Entering May, Sandbank is about to usher in the height of summer.
A large number of migratory birds sprinkle this land of reeds like stars. The shore is moist with mud and abundant water and grass, and while the hot summer has not yet arrived, the good weather in May is a gift from nature, which is where the red-breasted sika deer, an endangered species that loves water and shade, can walk comfortably and forage leisurely.
More than 120,000 birds spend the winter here. The white-tailed eagle seemed to stop and flew over the black-winged sandpiper standing in the shallow water, startling a flock of migratory birds. Only the sand blind mole rat, which is listed as endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (ICUN), knows nothing about these movements. They have lived their entire lives deep below, blind to sight, and are home to the vast majority of the world's remaining 15,000-20,000 sand blind mole rats, whose numbers continue to decline.
Chernomorskiy Biosphere Reserve, Ukraine/UNESCO
It is spring in the Black Sea Biosphere Reserve, the largest nature reserve in Ukraine. Or rather, it was the spring that Ukrainians used to take for granted before roaring tank cannons and fragments of flesh and blood were embedded in the dirt of the reserve.
From here back along the Dnieper River, the Kherson Oblast is now almost a Russian dish, and the gunfire in the adjacent Nikolayev Oblast has never stopped. The Dnieper, which turned Ukraine into the "granary of Europe," has been the main strategic goal of the Russian army since the beginning of the war.
"It [the Black Sea Biosphere Reserve] was occupied by Russian troops." In March, an anxious email came from Ukraine's Deputy Minister of Environmental Protection and Natural Resources, Oleksand Krasnorutsky, saying, "There is a fierce battle here, and it is not yet possible to count specific information on the extent of environmental damage." ”
Today, two months later, the damage inflicted on the protected area continues, even intensifies. Ukrainians, too busy defending their homeland, have had time to estimate the stakes, and many Ukrainian environmentalists have gone to the front line. Only some sporadic news came intermittently, with little good news – the most recent one was that on May 9, according to satellite images, another fire broke out in the Black Sea Biosphere Reserve.
"The fires in the reserve are so big that they can be detected from space." In mid-to-late April, fighting between Russia and Ukraine near Kherson over a bridge over the Dnieper led to a raging fire in the Black Sea reserve, said the Conflict and Environment Observatory, a Ukrainian environmental group. Since the beginning of March, fires have become common in this ideal habitat for many endangered organisms.
At the same time, the Turkish Ocean Research Foundation found that at least 80 dolphins have recently run aground and died along Turkey's western Black Sea coast. Scientists speculate that the sonar noise from 20 Russian naval vessels traveling in the Black Sea drove dolphins south to the Turkish and Bulgarian coasts, where they could have been caught in fishing nets or stranded on beaches.
Pavel Goldin, a researcher at the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, was impatient because of the war, and the Academy of Sciences could not observe the survival status of the endangered harbor porpoise and bottlenose dolphin as in previous years. The Black Sea Biosphere Reserve is a favorite water for bottlenose dolphins, and harbor porpoises have migrated from the Black Sea to the war-torn Sea of Azov in previous years.
The ecological catastrophe of war goes far beyond that. In Ukraine, which has large areas of wetlands, grasslands and forests, there are 11 national parks and nature reserves under the umbrella of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, which manages the Black Sea Biosphere Reserve, many of which are trapped in the Donetsk Botanical Garden and the Luhansk Nature Reserve, which are in the center of artillery fire. In the enemy-occupied areas where the Russian army was active, there were uncultivated primitive steppes in the east and south, Cretaceous slopes in the Donetsk region, coastal ecosystems in the southern region, and swamps in the north. These regions are natural habitats for rare and endemic plant species listed in the Red Book of Ukraine.
Map of the war situation on 23 March and the protected areas of Ukraine affected by the fighting / European Wilderness Society
According to the Ukrainian government, by the end of March, more than 20 national parks and nature reserves had been damaged, the Russian army had invaded 14 precious international wetlands, and 59% of Ukraine's pristine steppes were controlled by the Russian army. By April, according to the "Ukrainian Nature Conservation Group", at least 44% of Ukraine's highest level nature reserves were under the control of the Russian army.
Biochemical and weapon debris seeped into soil, groundwater and rivers and oceans, tanks crushed vegetation, tongues of fire engulfed forests, and military operations near nuclear power plants brought more radioactive pollution. Not to mention the dramatic increase in carbon emissions from the military industry, which destroys habitats favored by wild animals.
