Wormwood Forest: A Natural History of Chernobyl

"In a sense, yes. I suppose that sense of unseen, unknowable danger is very much present when visiting the Chernobyl exclusion zone. There are a number of very good books about the 1986 nuclear accident and its aftermath – not least Svetlana Alexievitch’s Chernobyl Prayer ( known as Voices from Chernobyl in the US) and Serhii Plokhy’s Baillie Gifford Prize-winning Chernobyl: History of a Tragedy . But what I’m really interested in, and what I travelled there myself to see in 2017, is how the natural world has rebounded or reacted in the wake of the accident and in the absence of people. The exclusion zone, or ‘zone of alienation’ in the more poetic translation, covers about a thousand square miles of Ukraine. There’s also a large ‘radioecological reserve’ over the border in Belarus, which arguably received the brunt of the contamination. So we’re talking about an enormous area that has been almost entirely deserted. It takes in two towns, Chernobyl and Pripyat, and nearly 200 smaller settlements, many of which were farming communities. In Pripyat, we explored abandoned schools and sports facilities, a small fairground, a supermarket and apartment blocks. The scale of the abandonment inside the zone is really quite incredible. And though the radiation has had myriad negative effects – especially in the immediate aftermath of the accident, when swathes of pine forest were killed, and unknown numbers of animals died of radiation poisoning – the zone has, over time, begun to be recolonised by flora and fauna. It’s a controversial subject, but Mary Mycio breaks down complex science and translates it for a general audience. Published in 2005, it’s now a little out of date, but I’d recommend anyone interested in the apparent natural recovery of the Chernobyl exclusion zone to start with this book, before moving on to more recent scientific studies, as it offers an excellent grounding in the science. And it’s all told through an engaging first-person narrative."