When Nature Makes A Comeback
I think we all saw during our first lockdown last year, just how quickly Nature can return if humans and their activity is removed from or limited in an area.
Whales swam in waters they had avoided for years due to human pleasure craft making things dangerous or just too disruptive for them. Mammals of all kinds ventured into towns and villages that were previously no-go zones.
We also saw a noticeable drop in pollution levels in the air and the waters, both fresh and saltwater, and it was a pattern repeated all around the world.
I think the speed that these things happened surprised everyone.
But there is a place where this has been happening for 35 years, and where little or no human intervention is possible and where Nature has been staging a remarkable comeback, despite a huge human-caused catastrophe in the form of radiation - Chernobyl!!
That catastrophic fire and explosion in Number 4 Reactor in 1986 sent radiation up into the atmosphere that caused problems far outside of the local area. I was working in accountancy in the aftermath of this disaster, and remember having to make claims for years after for Welsh farmers who couldn’t sell their livestock due to the radiation that came down with the rain affecting their grazing.
People were evacuated from the region around the reactor worst affected by the radioactive fallout and a large exclusion zone was put in place that still remains today. Nature too was affected in the short-term within this area but as radiation levels dropped, the plants and animals began to make a startling recovery in the absence of humans.
While a few people have ignored the authorities and moved back into some abandoned villages and towns, trees and other plants have largely reclaimed land that was once solely for human use.
Forests that had been largely made up of human-managed pine trees became more biodiverse left to themselves, encouraging greater diversity of other species: plants, animals and birds.
The huge catfish that live in the cooling ponds of Chernobyl are not that size due to any sort of mutation - although there is some damage to their DNA from radiation - but only because they are well fed with bread by visitors and no one is allowed to catch them. So they are allowed to reach their full natural age and size - fully 8 feet in length for some of them!
Other birds and animals have moved into the exclusion zone and the former human settlements. In the case of the larger predators such as wolves and bears, this was a case of animals that had not been seen much in the area for some time before the disaster.
As the prey species increased in number, so the environment could support more of those further up the food chain.
Endangered Przewalski's horses - the last remaining wild horse species - are thriving in the exclusion zone.
So, Chernobyl, while it was a disaster in every way for humans, it does give us a glimpse of how the world might change for the better for Nature if that human influence on the environment were suddenly to vanish.
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