PRIZING MANKIND TOO HIGHLY

Chernobyl shows nature will stroll in wherever man fears to tread (Andrew Osborn, New Zealand Herald, April 6th, 2006)

Near what is left of Chernobyl's ill-fated fourth reactor, a pair of elks is grazing nonchalantly on land irradiated by the world's worst nuclear accident.

In nearby Pripyat, an eerie husk of a town where 50,000 people lived before they were forced to flee on a terrifying afternoon in 1986, a Soviet urban landscape is rapidly giving way to wild European woodland.

Radiation levels remain far too high for human habitation, but the abandoned town is filled with birdsong. Twenty years after the reactor exploded on April 26, 1986, Chernobyl's radiation-soaked "dead zone" is not looking so dead after all.

The zone - an area with a radius of 29 kilometres in modern-day Ukraine - lives on in the popular imagination as a post-apocalyptic wasteland irreparably poisoned with strontium and caesium. It is associated with death and alarming yet nebulous stories of genetic mutation, a post-nuclear badland that shows what happens when mankind gets atomic energy wrong.

The reality, at least on the surface, is starkly different from the mythology, however. The almost complete absence of human activity in large swaths of the zone during the past two decades has given the area's flora and fauna a chance to first recover and then to flourish. [...]

Some claim it is one of Europe's most promising wildlife havens.

It is ironic how so much modern thinking is based upon the popular conviction that humans are, at the same time, capable of limitless good and on the verge of destroying the planet.