Damage is difficult to estimate and repair is elusive. The Ukrainian Nature Conservation Group, an environmental group, is not optimistic: "The ecological damage caused by the war cannot be counted, it may take tens or hundreds of years to recover, and some parts cannot even be recovered." ”
After the war, the state's repair of these injuries is likely to be sluggish and inefficient. "Even if the war is over, ecological restoration will not be the first priority of the Ukrainian government." Doug Weir, director of research and policy at the Observatory on Conflict and the Environment, told the ABC. The "Ukrainian Nature Conservation Group" is more realistic: "After the war, the international community will generally focus on detecting polluted areas, calculating damages, compensation, etc., and repairing what seems obvious to laymen – such as deforestation, a sharp decline in the number of endangered animals and plants, and less concerned about the irreversible consequences of long-term changes in biodiversity due to war." ”
"War is hell, it tears apart the flora, fauna, people, and landscape of a nation, it tears life to pieces." The Washington Post concluded.
In Ukraine in 2022, spring is silent, spring has never come.
Yin Jian is not far away
There is no shortage of tragic historical arguments for testing the ecological consequences that war could bring.
As early as world war I, before modern imaging technology could bud, nature had tried to sound the alarm for obscurant humanity — Paul Nash, the most famous war artist of the first half of the 20th century and who served on the Western Front of World War I, painted the shattered mountains, smoke-filled skies, withered forests and land engulfed by floods that he witnessed.
Menin Road, 1919, illustrated by Paul Nash / Network
The "scorched earth" policy that emerged in World War I (i.e., destroying anything that might be useful to the enemy when he enters or withdraws from a certain place) and the large amount of toxic wreckage from chemical warfare, including heavy metals such as copper and lead, still remain in the soil of battlefield sites 100 years later.
World War II was the first – and so far only – war of genuine use of nuclear weapons, which led to higher than normal levels of radiation in the soil around Hiroshima until the 1980s; the chemical defoliator "Agent Orange" used in the Vietnam War, which is believed to be the main cause of frequent miscarriages, skin diseases, cancer, birth defects and congenital malformations among Vietnamese in the 1970s; and the Khmer Rouge camp in Cambodia tried to crudely alter the landscape with irrigation ditches to promote agricultural development in the country. But eventually trees were cut down, natural lakes were drained, and the country's mines planted during the war were not expected to be completely cleared until 2025; in the Angolan civil war that began in 1977, anti-poaching patrols were suspended, and warring forces began slaughtering animals in exchange for war funds, leading to the collapse of the country's animal population, the death of 77% of animals, and the devastation of biodiversity, especially mammals, which play a key role in the ecological chain.
"Wars often lead to insecurity in the economy and food supply, and ordinary people have to rely on hunting for natural resources, such as wildlife. Some armed forces also rely on wildlife to feed their troops, such as buying and selling ivory and rhino horns, in exchange for military expenses. The government's environmental protection efforts and law enforcement supervision have been weakened by the war, which has given poachers an opportunity to take advantage of. Caitlin Gaynot, an ecologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, worried.
Eugenia Bragina, coordinator of scientific capacity development for wildlife conservation's Arctic-Bering Strait program, remembers the feeling of hunger.
Having experienced the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the soaring poverty rate in Russia, she remembers the days when her parents were unpaid for months in a row. "There's nothing to eat, we actually ate half of the wild boar in Russia." "There were plenty of wild boars in Russia, but between 1991 and 1995 their numbers plummeted by about 50 percent," Bragina recalls. "In addition to wild boars, the country's moose and brown bear populations also declined sharply during that period.
A more specific case comes from Mozambique, where nine species of large herbivores — including elephants, zebras, hippos and buffalo — fell by more than 90 percent in the 3,770-square-kilometer Gorongosa National Park-—— during the country's 1977-1992 civil war. Large predators such as leopards and African wild dogs have disappeared from national parks, the food chain has no top predators, and the herbivores that haunt the forest — such as bushback antelopes — have no natural predators, their habitats destroyed, and some migrate to open plains to nibble on vegetation, disrupting the food chains on the plains. To this day, Mozambique, with the assistance of international organizations, is trying to restore the ecosystem of Gorongosa.
Severe fire caused by war in the Black Sea Biosphere Reserve on 9 May / liveuamap
The carbon emissions from military operations are also staggering. According to a 2019 report released by Brown University's Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, the global war on terror that began in 2001 has released 1.2 million metric tons of greenhouse gases, equivalent to the annual emissions of 257 million passenger cars. That's more than double the number of cars currently on the road in the U.S.
