Prypiat used to be proud for being home to the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant workers. But something happened on 26 April 1986…

It took three days before all permanent residents of Chernobyl and the Zone of alienation were evacuated due to unsafe levels of radioactivity. People from around the Soviet Union were forced to come and work here in order to liquidate the danger and evacuate the residents. Many of the workers died or had serious illness from radiation. My father was also recruited for this operation, but he bribed corrupt local officers with some good sausages which were rare and a valuable item at those times, so he’s fine an alive today.

Let the story be told by these magical pictures taken ~20 years later after the accident.

Aug 31st 2009
From Economist.com
Leave them alone, and damaged ecosystems will bounce back fast

CONVENTIONAL wisdom is often a poor guide. For one thing it suggests that human damage to the world’s species, habitats and ecosystems is terminal: that when things are lost, they are lost for ever. But oil spills of the sort that now threaten the Timor Sea, forest fires like those that recently afflicted Greece, and other man-made and man-assisted threats to wildlife are transient. Except in those cases in which a species is driven to extinction, the Earth’s ability to shrug such things off is often underestimated.

Alan Weisman shows this in his book, “The World Without Us”, which illustrates nature’s great capacity to recover. Have mankind abducted by aliens or wiped out by some Homo sapiens-specific virus, and nature, Mr Weisman reckons, would reclaim its territory with surprising speed, as weeds colonised pavements, rivers flooded subway tunnels and buildings burst as they were played like concertinas by a cycle of freezing and thawing. By Mr Weisman’s reckoning, residential neighbourhoods would return to forest in 500 years and only the most stubborn of human inventions, such as certain plastics, would prove permanent.

Looking back from the future

Chris Turney

If future explorers came across evidence of human civilization 100 million years from now, what impression would they have of our existence?

By timothy on that’ll-do-for-now

Hugh Pickens writes “Kevin Kelly has an interesting post about an archive designed with an estimated lifespan of 2,000 -10,000 years to serve future generations as a modern Rosetta Stone. The Rosetta disk contains analog ‘human-readable’ scans of scripts, text, and diagrams using nickel deposited on an etched silicon disk and includes 15,000 microetched pages of language documentation in 1,500 different languages, including versions of Genesis 1-3, a universal list of the words common for each language, and pronunciation guides. Produced by the Long Now Foundation, the plan is to replicate the disk promiscuously and distribute them around the world in nondescript locations so at least one will survive their 2,000-year lifespan. ‘This is one of the most fascinating objects on earth,’ says Oliver Wilke. ‘If we found one of these things 2,000 years ago, with all the languages of the time, it would be among our most priceless artifacts. I feel a high responsibility for preserving it for future generations.’”

ganelo writes to tell us that 16-year-old Waterloo Collegiate Institute student Danel Burd has made quite a stir with his plastic-eating bacteria discovery. For his efforts Burd won top prize at a Canada-wide science fair claiming a $10,000 prize and a $20,000 scholarship. “Tests to identify the strains found strain two was Sphingomonas bacteria and the helper was Pseudomonas. A researcher in Ireland has found Pseudomonas is capable of degrading polystyrene, but as far as Burd and his teacher Mark Menhennet know — and they’ve looked — Burd’s research on polyethelene plastic bags is a first.”

The really difficult and necessary thing is to grasp the very notion of “World” itself as a natural phenomenon, which is co-extensive with properly recognizing ourselves as natural. It probably requires re-thinking the “natural” outside of the box enlightenment philosophy has drawn around it.

With no one left to run the pumps, New York’s subway tunnels would fill with water in two days. Within 20 years, Lexington Avenue would be a river. Fire- and wind-ravaged skyscrapers would eventually fall like giant trees. Within weeks of our disappearance, the world’s 441 nuclear plants would melt down into radioactive blobs, while our petrochemical plants, “ticking time bombs” even on a normal day, would become flaming geysers spewing toxins for decades to come. Outside of these hot spots, Weisman depicts a world slowly turning back into wilderness. After about 100,000 years, carbon dioxide would return to prehuman levels. Domesticated species from cattle to carrots would revert back to their wild ancestors. And on every dehabitated continent, forests and grasslands would reclaim our farms and parking lots as animals began a slow parade back to Eden.

Reviews:

Open Culture, A conversation with Alan Weisman,
October 3, 2007

The New York Times: Cityroom, October 1, 2007

The New York Times Book Review, September 2, 2007

Atlanta Journal-Constitution, August 31, 2007

Powell’s Books, Interview with Alan Weisman, August, 2007

The New York Times, August 13, 2007

The New Yorker, August 13, 2007

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, August 12, 2007

Salon, July 23, 2007

Time, July 2007

Scientific American article: “An Earth Without People”, July 2007