKe-hVASXduZ-O5Jw5BsJtclvmxyR6P318d2MQ

47. UK / National Parks in 100 Seconds - Dan Raven Ellison

48. Challenge the students to identify other locations where
people have abandoned land...
What examples can you think of?

49. Happisburgh, East Norfolk coastline
https://www.edp24.co.uk/news/happisburgh-parish-council-d
ispute-over-village-car-park-7982436

50. Plymouth, Montserrat / La Palma Eruption….
https://storymaps.arcgis.com/collections/37f985e738624e9cace2153e01317df3

51. Music of the World
http://www.juicygeography.co.uk/montserrat.htm
http://radio.garden/

52. The Shale Trail
https://shaletrail.co.uk/

53. ACTIVITY IDEA
Students to research and create a guide book / leaflet / interpretive
sign for visitors.
Criteria for what to include .
Rubric on successful outcome.
https://shaletrail.co.uk/

54. Practical Action - RESTOR.ECO
Earthshot Prize

55. Chernobyl Extracts and Resource on Rewilding
https://www.slideshare.net/GeoBlogs/extracts-for-sagt-2021/secret/xtKm7GxFYdW1Mb

56. Bigger picture
https://www.decadeonrestoration.org/

57. https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/story/how-chernobyl-
has-become-unexpected-haven-wildlife
“Nature’s resilience can buffer human
societies from disasters. As we head towards
the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration, and
especially in the wake of the COVID-19
pandemic, we need to remember that natural
ecosystems are essential for human health
and well-being.”
Tim Christophersen, head of the United Nations Environment
Programme’s (UNEP’s) Nature for Climate Branch.

58. Futures - the final chapter
Where might we be in 100 years?
Most children born today will be alive by the end of
the century. We hope...

59. Future abandonments
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/14/opinion/climate-disasters.html

60. The largest abandonment of all
A thought experiment...
http://www.loe.org/shows/segments.html?programID=07-P13-00032&segmentID=4

62. Dune

63. “...everywhere 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”
Cal Flyn, “Islands of Abandonment” (2021), p.323

64. Thanks for listening.
See you in 2023!

65. Further reading, listening and influences
Christian Richter photography:
https://www.dezeen.com/2016/09/11/christian-richter-photographs-abandoned-empty-buildings-europe/
Chernobyl, HBO Series (2019) - available on DVD / BluRay / Streaming
Soundcloud - Cal Flyn book extract:
https://soundcloud.com/harpercollinspublishers/islands-of-abandonment-life-in
Alaric Maude (2020): The role of geography’s concepts and powerful knowledge in a future 3 curriculum,
International Research in Geographical and Environmental
Education, DOI: 10.1080/10382046.2020.1749771 - open access
https://www.decadeonrestoration.org/
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/research-review-series-geography/research-review-series-geography
https://alcock.blog/ - David Alcock

66. Reading
Bustos, N and Sanchez F (2014) ‘Chernobyl - the Zone’ Centrala
Dee, T. (2013). ‘Four Fields’ Jonathan Cape
Farrier, D (2020) ‘Footprints’ Fourth Estate
Flyn, C. (2021). ‘Islands of Abandonment: Life in the Post-Human Landscape’ William Collins
Khanna, P (2021) ‘Move’ Weidenfeld and Nicolson
MacFarlane, R (2007) ‘Wild Places’ Granta
Mattless, D (2018) in Dee, T. (2018) ‘On Place’ Jonathan Cape
Parkinson, A (2020) ‘Why Study Geography’ LPP Books
Plokhy, S. (2018) ‘Chernobyl: History of a Tragedy’ Penguin
Richter, D. (2020). ‘Chernobyl: A Stalkers’ Guide’ Fuel Design
Weisman, A. (2008) ‘The World without Us’ Virgin Books