The Wild Horses of Chernobyl Will Outlive Us All
An uninhabitable earth, the horses who call it home, and the humans who pushed them to near-extinction.
This week, we’re delighted to feature work by Emma Kumer, who’s a designer at The Washington Post. You can follow her on Twitter at @EmmaKumer. We plan to feature a guest at least once a month from here on out – if you’re interested in contributing, let us know at oddboxletter@gmail.com.
ILLUSTRATION BY EMMA KUMER. IMAGES COURTESY OF JORGE FRANGANILLO, JEFF KUBINA, AND “TED”.
We’ve all heard the story before: A nuclear power plant with fires raging for nine days. Seventy thousand people evacuated, children contracting cancer from radiation. A story of human fallibility, catastrophic error, and destruction as the corollary for our pursuit to control the world. The story of Chernobyl makes it both impossible and necessary to believe that this scorched corner of Ukraine and Belarus, of all places on earth, holds one last breath of hope.
It’s a trampled, sideways-leaning nature that calls to mind some of the darker works of Dr. Seuss. Trees lie rotting in the knotted grass while beavers gnaw on the trunks like carcasses. Prides of wolves trace dotted lines in the dirty snow. In the eerie quiet, power lines three decades dead sway in the wind. And blending into it all, tan and still, stand wild horses. The last ones left on earth.
When most people imagine wild horses, they think of cowboy movies and DreamWorks’ Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron. The sad truth is that the “Wild West” we keep in our collective imaginations is a Hollywood myth; any free-running herds left are likely just escaped farm horses. The only true wild horse is the Przewalski. They are khaki-colored, with pale undersides as if perpetually dusted in cinnamon, boasting zebra-like black manes cresting in mohawks. With short, stubby legs and thick, stocky necks, they don’t hold their heads high or pick up their knees when they run. They do not conjure elegance or beauty. They’re hardy. Tough. And you can try your best to romanticize them, but their entire form resists it: the Przewalskis are ugly, the personification of a breed stripped from the Earth and reintroduced into a radioactive danger zone.
Since the infamous Chernobyl explosion in April 1986, it has become illegal for humans to live in the zone—though a few stubborn people still do—and at 16,000 square miles, the land has turned into the planet’s largest wildlife sanctuary. Scientists think there are more wolves there than Yellowstone. The land boasts a mysterious resurgence of the European brown bear, a beast that hadn’t been seen in Eastern Europe for over a century. The zone holds so many beavers that, eventually, they will fell enough trees to transform the landscape back into the bog it once was.
The wild horses form an intentional component of this new ecosystem, placed in the exclusion zone as a rite of reconciliation. And the story of their species is a model for the behavior mankind has exhibited on nature. Not officially discovered until 1881, the Przewalski’s horse was named, not after the natives who lived among it, but by the man who conquered it. Nikolay Przewalski, a Russian geographer killed the horse, skinned it, and brought its skull to the West. He told tales of this modern-day manifestation of cave paintings. For the next century, humans hunted Przewalski’s until the only ones left lived in zoos. In 1998, conservationists gathered a small percentage of the remaining thousand and placed them in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, the only place where humans would not interfere.
In recent years, scientists have returned there to report on the effects of the radiation. Their findings are striking, not because the animals are doing poorly, but because they are doing so well. "Even after the world's worst nuclear accident," environmental scientist Jim Smith told National Geographic, “Nature flourishes when humans are removed from the equation.”
Even though humans do not venture into the exclusion zone anymore, their touch is unmistakable in the radiation saturating the ecosystem. Stray dogs left by families evacuated in the ‘80s still roam, but in such an unnatural climate, most do not live more than a few years. Birds fly overhead with cataracts in their eyes. Rodents rustle underfoot, skulls pressed by tumors. Radiation is so high that scientists worry about mutations escaping into the human world. But we can’t escape the consequences of our actions. Even if we outlive the toxic half-life of Chernobyl, we can’t outrun the hole we’ve burned in the ozone, the planet we’ve choked with greenhouse gas, or the ocean we’ve filled with trash.
We will destroy this world ourselves, if we haven’t already. And only after we render the planet unlivable or bomb our species into oblivion will the horses reclaim the world. Herds and herds of Przewalski’s, streaming back into the wild they once claimed, reversing years of history until hoofbeats thunder across the Earth: the lone horsemen of the apocalypse. Their bellies pale and their manes coarse, like the first horses that ever walked, as if no time has passed at all, as if we were never here.
Emma Kumer is a graphic designer, journalist, and horse girl at heart. Her writing has appeared in Runner’s World, Reader’s Digest, and Taste of Home.