How long until we burn the sky?
So as the conversations at work often do, this morning's topic meandered a bit. We started off when someone saw a blurb about a man who survived both the blasts at Hiroshima and Nagasaki died at age 93 and then on to the Chernobyl disaster. Which led to some me poking around a bit and finding some interesting articles on the "current" state of Chernobyl (the quotes are because they're not brand new, I had to stop looking and actually do some work). But a couple of the more interesting ones I found:
The wikipedia entry on the Zone of Alienation was a little surreal, if for no other reason than the affected area seems to be about a third of the country (Ukraine).
Wildlife defies Chernobyl radiation, which is a BBC report from 2006 on how animals are thriving now that humans aren't around to muck up the land. On striking quote in reference to an author included in the article was "But she too argues that the benefits to wildlife of removing people from the zone, have far outweighed any harm from radiation."
And this one on the Lost City of Chernobyl, with lots of pictures of the abandoned city.
This is an old site of a Ukrainian photographer, Elena Filatova, who took pictures of the zone. There seems to be some controversy as to whether she booked a tour and took the pictures or actually rode through the zone alone on her bike as she claimed. One part of her site had an interesting revelation:
"In Ukrainian language ( where we don't like to say "the") Chernobyl is the name of a grass, wormwood (absinth). This word scares the holy bejesus out of people here. Maybe part of the reason for that among religious people is because the Bible mentions Wormwood in the book of the revelatons - which fortells the end of the world...."
And an more recent site from her called Chernobyl: Land of the Wolves.
And lastly this Wikipedia entry on the Red Forest, about the forest surrounding the site that was instantly killed off.
Fascinating if morbid. And sad, because I don't think we as a species really learn from mistakes unless we make them ourselves.
The wikipedia entry on the Zone of Alienation was a little surreal, if for no other reason than the affected area seems to be about a third of the country (Ukraine).
Wildlife defies Chernobyl radiation, which is a BBC report from 2006 on how animals are thriving now that humans aren't around to muck up the land. On striking quote in reference to an author included in the article was "But she too argues that the benefits to wildlife of removing people from the zone, have far outweighed any harm from radiation."
And this one on the Lost City of Chernobyl, with lots of pictures of the abandoned city.
This is an old site of a Ukrainian photographer, Elena Filatova, who took pictures of the zone. There seems to be some controversy as to whether she booked a tour and took the pictures or actually rode through the zone alone on her bike as she claimed. One part of her site had an interesting revelation:
"In Ukrainian language ( where we don't like to say "the") Chernobyl is the name of a grass, wormwood (absinth). This word scares the holy bejesus out of people here. Maybe part of the reason for that among religious people is because the Bible mentions Wormwood in the book of the revelatons - which fortells the end of the world...."
And an more recent site from her called Chernobyl: Land of the Wolves.
And lastly this Wikipedia entry on the Red Forest, about the forest surrounding the site that was instantly killed off.
Fascinating if morbid. And sad, because I don't think we as a species really learn from mistakes unless we make them ourselves.