On a number of occasions, I’ve been able to walk through the ruins of an old industrial site that is in the process of being reclaimed by nature. Here’s a description and a few photos of such a place in Sweden. That particular site puts me in mind of a children’s book I know that is based on the High Line in New York. The High Line itself is far from the first park adapted from an industrial site, but it is famous and heavily visited.
There’s something comforting in knowing that it’s possible for nature to reclaim even polluted sites. The book The World Without Us described this process in some detail using the hypothetical disappearance of all human beings as a starting point.
The problem with that comfort is that, taken too far, it removes from us the responsibility to take care of nature. Our ability to destroy the environment is so great that it can easily outpace nature’s capacity to recover, so we need to see reclamations as nice oddities and not the solution to the problems we create.
You must be logged in to post a comment.