Kamal Ghorui
It has been called the ‘forbidden experiment’. The kind we could never, ever be justified in purposely initiating. Forty years ago, the worst nuclear disaster in history sent a radioactive cloud billowing from Chernobyl across Europe, emptied entire towns, uprooted 350,000 lives. In an unforeseen twist, it also triggered extraordinary rewilding. In parts of the exclusion zone, the landscape appears to have rolled back centuries. Almost a ‘factory reset’. Wolves and bears roam free once more. What should have been a place of pure darkness, the most blighted on earth, has instead been reclaimed by cascading ecological forces. Man – pompous, self-appointed custodian of this planet – has made precisely one contribution to all of it: Exit stage left.
Like big mammals, birds, trees, and other organisms are also enjoying a joyous rejuvenation. There are bacteria thriving inside the nuclear reactor walls, others immobilising the dissolved uranium, fungi breaking down contaminated materials. They are taking energy from the very things that make the site deadly to us. To be clear, the 1986 nuclear accident did inflict massive mortality and mutation on forests, mammals, invertebrates, soil microorganisms. Only with time, did the positive, adaptive responses emerge. Yes, very much like Eliot’s Wasteland, “breeding lilacs out of the dead land”.
Russia’s war on Ukraine has shattered this fragile peace. Drones have struck the ‘sarcophagus’ built to entomb the radioactive debris. Flora and fauna have adapted to chronic radiation in a phenomenal way, but ‘we the problem’ remains. We still cannot leave them alone. Our military blundering threatens fresh devastation. Chernobyl’s true lesson is not that Nature can absorb our worst catastrophes, but that what Nature most needs to heal itself, is for us to get out of the way. This is grim comfort, but still a comfort, that when we render the planet uninhabitable for ourselves, which we seem bent on doing, everything else could still thrive.
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