Abandoned

There is an interesting article at the Guardian, The great abandonment: what happens to the natural world when people disappear?

In many parts of the world, people are fleeing rural communities and moving to cities for work. Coupled with a declining birth rate, many areas are literally going back to seed. Nature is reclaiming many once urban landscapes, both here and abroad.

Bulgaria lies at the extreme end of this kind of demographic change, but the forces reshaping it are acting everywhere. Over the past half century, the global portion of people living in rural areas has decreased by almost a third. Farming is becoming increasingly industrial and concentrated. More than half of all people now live in and around cities, and that figure is expected to rise to 70% by 2050. In many countries, birthrates are dropping steadily, and while the global population is projected to keep growing until 2080, around half of that growth is being driven by fewer than 10 countries.

As populations move and shrink, people are leaving long-occupied places behind. Often they leave everything in place, ready for a return that never comes. In Tyurkmen, Christmas baubles still hang from the curtain rails in empty houses, slowly being wrapped by spiders. In one abandoned home, a porcelain cabinet lay inside a crater of rotted floorboards, plates still stacked above a spare packet of nappies for a visiting grandchild. Occasionally, abandonment happens all at once, when a legal ruling or evacuation sends people scuttling. But mostly, it is haphazard, creeping, unplanned. People just go.

Since the 1950s, some scholars estimate up to 400m hectares – an area close to the size of the European Union – of abandoned land have accumulated across the world. A team of scientists recently calculated that roughly 30m hectares of farmland had been abandoned across the mainland US since the 1980s. As the climate crisis renders more places unliveable – too threatened by flooding, water shortages and wildfires to build houses, soil too degraded and drought-stripped to farm – we can expect further displacements.

I will never forget the photos a few years back of trees growing through old factory ceilings in Detroit.

Entropy can be a beautiful thing, especially for an artist. But the back to nature scenario is not all rosy.

An abandoned house in Kreslyuvtsi village, Bulgaria. Photograph: Ivo Danchev/The Guardian

According to the article, when a dominant species like man moves out of the landscape, unfortunately a dominant monoculture moves right back in, usually an invasive species.

The brambles illustrate the first force that abandoned land faces: when humans leave en masse, new dominant species can make a clean sweep. The worst offenders are not brambles, but imported, invasive species. In Poland, where about 12% of farmland was abandoned after the fall of communism, the fields have turned thick mustard yellow, blanketed by the bright pollen cascades of Canadian goldenrod. This species has colonised about 75% of the country’s abandoned fields, and where goldenrod grows, little else thrives. Scientists studying this abandoned land found that wild pollinators decreased by 60%-70%, and the number of birds halved. In Bulgaria, an emerging threat is the Tree of Heaven (Ailanthus altissima), a hardy, fast-growing, disease-resistant tree from northern China, with bitter-smelling sap that repels other plant, animal and microbial life.

These monocultures can create “biological deserts”, where just one species grows. The need to diversify them is not only an aesthetic, human preference. Monocultures are associated with soil degradation and nutrient depletion, extinctions of other species, difficulty purifying water, catastrophic wildfires, vulnerability to drought and the rapid spread of disease.

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I have been wrestling with personal feelings of abandonment. One of my closest couple friends has just left for Asia for four months for their annual pilgrimage. Another very close friend has sold her home and will be leaving the area forever. Another close friend has died after a short illness.

I started compiling a list this morning.

Jack and Jill - Spring Valley
Lemon Avenue - La Mesa
Lancaster Elementary - Lancaster
Mariposa Elementary - Las Cruces
McArthur Elementary - El Paso
South Woods - Syosset
Hauppauge Middle School - Hauppauge
Lewis Junior High - San Diego
Desert Sun School - Idyllwild
Dwight York Preparatory School - New York
Walden School - New York
Oxnard High School - Oxnard

I think that is all of them, might have missed one.

These are the schools I attended through high school graduation. Twelve schools. I spent a year and a half at Lemon Avenue, four years at McArthur and a miserable year and a half at Oxnard, fighting Hep C. Everything else was a year or less. Some were six month stretches. You keep your suitcase half packed, like I do today.

My parents divorced when I was four and my mother married a guy who designed missiles and rockets.We moved from missile base to missile base for his job. He was also a physically abusive alcoholic who could only be trusted for two things, to beat my brother and I with regularity and to drink to oblivion. My mother started drinking too and popping pills, mainly valium, darvon and librium. Life was serious hell for us.

My late brother and I shuffled back to California for one stretch in 1970, when things became completely unbearable. Alone to the world. Unfortunately my father, a wealthy man, was now married to a woman who wanted nothing to do with us and I was sent to boarding school and Buzz to military school.

I don't think I need to spill much further into my personal bio, but I developed some weird habits and phobias. My real father never paid child support and we never had a dime when I was growing up. I was the middle child in a house full of strays. Food was scarce at times. And I would steal bread and hide it in my drawers. They would find these old rye crusts in my dresser. WTF?

I think that I was afraid that I would starve one day and it was security for me. Who knows? Perhaps that is why I overeat today, I'm not a shrink?

But the point I was getting around to is that when you move every six months or year or so, you gain and lose friends real quickly. You expect things to be taken from you and for things to fall apart. Wait for the shoe to drop. Without fail, until my sophomore year in New York, I never reconnected with anyone from my past.

I was exceedingly good at being a chameleon, making friends and recreating my persona at will and then it was on to the next gig. Poof. All those people gone forever.

As an adult, my life changed. I developed friendships that have lasted in some cases fifty years or more now. I talk to certain people every day of my life. I put incredible effort into being there for my friends and showing up and holding each other accountable.

And I hurt deeply when I or they don't, a rare event.

Perhaps that is the reason I have written a blog for eighteen years now, a virtual network for friends and strays that can be counted on, that offers some solidity and fellowship in this transient world of ours. Because I need to maintain friendships, something that was denied me most of my fledgling life. I have this inordinate and unnatural need to hold people together.

I hate feeling abandoned and I hate feeling tossed aside. I have let people go too but only when it became absolutely necessary for me.

I lost my best friend in 1985 over something stupid. He invited me to New York but unbeknownst to me he was in the middle of a break up. I stayed a week and he said I was not sufficiently sympathetic to his cause so I was jettisoned. That damn objectivity again.

I hurt for a long time. It was actually a good thing all in all because I realized that our whole friendship was asymmetric. He lived at my home for free, blah, blah, blah. I mourned the loss for a long time but at a certain point realized that I was being used and that I no longer cared if he lived or died.

I stopped associating with people who failed to live up to their word or bargain. Thankfully there are a lot that do.

Whew, I got that off my chest.