Wormwood Forest: A Natural History of Chernobyl Book

This is a well-written, interesting and informative book from 2005 about the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear power plant catastrophe and the effects of the radiation the explosion poured onto the people, plants and wildlife of the surrounding area - a contaminated area that extends across parts of Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia.

The author, a Ukrainian-American, became obsessed with the catastrophe the moment she heard about it and spent years researching aspects of the accident, and even lived in Kiev for a number of years. The book explains the way different isotopes can harm people, plants and animals; some of those effects lessen with time as particles decay, sink into soil or silt.

There were, unfortunately, hundreds of thousands of people harmed by the accident - both residents of the affected areas and the hundreds of of thousands of workers sent in to do the clean-up. Surprisingly, the restricted surrounding area - which is now a nature reserve off-limits to most people except to permitted visitors and some former residents who insist on returning to their properties, is mostly green and teeming with wildlife, not a nuclear wasteland, although living things in the area do contain elevated levels of radionuclides. Aside from some distorted pine trees in the Red Forest near the decommissioned power plant itself which bore the brunt of the explosion, which grow from the contaminated soil in a shrub-like manner rather than as trees with branches perpendicular to their trunk, and some striped mussels, which develop in a disoriented manner with respect to the direction in which they grow in streams (not an effect readily visible to a casual observer), there are no "mutants" or "monsters" as a result of the radioactivity, despite the years of radioactive harm. Although this is of course good news in that it attests to the regenerative power of nature, it leads to some disquiet, at least it did for me. A huge mitigation project was undertaken after the accident - and although imperfect - the area did not turn into a permanent nuclear wasteland, as people have usually imagined the after effects of nuclear war with only roaches and rats remaining. Earth's seemingly invincible regenerative or adaptive power unfortunately might give military planners fewer qualms about using tactical nuclear weapons in a limited conflict. The fact is, wars and all nuclear weapons are catastrophically bad; some of the isotopes at Chernobyl have a half-life of thousands of years. Nuclear fallout is never acceptable. Despite the hope one can derive from the book, it is in the end nonetheless a profoundly disquieting book. Still, I would recommend it to anyone interested in finding out about the Chernobyl catastrophe especially its effects on the ecology of the surrounding contaminated area.

Here are a few quotes:

"...an accident on April 26, [1986] ... destroyed part of what was, until then, the obscure Chernobyl atomic energy plant in the Soviet Ukrainian republic."

"My Ukrainian-American upbringing had instilled a visceral distrust of the Soviet Union in me."

"...to harness the energy of Ukraine's Dnieper River, Europe's third largest, over the years the Soviets transformed it into a series of shallow, eutrophic reservoirs where fish perish by the thousands during hot summers."

"It is one of the disaster's paradoxes, but the zone's evacuation put an end to industrialization, deforestation, cultivation, and other human intrusions, making it one of Ukraine's environmentally cleanest regions--except for the radioactivity."

"...the feral fields surrounding the largely empty town [of Chornobyl] are now rich with the hares, rabbits, and rodents that are the golden eagle's favorite diet. The multitude of small creatures has attracted many raptors..."

"With biologically active radionuclides such as strontium and cesium constantly decaying, the window for studying high levels of contamination in the environment will eventually close. At the same time, Chernobyl's long-lived radionuclides such as plutonium and americium will continue to affect living things for a very, very long time to come."

"[Petr Palytayev, director of the Belarusian reserve:] 'And then, in one moment, it all ended.'"

"Science fiction writer Bruce Sterling coined the term "involuntary parks" to describe places that have been reclaimed by nature and reverted to savagery because of war, pollution, or other disasters. Involuntary parks do not, as Sterling puts it, represent untouched nature, but "vengeful nature"--natural processes reasserting themselves in areas of political and technological collapse."