“We are the children of the flood. All of us living today are descended from those who saw their lands drowned, civilisations crumble and populations scatter. Floods linger deep in our cultural memory. They ripple through songs, prayers and stories about a time of great disaster, when an old world died in violence, and a new one was born.”
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As humanity grapples with the terrifying reality of sea levels rising and ice caps eventually melting away, it’s sobering to think that all this had happened before. We live on the watery planet, and that water often reclaims the land just to retreat some time later and then return again. It’s the cycle of life and a cycle of floods. There are countless myths and legends about the civilization-ending floods by vengeful waters in various cultures. Some of these may be the echoes of the collective memories of true cataclysms, the ones that likely gave us the stories of Atlantis, Noah’s Ark, and lost Welsh kingdoms.

In Sunken Lands we see the remnants of the places that have been swallowed by waters. Doggerland, a huge expanse of land that is now under the North Sea. The Roman resort city of Baiae in the gulf of Naples, the capital of vice and parties, now in the waters of the Mediterranean in the volcanic caldera. And places barely teetering above the waters, with an exploration of what led to the precarious situation of floods in New Orleans including the devastating Hurricane Katrina, and the disappearing wetlands due to our very short-sighted management.
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“To tell my version of the story, I visit an impoverished neighbourhood of New Orleans, almost completely destroyed by Hurricane Katrina, where houses are built on stilts; a First Nation settlement in the Louisiana wetland that is falling into the sea, its houses abandoned and refugees scattered; a submerged Roman party town in the caldera of a volcano; a rapidly sinking village on the coast of Wales near the site of a legendary lost city; an Atlantic archipelago threatened by saltwater intrusions and storm waves; drained former wetlands in England’s East Anglia, formed from the mulch of a sunken forest, shrinking far below protective dykes as an ascendent North Sea pounds. These places are where the effects of global warming are most apparent – and most urgent – from rising sea levels to extreme rainfall and storm surges. They give us a stark glimpse of the future on a rapidly transforming planet. But they also tell a story about the unavoidability of change, the necessity of harmonising with nature’s flux and the folly of trying to control it. In these threshold zones, water and land are embraced in eternal cycles of flood and reclamation, erosion and deposit, destruction and renewal. Forests become freshwater swamps. Swamps become saltmarshes. Saltmarshes become the seabed. The seabed becomes stone. Stone becomes the bedrock on which future forests grow.”
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This book is a curious mixture of history, travelogue, legends, folklore, and climate change, contemplative lyricism and anxiety. All those ride this associative digressing train of thought without ever getting too scattered, somehow, and coalesce into a strongly environmentalist message.

Besides the travels to actual flooded - and flooding - places, Rees takes time to explore the myths behind the flood legends. It’s fascinating how floods in so many of these are the result of divine punishments for transgressing, the consequences for wrong actions, the need to cleanse the earth of human impurity. And he cannot help but segue into current rise of sea levels seeming as punishment for our current carbon-spewing gluttony — except Rees is careful to pinpoint that the blame is being comfortably laid on the individuals with their “carbon footprint” while big oil and fossil fuel companies keep getting richer while shifting the blame.
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“It’s a narrative that suits big business and oil corporations – where the onus is on us to change our wicked ways and eat less, drink less and do more recycling, rather than on the rulers of this world to change the environmentally destructive economic and technological system in which we have no choice but to live.”
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There is a lot of anxious feeling throughout the book, but also quite a bit of serene melancholy. (“The middle-aged me was a deeply anxious person, endemically pessimistic and prone to compulsive catastrophising.”) Rees is resignedly pessimistic about humanity’s chances to get out of our carbon-emitting predicament and reverse the changes already well under way. He imagines our own sunken cities being just as much of a myth to our far-future descendants as Atlantis is to us now. Humanity had to cope with such catastrophes before, and we are no exception, and it does not help that we are accelerating these changes despite knowing what’s happening.
“It was a party at the end of the world behind walls that were braced against the might of a rising sea, where the future was of no importance, all bets were off, there were no more rules, and the music never stopped.”

3.5 stars rounding up since I’m still entranced by Rees’s writing from which it’s hard to surface.

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Thanks to NetGalley and Independent Publishers Group | Elliott & Thompson for providing me with a digital ARC in exchange for an honest review.

I received a free copy of, Sunken Lands, by Gareth E Rees, from the publisher and Netgalley in exchange for an honest review. Its amazing to see how much land we have lost. This books tells about places that flooded like New Orleans during hurricane Katrina, and the like. It was a nice read.

Sunken Lands: A Journey Through Flooded Kingdoms and Lost Worlds weaves together folk tales and history to explore the lasting impact of climate change on these submerged landscapes. Rees' passion for the subject shines through, painting vivid portraits of the places we journey to. I found myself diving into my own research on these locations as I read—this book definitely sparked new interests for me.

I received a free copy of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.