Excerpted and adapted from Islands of Abandonment: Nature Rebounding in the Post-Human Landscape, by Cal Flyn. Used with permission of the publisher, Penguin Random House. In 1919, all along the Western Front, French authorities were taking stock of the devastation of World War I. From the border with Belgium at Lille to the border with Switzerland near Strasbourg, this most brutal of wars had torn a rupture through the land: It was ripped, cratered, pitted, charred by a billion artillery shells fired over four years. “Where there are no dead,”…
