"Everything that concerns Chernobyl – the name of the place long since synonymous with the event – is part of a miniature postapocalyptic laboratory for imagining ‘the world without us’, a global future where there is no place for human beings. Such a future may be bemoaned or, with a good measure of misanthropy, celebrated: finally, Earth will have been cured of humans, who – cancer-like – eroded its climates and ecosystems."

https://aeon.co/essays/what-did-the-russians-dig-up-when-they-dug-trenches-in-chernobyl