Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
reclaiming the place, growing in where civilization would have pushed it back, reoccupy-
ing the space once reserved for people.
If the zone had become a giant, radioactive national park, then Dennis was the Boy
Scout in love with it. As we walked back to town, birdsong filling the air, he told me about
the scientists and researchers who came to the zone to study the wildlife. His pride was
obvious. Species of birds not seen in the region for decades had been popping up there, he
said. Ecologists had even chosen it as a place to reintroduce an endangered species of wild
horse. And everywhere I had gone, except for the reactor complex itself, I had seen nature
running riot. Despite the radiation—indeed because of it—Chernobyl had effectively be-
come the largest wildlife preserve in Ukraine, perhaps in all of Europe.
It is a turn of events that highlights a certain human arrogance about our destructive
powers. It is only hubris to imagine that we can destroy nature, or the world. It is the mirror
image of the industrialist's egotistical desire to exploit and control it. And it is true that we
can kill off continents of forest and destroy species by the thousands, and even wreak cli-
mate change. But once we're gone, the rest of nature will rush on, as it has after so many
other cataclysms, growing over and through and out of us. The apocalypse we can create is
for ourselves and for our cousins, but not for life on Earth.
We headed back by a different route, cutting through the town's World War II memorial,
an arcade of pillars tucked into the woods. The centerpiece of the memorial was a white
column, perhaps thirty feet tall, with a large bronze star perched on top. Fresh flowers had
been placed at its base.
Layers of catastrophe had been overlaid on this landscape. During World War II—long
before any nuclear reactors came along—the area around Chernobyl had been the scene
of brutal fighting. As local partisans resisted the German occupation, the people suffered
murderous Nazi reprisals, only to endure a horrific famine once the war was over.
In that context, it's hard to say that the accident in 1986 was even the worst thing offered
up to Chernobyl by the twentieth century. Indeed, although the human dislocation caused
by the accident was immense, its legacy in terms of illness and death is deeply ambiguous.
In the public consciousness, Chernobyl stands for cancer, deformity, and death. Even
now, a quarter century later, there is no shortage of charities dedicated to the care of
“Chernobyl children”—recently born kids suffering from cancer or birth defects attributed
to the accident's aftereffects. But the Chernobyl Forum (a consortium including several
branches of the UN and the governments of Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia) has argued that,
after an epidemic of thyroid cancer among children living in the area during the accident,
no measurable increase has yet been demonstrated in the region's cancer rates. The Forum's
projection of excess cancer deaths in the future is surprisingly low, at about five thousand.
Meanwhile, its estimate of the number of people killed by the accident's immediate effects
