WIRED: Radioactive Beasts Are Invading Our Cities

Article adapted from ANIMAL REVOLUTION by Ron Broglio.

Why our failure to consider the power of animals is to our deep detriment 

A decade after Fukushima, three decades after Chernobyl, and seven after the Manhattan Project, the boar and bunnies wandering in the wake of disaster continue to bring us a gift. It is the same lesson we began to explore with Godzilla but quickly relegated only to fiction: the human trajectory of technological and social progress has produced by-products that linger on a scale of time and space far larger than humanity can easily understand. The Chernobyl boar are not just visitors from the past, it turns out. Thanks to the longevity of radiation, they are also visitors from the future, a future of continued radioactivity and leaking between the membranes of culture and nature. To take their gift seriously would require accepting the repressed detritus of human progress and incorporating that aftermath into the idea of progress, rather than believing that it remains safely buried, cordoned off, and forgotten. Are we willing to accept such a gift?

Read this excerpt of Ron Broglio's Animal Revolution at WIRED.