The commission was from a London magazine I'd worked with before.

It was a long-form piece, about 6,000 words, and a photo essay, all on the ecological recovery in the Chernobyl zone.

The angle was genuinely good, genuinely surprising if you hadn't read the science. In 38 years without humans, the exclusion

zone had become, accidentally, the largest wildlife sanctuary in Europe. Surprisingly,

wolves had returned in numbers not seen in the region since before industrialization. There were lynx, wild boar, white-tailed eagles, and a population of Persuwelski's horses introduced as an experiment in the 90s

that had thrived beyond any reasonable projection.

The absence of humans had done more for the ecosystem than any conservation program, which said something worth saying.

The radiation was still there, measurable, but it turned out wolves didn't care about elevated background radiation in the way they cared about being shot, which they no longer were.

This was the piece. What happens to a landscape when people leave it entirely? I'd spent three weeks reading the ecology literature

before I came and I had a genuine interest in the subject that made the work easier.

I wanted to photograph a wolf if I could.

I wanted to photograph the zone's edges at dawn,

with a forest that reclaimed the outskirts of Pripyat,

and you could stand in what had once been a residential street and find it fully wooded,

the pavement broken by roots, the street

signs lost in undergrowth.

My counter clicked up to 1.4 microceiverts, and I noted it and moved on.

That was part of the job.

Arasoka, you learn not to dwell on the numbers.

The helicopters absorb your attention anyway.

There were hundreds of them spread across the flat ground in rusting rows,

the MI8s and the M26s that flew over the reactor in the weeks after the explosion,

...