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These days most examples of primary succession are caused by humans, and they have nothing to do with volcanism or glaciers. They occur in the wake of the dead landscapes caused by nuclear testing or are found on top of slag heaps or at battle sites or in the cracked tarmac and paving stones of our cities.
    These plants seem such doughty invaders that it is easy to assume that, given time, the green world will always grow back and take over. It’s early days yet, but at the moment it seems that the Aralqum is suggesting otherwise. The salty, dust-blown, and often poisonous seabed makes conditions very hard for new life. A German team from the University of Bielefeld has studied the limited plant life that is taking root. Along with other experts they predicted that the desert will only be greened by people going in and planting species that are not just salt resistant but can withstand the extreme temperatures and winds of the dry sea floor. Yet 70 percent of the Aralqum is salt desert. To turn it into something living would be an expensive, long-term, and probably thankless task. The Aralqum appears to be showing us that, at least in the short term, nature cannot cope. A problem created by us can only be solved by us, but so far it appears to be beyond us. We have gotten used to seeing natural places as places that can be protected and nurtured, but the story of the Aral Sea indicates a daunting challenge, of moving beyond designating zones of conservation toward rebuilding entire ecosystems and landscapes on a vast scale.
    In the meantime, the new desert is sharing its secrets. It seems this is not the first time that the area has been dry. On the old sea floor Kazakh hunters have found the remnants of a medieval mausoleum along with human bones, pottery, and millstones. Satellite images have also revealed the courses of medieval rivers meandering through the desert. These findings confirm a local legend that the Aral Sea was once land. The area’s folklore has since been updated. Now old-timers look forward to a second inundation, a new flood to give them back their blue sea.
    Lost places have an uncanny presence in our lives. In a century that has seen the obliteration of so many places, it might be thought that these ghosts would have been exorcised. But that’s not how humans work; place means too much to us for its disappearance to ever feel easy or complete.





The Labyrinth
    44° 56′ 14″ N, 93° 12′ 03″ W
     
    In a world where it is easy to assume that everywhere is fully known and fully charted, places that don’t appear on maps become intriguing and provoking. Hidden geographies are the inverse of lost places; they hint at the possibility that the age of discovery is not quite over. The surprising resilience of closed cities and unnoticed uses of existing landscapes challenge us to see ordinary streets in new ways. The underground city provides more intimate hidden places that manage to be both near and far.
    Urban exploration took off in the early 2000s. I first knew it was going mainstream when my sixteen-year-old nephew told me he had spent the night in an abandoned mental hospital. He showed me the photos: empty wards full of fallen plaster and upended radiators, grinning teens posing in front of the goofy monsters they had painted on the walls. I didn’t ask why he did it, because I already knew. A decade earlier I’d helped set up a magazine dedicated to the experimental geographical wanderings and disorientations known as psychogeography. We called it
Transgressions: A Journal of Urban Exploration
. It ran for only four issues and was full of purposefully perplexing accounts from the geographical avant-garde. What brought the group together was an understanding of urban exploration as a kind of geographical version of surrealist automatic writing. Our real-world adventures were little more than pegs on which to hang our interpretative essays, which usually came with pendulous bibliographies