In this video, we explore Chernobyl as an example of what happens when humans leave and nature takes over. It's the perfect example of extreme rewilding. Humans are kept out by radiation and this gives wild animals an opportunity to recolonise the area.
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WHY WE MADE THIS VIDEO
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As a kid, I've always wondered what the world would look like if we suddenly left. There was something exciting about the thought of buildings slowly crumbling and being covered in plants ... something exciting about nature returning to a place from which it had been banished.
BACKGROUND
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The Chernobyl disaster was a nuclear accident that occurred on the 26th of April 1986 whist conducting a test on the No. 4 reactor in the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, near the city of Pripyat in the north of the Ukrainian SSR.
It's the long term consequences that are of interest to us here. Long story short, the accident led to widespread radioactive contamination in the surrounding areas and an exclusion zone was created. This area spans 30km in all directions from the reactor covering approximately 4,200 km2 and is pretty much uninhabited except for a small group of about 200 people living at the edge.
About 70% of the exclusion zone is forest. The monoculture pine plantations that were there in 1986 have given way to more biodiverse primary forests". Although 200km2 of those forests burned up in 2020. Which is a big shame and gave everyone a scare... Local conservationists though expect a significant recovery to take about 10 years.
So what about the wildlife?
The exclusion zone has a wide variety of species including Grey wolves, Eurasian lynx, brown bear, black storks, European bison, roe deer and boar
and studies have shown that high doses of radiation
"during the first six months after the accident significantly affected animal health and reproduction. However, any potential long-term radiation damage to populations is not apparent from" the observed trend in the population data.
In fact, the authors go on to state that
"Relative abundances of elk, roe deer, red deer and wild boar within the Chernobyl exclusion zone are similar to those in four (uncontaminated) nature reserves in the region and wolf abundance is more than 7 times higher."
"These results demonstrate that, regardless of potential radiation effects on individual animals, the Chernobyl exclusion zone supports an abundant mammal community after nearly three decades of chronic radiation exposures."
The four nature reserves areas they used for comparison in this study all had relatively smaller sizes - ranging between 1/4th and about half the size of the exclusion zone. Also, these areas have much higher population densities than the exclusion zone for obvious reasons... as most of them include scattered villages in their boundaries.
So what can we conclude from all of this?
A sad first conclusion has to be that even radiation is not as detrimental to wild ecosystems as the good old Homo Sapiens... The pressure we put on ecosystems is simply devastating.
Our second conclusion is that nature can bounce back and do so very fast when we give it the opportunity to do so.
Finally, in more practical terms, our comparison with the other four nature reserves gives us a few hints of what we need to put in place to allow wilderness to thrive. The exclusion zone has similar population densities to those other reserves but what sets it apart is the wolf and lynx densities. Large predators are a great indicator of a fully restored and self-sustaining wild ecosystem. What is special about the exclusion zone is its larger than average size and low human population density. Nature needs space. That's it. When considering the large rates of land abandonment in Europe and the opportunity this brings we could use this knowledge to plan which chunks we want to give back to nature and make sure we make them large enough to be meaningful and that we make sure to leave it alone and give it the space it needs.
⏱️TIMESTAMPS⏱️
0:00 Intro
0:16 What would the world look like if we left?
0:52 Rewilding
1:54 Chernobyl
2:42 What happened?
3:14 Long term consequences
4:14 What about the Wildlife?
5:42 Conclusion
7:26 Outro