Inside the Exclusion Zone of Fukushima's Radioactive Forest

As we know from Chernobyl and its infamous exclusion zone, Time will reveal all. In many respects, Chernobyl is a radioactive experiment, unfortunately. Even more tragic, is a 2nd nuclear experiment we can now learn from; and, that is from the exclusion zone from Fukushima, Japan: A radioactive forest in the heart of the Fukushima exclusion zone.

Nature Takes Back Our Empty Cities in 2020: A Reflection on Chernobyl

One of the perhaps rare silver linings of the Covid-19 pandemic is how our planet's wildlife is actually benefiting from a global pandemic. Wildlife has been seen entering empty cities everywhere now that city streets are emptied during the Covid-19 quarantine lockdown.

We've also seen a rather quick drop in greenhouse emissions in the atmosphere since humankind has been forced into a mass global lockdown due to the Covid-19 pandemic. I wonder if anyone else sees the irony of how the environment and wildlife are actually benefiting from humanity going into the largest lockdown in human history?

(History, the world and our neighboring species could even benefit from our disappearance.....if mankind were to ever disappear...)

This reminds me of what happened in the Chernobyl exclusion zone. Due to the regions radioactive contamination for many decades, residents left the area deserted, like a ghost town. In the absence of human activity in the empty ghost towns, local wildlife ended up moving back into the region and taking it over.

 The wildlife could not detect radiation in the environment, just as humans cannot. Radiation is a silent enemy. Slight genetic mutations have been the result, but despite that, the wildlife has managed to flourish in the dead zones of Chernobyl due to humans abandoning the contaminated exclusion zone.

Post Apocalyptic Now:

Hello fellow survivors,

We're in the future, yet now in a post apocalyptic reality.

You do not know the past entirely, and if this blog/post/literature continues to exist, like we hope it will, for generations.... you are seeking answers to the past.

You see, no one knew we were in an apocalypse when radiation from four nuclear reactors in Fukushima, in an island country called 'Japan' erupted and lasted for years and years, environmental contamination spewing into the seas and into the land over what was supposed to be 40 years, and ended up at least 100 years.

We thought, ignorantly, that an environmental apocalypse would be dramatic, all over the news, and world wide spread knowledge, but in the end the apocalypse was silent, humble and too many years to take effect and its toll on the oceans, plant life and human beings. No one sounded the trumpets, or interceded and it was business as usual on planet earth.

We thought it would and should be like AMC's 'Walking Dead' or other examples like this, but ignored far too long, until it was too late, that we all we're the walking dead but did not see it, feel it...yet....as that is the silent death of nuclear energy.

We died of nuclear contamination, except for you survivors. Over time. It wasn't quick, or dramatic, but a slow death of time. And now it is up to you, and hopefully communications like this and many others are accessible to you in the future. That is our hope, to let you know what your past was, what earth was.... and what you need to contend with this day.

(Thinking of the current events and obstacles facing Japan, Tepco, the environment and the world, I wanted to write a what if? letter to a post-apocalyptic world and the remaining survivors.)

America's Wastelands

I was posting a Blue Man Group video earlier today and begun thinking about the wastelands of America I've witnessed in my personal explorations and travels. Urban and industrial decay is not only a tragedy of abandonment but of the environment.

Take, for instance, a small coal town in Pennsylvania - Centralia - where a mine fire has been burning under the ground for nearly 50 years. Centralia is now a ghost town, but the smoldering fire will burn hundreds of years spreading to nearby towns.

What to think of all this? I'm not sure entirely. But environmental disasters are some of the key forces behind cultural abandonment's. Man playing with nature as she builds her industrial playground have consequences. Below is Blue Man Groups video "Earth to America"!