Disputes and conflicts are not without unexpected counterproductive effects, but only if gross human intervention is kept out of the natural environment.
The most famous example comes from the demilitarized zone at the South-North Korea border. It was a narrow strip of area that served as a buffer zone between North and South Korea, tightly enclosed by fences, guards, and minefields. Without human interference, it provides shelter for rare flora and fauna, including the red-crowned crane, the white-naped crane, and the Asian black bear, giving it a transcendent meaning outside politics.
For the vast majority of war history, nature has played a role of being battered and ravaged, destroyed in a short period of time and slowly repairing itself over the long years. But unlike the situation a hundred years ago, today's rapidly deteriorating ecological environment no longer has the same broad fault tolerance as in the past.
"Humans are usually saboteurs." Robert Pringle, a biologist at Princeton University, said.
Flowers dedicated to Chernobyl
Unlike the horrific features of many film and television productions, the Chernobyl exclusion zone became a miracle of life in the eyes of many environmentalists and environmentalists after the 1986 nuclear power plant accident.
Since no one dared to set foot in this forbidden area, "the large creatures that lost their homes around them have returned." Bruce Byers, an independent ecological adviser who led ukraine's biodiversity assessment for the U.S. Agency for International Development, said with relief.
Lively gray wolves, red foxes, raccoon dogs, lynx and wild boars began to run in the forbidden area, where the world's last remaining wild horse, the Przewalski's wild horse, made its home, with more than 50 endangered species and more than 400 species of wildlife in an area of 230,000 hectares, lush vegetation and lush shrubs.
Przewalski's Mustangs / UNEP in the Chernobyl penalty area
Since 2000, Timothy Musso, a biological science expert in South Carolina, has been working with more than a dozen Ukrainian colleagues on the Chernobyl exclusion zone, which is now a wildlife sanctuary. They observed and analyzed the evolution of the swiftlets living near nuclear reactors, found evidence of radiation tolerance in birds near Chernobyl, and published more than 120 research papers.
Before the Russian shells fell, Musso and his colleagues had a six-year camera trap experiment documenting the distribution and abundance of mammals, a project to monitor the effects of radiation on the wild dog microbiome, a study of the genomics, physiology, reproduction and ecology of rodents, and a collaborative project with NASA to understand how plants adapt to long-term exposure to radiation. This project could be important if people want to grow crops on spacecraft or objects with little radiation shielding — like the hero in the movie "The Martian" grows potatoes.
In Timothy Musso's view, Chernobyl is not a terrible "forbidden place of death", but an ecological specimen that breeds hope.
Then it all came to an abrupt end.
Worried, Musso had no time to worry about his own safety. He had read in a report on the Fukushima nuclear power plant accident that the noise caused by the war could cause wild animals living in the forbidden area to flee everywhere, and the ecological homes that had been built for more than 30 years would suddenly collapse.
But the disasters that can happen go far beyond that. The nuclear reactor destroyed in 1986 was encapsulated in a $2 billion stadium-sized metal structure, but three other unaffected reactors remained completely exposed, containing a 5 million-pound pool of spent nuclear fuel, as well as dangerous isotopes such as uranium and plutonium.
"If these are hit, there is a risk of causing a bigger catastrophe than in 1986, and the whole of Europe could be evacuated on a large scale." Carol Mufit, president of the Centre for International Environmental Law, said, "Conducting military operations in a country with four nuclear facilities and 15 active nuclear reactors poses extraordinary risks. ”
For example, he said, Russian troops cut off power to Chernobyl, untrained Russian soldiers stepped on radioactive soil and raised dust as they crossed the area, and at the same time sensors showed abnormally elevated levels of gamma radiation in the exclusion zone. "This is caused by the re-suspension of radioactive dust due to vehicle and human movement." Mufit said. This judgment was confirmed by the International Atomic Energy Agency.
Misfortune is also far from limited to Chernobyl.
"It has no home"
In highly industrialized Ukraine, a large number of mines, chemical plants, oil depots, natural gas pipelines, etc. are spread throughout the country. Several coal mines, which had been forced to close because of the war, were now flooded by acid mine drainage, but no manpower was available to pump the water out. These toxins then seep into groundwater aquifers, contaminating the surrounding area's domestic water.
