The God Species_ How the Planet Can Survive the Age of Humans - Mark Lynas [94]
In his twentieth-anniversary statement, Greenpeace’s Gerd Leipold invited his audience to remember “the old people who have no alternative but to eat mushrooms and burn firewood harvested from woodland so radioactive that soil samples from them are treated as radioactive waste in Western Europe.” Lest we forget, “it is here where we should look—into the eyes of these people—when we are told about the so-called ‘benefits’ of nuclear power.” As it happens, on a visit to Chernobyl in May 2010 with a Channel 4 camera crew, I had the opportunity to look into the eyes of just such an old person during an interview I conducted with 81-year-old Leonid Petrovich outside the garishly painted church in Chernobyl village. Despite having moved back to his old cottage deep inside the exclusion zone, Petrovich did not at all resemble the sad victims portrayed by Greenpeace—and nor did any of the other people, mostly old and all Chernobyl residents, whom I also spoke to on the same day and who were accompanying him to church. All had moved back of their own accord, and none were particularly concerned about the dangers of radiation, which they considered to have been overhyped by the authorities. As a milestone in his life, Leonid Petrovich told me that the explosion of Reactor Number 4 in April 1986 was a great deal less traumatic than the arrival of German SS troops in 1942, when Petrovich was a boy and saw dozens of Jewish residents shot in the forest outside the village.
Poking around the Chernobyl exclusion zone was a fascinating experience for me. In case readers are concerned, the radiation dose I received over the two days I spent there was about 0.1 milliSieverts, 100 times less than a single medical CT scan.51 What most struck me was the sheer profusion of wildlife. The long sleeves, strange-smelling wristbands and hats we had been ordered to wear turned out to have nothing to do with radiation—they were to ward off the clouds of mosquitoes that emerged from every bush and tree in the lush new forest. Just a couple of miles from the reactor itself, in the abandoned Soviet town of Prypiat, I variously saw a snake, a lizard, and a large hare lolloping past the rusting bumper cars of an abandoned amusement park. The birdsong was nearly deafening. Everywhere wildlife was verdant and abundant—hardly the image I had grown up with of a devastated, blighted landscape. A silver birch tree—always a hardy pioneer species—was growing up through the wooden floorboards of an abandoned gymnasium. The calls of cuckoos echoed between the abandoned apartment blocks.
None of this is to suggest that radioactivity is somehow good for biodiversity. What has benefited the local wildlife is one thing only: the exclusion of people. Moreover, the Chernobyl disaster did at first have a serious effect on the surrounding ecology. Nearby pine trees quickly died, becoming the famous “red forests” as their needles shriveled and turned brown. Within a radius of about ten kilometers, other trees developed malformed buds, dead branches, or genetic abnormalities. Researchers also noticed a “catastrophic impact” on soil invertebrates: Most of the worms and insects living on and below the forest floor quickly died off as the radionuclides were washed into the leaf litter by rain. Scientists found that rodent populations had suffered, their numbers declining and reproductive success compromised. Fish in heavily irradiated water bodies like the nearby Chernobyl cooling pond were also affected, suffering problems with spawning and fertility—those fish that received the