A vital book for any twenty-first-century reader.
4 stars
Planet Earth is a forever changing place, and climate change is something that is always in the news, what with climate deniers on social media and the frequent news of lost ice shelves which cause rising sea levels, it seems we’ve lost perspective of what this means for our species as a whole, and how we’ve failed to learn from our mistakes from the past.
In Sunken Lands: A Journey Through Flooded Kingdoms and Lost World, author Gareth E. Rees takes us on a tour of a number of the lands around the world which have now been lost to rising sea levels. With areas such as East Anglia’s Fens, which are slowly succumbing to rising sea levels and the region of Doggerland which connected mainland Britain to Europe our nation alone has changed over the centuries, with many of these regions not only being lost to time, but now …
Planet Earth is a forever changing place, and climate change is something that is always in the news, what with climate deniers on social media and the frequent news of lost ice shelves which cause rising sea levels, it seems we’ve lost perspective of what this means for our species as a whole, and how we’ve failed to learn from our mistakes from the past.
In Sunken Lands: A Journey Through Flooded Kingdoms and Lost World, author Gareth E. Rees takes us on a tour of a number of the lands around the world which have now been lost to rising sea levels. With areas such as East Anglia’s Fens, which are slowly succumbing to rising sea levels and the region of Doggerland which connected mainland Britain to Europe our nation alone has changed over the centuries, with many of these regions not only being lost to time, but now only remain in our myths and legends, where their memory helps shape our cultures.
What makes Sunken Lands so interesting and vital is that throughout the world there are tales of great floods linked to many of these lost realms. From Doggerland, through Wales, which saw lands linked to Ireland, Atlantis, through to the lost lands of the Roman Empire in the holiday resort of Baiae where Emperors went to relax, all these lands succumbed to the rising tides. However, what I did find uncanny was the similarity of flood takes similar to that told in the Old Testament which takes place within the North American Choctaw people whose own legend sees a family building a boat and saving two of each animal before a mighty flood.
Although such tales of mighty floods exist in our ancient folklore, it is through the apparent voodoo priestess, Julia Brown, whose apparent curse of the town of Frenier, near New Orleans brings us closer to home. During the frequent storms which have ravaged the Gulf of Mexico over the past twenty years, the area has seen great devastation and land lost to the sea. This combined with over extraction of natural resources has exposed the area to more flooding from rising sea levels, and it is here that we see in Sunken Lands that we have not learned from the past that we are at the mercy of the elements, not the master of them.
In Sunken Lands: A Journey Through Flooded Kingdoms and Lost Worlds Gareth E. Rees takes us on a personal odyssey through these lost areas, with a stoic philosophy that reminds the reader of the relevance of these places, and these stories, it creates a vital narrative for our modern-day attitudes and the need to change our ideologies to adapt to this world that is changing around us, largely to our own avarice. Sunken Lands: A Journey Through Flooded Kingdoms and Lost Worlds not only tells of the need to change but highlights what happened to those people who refused to change and the consequences for future generations and should be a vital book for any twenty-first-century reader.