In the Ukrainian government's constantly updated war briefing, the situation was shocking: on February 27, the Russian military hit an oil base in the Kiev region with ballistic rockets, 10 oil tanks containing 2,000 cubic meters of oil and diesel caught fire, and similar things happened in Luhansk, Chernihiv, Zhytomyr and other places; on March 3, in the village of Chaiky near Kiev, a missile hit a foam rubber warehouse, the warehouse and a nearby office building on fire. Foam rubber-burning products can cause poisoning of people and animals around them.
On March 14, Russian troops shelled a water treatment and sewage pumping station in the southern part of zaporizhia, which meant that wastewater from several districts of the city would flow untreated into the Dnieper River, where boiling water contained large amounts of organic matter, worm eggs, pathogenic bacteria, sulfates and chlorides, polluting the river and causing large-scale algae breeding in the Dnieper River and the Black Sea; on April 11, the Russian military used enemy unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to drop unidentified substances into locals. The victim has developed respiratory failure and neurological problems.
Russian troops have also attacked port infrastructure and ships along the Black Sea and Azov seas, spilling fuel and petroleum materials that directly kill fish, seabirds and marine microorganisms, and form thin films on the surface of the water, disrupting the exchange of energy, heat, humidity and gas between the ocean and the atmosphere. Turkish newspaper Hurriyet quoted Turkey's defense minister as saying that hundreds of mines may currently float on the surface of the Black Sea.
According to Oleksi Vasiluk, a biologist working at the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, the consequences of the destruction of these chemical facilities, whether intentional or unintentional, are not much different from the release of biological and chemical weapons.
But Vasiluk didn't have time to pay attention to these major subversive accidents, and he decided to do what he could— the Ascanian-Nova Reserve in Kherson Oblast was now under Russian control. There are many endangered wild species living there (such as Przewalski's wild horses, saiga antelope, etc.), and some animals need artificial supplementary feeding in winter and early spring.
Pre-war Ascania-Nova Reserves / Networks
"The government can't safely get money or supplies into the occupied protected areas, and the animals may even starve to death." Vasiluk said. His animal protection group has been moving around raising money to pay local farmers to feed the animals in the reserve.
This is not an easy task. In some protected areas occupied by the Russian army, the offices of scientific researchers have been looted and many staff have been evacuated. Vasiluk's organization has worked hard to provide food, water and medicine to researchers in the occupied areas and to help displaced workers find housing. Some of his colleagues, who fought alongside him, have now become refugees.
As a result of the war, a massive fire broke out in the Orleskiy Sandy, Europe's largest desert, which was devastated beyond recognition by military installations; because of the war, more than a third of the Frankfurt Zoological Society's European projects have been stranded; the Belobierezhye Svyatoslav National Park in Ukraine, located near the confluence of the Dnieper River and the Black Sea, has a fire in an ancient forest with a history of more than a thousand years; the Elanetsky Nature Reserve has the largest area of pristine savannah in the northwestern part of the Black Sea coast. Fragments of rusty Russian equipment and ammunition are now scattered there, and parts of the steppe have been burned down and will not recover for decades.
Small clusters of wildfires that do not cause casualties can also be indirectly fatal. Ukraine's State Emergency Service (SES) has written an article warning that dry peatlands (land made up of large amounts of rotting organic matter, also known as peat swamps) in northern Ukraine are extremely flammable. When a wildfire ignites peat, it emits toxic substances into the air, including carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, PM2.5, volatile organic compounds containing acrolein or formaldehyde, etc.
Spring is the season of high wildfires, and the shelling brought by war is more likely to trigger wildfires, and because of the war, firefighters cannot rush to the scene to fight the fire in the first place, and the single pine forest in northern and eastern Ukraine is even more fueled by fire, fueling wildfires.
When rockets and shells that rain down like raindrops explode, they themselves produce a large number of chemicals: in addition to carbon dioxide, water vapor, etc., which will exacerbate global warming, there are also nitric oxide, nitrogen oxide, nitrous oxide, formaldehyde, hydrogen cyanide vapor, nitrogen and a large number of toxic organic matter. They burn coniferous forests, alter soil ph, acidify turf and buildings, and rain acid rain, which in turn harms the respiratory system of humans and mammals. Acid rain can weaken biomass in jungles and farmland, pests lose their natural enemies and may destroy forest land more quickly, while dead wood after wildfires are not cleared in time, which in turn may further promote forest fires.
