Wild Chernobyl - Photo Essay

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Thirty years after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, Reuters photographer Vasily Fedosenko documented booming populations of wolf, elk and other wildlife in the vast contaminated zone in Belarus and Ukraine. On April 26, 1986, a botched test at the nuclear plant in Ukraine, then a Soviet republic, sent clouds of smouldering radioactive material across large swathes of Europe. Over 100,000 people had to abandon the area permanently, leaving native animals the sole occupants of a cross-border “exclusion zone” roughly the size of Luxembourg.--By Reuters



A fox walks through the 30 km (19 miles) exclusion zone around the Chernobyl nuclear reactor near the abandoned village of Babchin, Belarus, March 5. (VASILY FEDOSENKO)



Elks are seen in the 30 km (19 miles) exclusion zone around the Chernobyl nuclear reactor near the abandoned village of Dronki, Belarus, Jan. 28. (Vasily Fedosenko/Reuters)



An otter swims in a river in the 30 km (19 miles) exclusion zone around the Chernobyl nuclear reactor in the abandoned village of Pogonnoe, Belarus, March 13. (Vasily Fedosenko/Reuters)

Many more here

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1. What amazes me is this:

Human presence was far more of a threat to this wildlife than all that monstrous radiation.

It feels like there's a message in there, if I could only figure it out...

[enough]

2. Maybe the message is they'll be fine when we're gone? (nt)