Making sense of nature in the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone. Jonathon Turnbull
Channel: Postgraduate KMA
Date: 18/04/2021

In the 35 years since the world’s worst nuclear accident of 1986, reports have proliferated suggesting nature has ‘taken back’ the area surrounding the Chornobyl nuclear power plant. The Chornobyl Exclusion, spanning both Ukraine and Belarus, has been called one of Europe’s largest true wilderness areas. However, a scientific controversy surrounds whether nature in the zone can be considered to be flourishing, or whether long-lasting radioactive contaminants in the ecosystem are damaging the ecology at a range of scales. After outlining this controversy, the rest of the talk focuses on two parts of the speaker's research.

It is discussed wolves. Wolves are often used to point to the health of nature at Chornobyl, where they are seven times more populous than in surrounding uncontaminated nature reserves. As they are top predators – keystone species – their abundance apparently signals the health of the entire ecosystem. Following the story of one wolf that was tracked leaving the Zone, it is discussed how it was transformed from a keystone species (inside the Zone) to a mutant (outside the Zone).

It is discussed nature at the more everyday level in Chornobyl. The focus is on the dogs that live in the Zone and the various ways in which different groups of people relate with them, which is determined by whether people think the Zone is a good place for dogs to live or not. The speaker is contrast the understanding of the dogs with the checkpoint guards, power plant workers, and others who live with dogs in the Zone to show how these everyday relations produce very different knowledges concerning the lives of animals.

The lecture is concluded by discussing what these stories can teach us about human-animal relations and nature more broadly in the current epoch, the Anthropocene.