Steel-blended cast iron is the most common shell material and contains not only common iron and carbon, but also toxic sulfur and copper. Fragments of artillery shells are left on the battlefield, into the soil, may drift into groundwater, and eventually into humans and animals – the clouds of chemical warfare in World War I mentioned above may not be far from the Ukrainians.
Cambodia's landmine nightmare is reenacting. Ukrainian troops planted mines on the beaches around Odessa, and Russian troops blew up oil export equipment, polluted the Black Sea and filled fields with mines that were discovered during the retreat of Russian troops around Kiev. On April 11, Oleg Bundal, head of the pyrotechnics and humanitarian demining department of Ukraine's State Emergency Service, said that at present, about 300,000 square kilometers of Ukraine(about half of the country's land area) are in need of humanitarian demining.
Orkha Boyko, a Ukrainian climate activist and coordinator of the Climate Action Network for Eastern Europe and East Asia, has another concern: "Preliminary assessments show that large areas of Ukraine's farmland have been affected by heavy shelling and unexploded ordnance. In the years following the Russian invasion, millions of Ukrainians may have suffered from malnutrition due to a lack of arable land. ”
Nor can the sky be at peace. "The air battle could disrupt an important migratory bird migration corridor over Ukraine." Oksana Omelchuk, who works for the Kiev environmental group Eco Action, said. Since the outbreak of the war, she has worked hard to gather and aggregate information from various sources, spontaneously monitoring the extent of environmental damage in the Sumi region of northeastern Ukraine.
There are three main bird flight routes in Ukraine: the Azov-Black Sea parallel (southern channel), which is the most concentrated concentration of migratory birds in Ukraine; the Polynesian parallel, which passes through the Polynesian forests and the forest steppes of northern Ukraine; and the Dnieper meridian, along the bed of the Dnieper river and its tributary Desna, which is favored by waterfowl and shore birds. Every year in late April and May, millions of migratory birds follow these routes, through Ukraine, north to breeding grounds such as Russia's tundra, coniferous forests and steppes.
During migration, large flocks of geese, ducks, swans, seagulls, and terns stay on the water; wading birds such as cranes rest on swamps and meadows, while songbirds such as bran finches, buntings, starlings, robins, robins, and warblers prefer to land in trees and bushes. These are extremely important places for migratory birds to feed and rest, and they need to be protected.
The reality is that migratory bird stations, such as the Black Sea Biosphere Reserve, have been reduced to scorched earth. Restless birds can change course, or can't rest, and end up dying of exhaustion, or they can die directly from bullets or shells — not unusual, as estimated by The Voice of the Village on April 22 that tens of thousands of wild animals have died from shelling since the Russian invasion.
"I don't know what awaits these migratory birds." Ukraine's Deputy Minister of Environmental Protection and Natural Resources Oleksand Krasnorutsky said.
The way nature reserves are destroyed will also change as the war situation changes. Sophia Sadohulska, an expert in the climate sector of Eco-Action, assessed that russian troops moved through existing infrastructure in the first few days of a full-scale Russian invasion. However, after the failure of the "Blitzkrieg", the Russian army had to start building garrison bases and fortifications to prepare for a protracted war. This means they must move deep into the wilderness, occupying forests and protected areas. Russian soldiers cut down precious timber for daily heating and cooking, and the crushing of heavy machinery and the construction of fortifications destroyed the soil, led to vegetation degradation, and aggravated wind and water erosion.
And Ivan Russef, deputy director of the Tuzlovsky Lagoon National Park in the Odessa region, remembers the proud flock of birds.
Tuzlovsky Lagoon National Park / Network before the war
On the morning of April 9, he crossed the shoal at the mouth of the park, through swaying reeds, and heard a huge explosion from the distant Snake Island. Once, twice, three times, there were five times in total.
The sound waves were huge, the heavens and the earth were upside down, and beside the terrified Russef, the wild ducks were running around in panic, a white-tailed eagle swept over his head, and several red herons took off. He looked at the remnants of the white-tailed eagle from afar, remembering the strange polyphony of birds that lingered in his ears before the explosion, and the slight gentle noise of the waves of the estuary.
"The white-tailed eagle is a majestic, noble, proud bird, bright and powerful, a symbol of spiritual power, but its nest is no match for artillery fire. It has no home. (Author / Ye Chengqi; Editor-in-Charge / Zhang Xibei)
The copyright of the article belongs to the original author and is not allowed to be commercialized
If you need to reprint, please send a private message
@World says little world