What Da Cover Says: Travel through drowned forests, vanished villages and sinking cities: the lost lands of our past, present – and future.
From Stone Age lands that slipped beneath the English Channel to the rapid inundation of New Orleans, Gareth E. Rees explores stories of flooded places from the past – and those disappearing before our eyes.
The places lost to the eternally shifting boundaries between water and land continue to have a powerful emotional resonance today. Their uncertain features emerge to haunt us, briefly, when the moon draws back the tide to reveal a spire or a tree stump. And, imbued with myths and warnings from the past, these underwater worlds can also teach us important lessons about the unavoidability of change, the ebb and flow of Earth’s natural cycles, and the folly of trying to control them.
Sunken Lands peels back the layers of silt, sea and mythology to reveal what our submerged past can tell us about our imminent future as rising sea levels transform our planet once more.
What I Says: In one of those weird coincidences each time I picked up this book it started raining, I’m writing this review as the rain turns horizontal outside and batters against my window, I can only hope by finishing this review I can save the planet. This book wasn’t quite what I was expecting, I thought Rees was going to be exploring sunken forests and towns but he takes us further into the folklore of the sunken place and presents to the reader how these events are playing out today. Rees takes a story from the past, explores what happened, what the tale is trying to teach us and how we are blatantly ignoring these warnings. He also tries to locate possible locations for these vanished places.
There is a lot of emotion behind his writing, I think when Rees set out on this journey he didn’t expect us to be in such a bad way, driving around New Orleans hit home how desperate the situation is. I have gained a lot of knowledge from what he shares in these pages, I knew that we have a habit of building houses on flood planes, doing the bare minimum to protect people and houses from rising seas and extreme weather, the propaganda put out by energy companies to show they care, but I didn’t realise just the extent of our stupidity, millions of houses on flood planes, flood barriers made out of sand and shells? Who authorises this craziness? My favourite thing about this book was learning about how the UK was shaped, how we became an island and then the creation of the Scilly isles, fascinating stuff I should have learnt at school.
The book is well written, I like how each chapter starts with a story, then Rees elaborates on that and shares many theories. I liked his sense of humour, especially on his trip to Italy and sharing his paranoia with us. I enjoyed reading his descriptions of what he saw. I think the book is missing something though, it needs diagrams/maps, he talks about events and gives figures about how much land is affected and it was hard to visualise this, some diagrams would help hammer home the points he was trying to make.
This was an interesting read and although the future doesn’t look good I think this is something everybody needs to read just to get an understanding of where this planet is heading.
EDIT: Rain has just stopped….
Thanks to Elliott & Thompson for this copy, you can grab yourself a copy from HERE:
Gnome Appreciation Society 