You may have heard the news that
Fukushima is being ravaged by radioactive wild boars. No, it is not. The boars are not ‘radioactive,’ they would
be irradiated. The difference between the two words is not
mere pedantry, they describe very different phenomena. I talked about this in my last reminiscence
post for the fifth anniversary of 3/11.
Radioactive means the material is unstable and throwing it’s own
particles around. Irradiated means the
organism or object has absorbed radioactive material, and could potentially
become toxic. Buried under the alarmist
headlines is a very real, very important story about nature and some of the
possible long term consequences of 3/11 that have gone largely unremarked on until
now. There really are animals running
wild in the parts of Fukushima that were evacuated and are still devoid of
humans. Japan has always had a large
wild boar population, so it is no surprise that they turn up in numbers inside
the Fukushima exclusion zone.
Whenever
humans leave, nature takes over. In
Ukraine, we have already seen nature takeover the Chernobyl exclusion
zone. Animals came back and plants
overgrew everything. I think that any
talk of former residents moving back into the Chernobyl exclusion zone is gone,
if there was any. Sometimes I hear
people say it would be nice to turn the exclusion zone into a national park. I have
never been to Ukraine, but I have seen photographs and films of the area around
Chernobyl, and it is quite eerie. For my
part, I can hardly believe the area was only abandoned 30 years ago. Now the same process is occurring in
Fukushima, and it is a potential problem.
The refugees from the exclusion zone still scattered around Japan would
like to go back. But what can they go
back to? This goes back to the
boars. Wild boars are opportunists. They can and will eat almost anything, just
like domestic pigs. The boars can breed
safely in the exclusion zone, with no predators, except for the occasional black
bear, which are very, very rare on
Honshu.
With a safe space
to breed, the boars are already a bigger problem outside the exclusion zone
than they were before the accident.
Authorities can try to cull the herd, but so long as boars are free to
roam in the exclusion zone or anywhere, the boar problem will be unsolvable. In theory, the government of Japan or
Fukushima could send hunters into the exclusion briefly to conduct a quick
cull, but that would not work either.
Besides, boars are hardly the only animals that could find sanctuary in
the exclusion zone. Japan also has deer,
monkeys, badgers and even raccoons. Any
animal that can tolerate the radiation even a little has already taken
advantage of the human vacuum in Fukushima.
Much of Fukushima is rural, and pest animals find farmland most
inviting. There is plenty of food and fewer
humans to chase the pests away.
Besides
the animals, every other element of nature will take its toll on abandoned
buildings, roads, pipes and rail. If the
exclusion zone is ever declared safe, and people have the opportunity to live
there again, they will likely need to build a whole new infrastructure. How much that costs depends on how many people
want to move back, and it begs the question, who pays for it all? Perhaps the best solution is to just leave
the land to the boars.
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