The Forest That Came From Nowhere

Ivan Shemaianuk was one of 200,000 Ukrainians who left their homes to live in the wilderness after Chernobyl. The elements they said would kill anyone who stayed behind were iodine, cesium, strontium and plutonium those were the elements that transformed a thousand square miles of suburban real estate into a contaminated wasteland called the exclusion zone. Today it has become a model of environmental biodiversity teeming with hundreds of unexpected species including inexplicably healthy homo sapiens.