https://e360.yale.edu/features/ukraine-war-wilding
"It was a monumental disaster. The dynamiting of the Kakhovka dam on Ukraine’s
Dnieper River just before dawn on June 6 last year rapidly emptied Europe’s
largest hydroelectric reservoir. Some 14 million acre-feet of water hurtled
downstream for more than 100 miles to the sea. Around 80 villages were flooded,
more than 100 people died, and more than 40 nature reserves were engulfed. In
the Black Sea, the flood delivered a flush of industrial toxins, land mines,
agricultural chemicals, sediment, and freshwater that killed fish and unleashed
swarms of algae along the coast.
Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, called it the “largest man-made
environmental disaster in Europe in decades” — since the meltdown at the
country’s Chernobyl nuclear plant in 1986. Within days, his government pledged
to rebuild the dam.
But now the ecological consequences of this war crime — widely presumed to be
perpetrated by the dam’s Russian occupiers — are being seen in a different
light. The bed of the former reservoir is rapidly rewilding, with extensive
thickets of native willow trees growing. The country’s ecologists are calling
for plans for a new dam to be dropped, in favor of nurturing the ecological
renewal. And they argue that some of Ukraine’s short-term wartime environmental
catastrophes — on rivers, in forests, and across the country’s precious steppe
grasslands — can be turned into long-term ecological gains.
“War-wilding” can benefit a country still chained to Soviet-era infrastructure,
they say. After the war ends — which Zelensky said during a visit to the U.S.
in September could be “closer… than we think” — Ukraine could secure its
inadvertent ecological gains and ensure that reconstruction puts the
environment at its heart."
Via
Fix the News:
https://fixthenews.com/276-nauseously-optimistic/
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
