Mycio, Mary

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Mycio, Mary

PERSONAL: Female. Education: Hunter College, B.A.; New York University, J.D.

ADDRESSES: Home—Kiev, Ukraine. Office—IREX U-Media Legal Defense and Education Program, vul. Khreshchatyk 27A, Ste. 28, Kyiv 01001, Ukraine. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER: During early career, worked as a lawyer in Los Angeles, CA, and New York, NY; IREX U-Media Legal Defense and Education Program, Kyiv, Ukraine, director, 1998–; International Research and Exchanges Board, Washington, DC, head of Legal Defense and Education Project, 1999–; freelance journalist.

WRITINGS:

Wormwood Forest: A Natural History of Chernobyl, Joseph Henry Press (Washington, DC), 2005.

Contributor to periodicals, including Newsday, Los Angeles Times, Omni, Jewish Monthly, European, Natural History, BBC Focus, Ukrainian Weekly, and the Kiev Post.

SIDELIGHTS: When a nuclear power plant accident occurred in the former Soviet Union city of Chernobyl in 1986, millions of area residents were forced to evacuate for miles around. Twenty years later, the area is still largely abandoned by people, with the exception of a few government officials and squatters. Mary Mycio, an attorney and journalist, decided to investigate the area, planning to write an indictment of governmental bureaucracy that led to the disaster. Instead, as she relates in her first book, Wormwood Forest: A Natural History of Chernobyl, Mycio discovered that the area in and around Chernobyl was not at all what she had expected. Wild Przewalski's horses, elk, moose, wolves, and hundreds of species of birds were thriving there, apparently without mutations or other ill effects from the soil, plants, and water that were still irradiated with cesium and strontium isotopes. She also found the plant life to be doing well, and the few people who were living there also seemed to be surviving just fine. "In an objective and balanced assessment of the evacuation," remarked David R. Marples in the St. Petersburg Times Online, "she concludes that although the initial exodus was necessary and had an important impact on reducing radiation doses, the ones that took place more than a decade after the disaster did more harm than good because of the social and economic stresses involved."

Although Mycio does betray a concern for the high levels of radioactive strontium and cesium in the water, which are even more worrisome downstream from the disaster in supposedly safe areas, she is convinced that Chernobyl is making an amazing recovery, noting that the region has now become Europe's largest wildlife habitat. In addition, stated Marples, "Mycio is at her best when she focuses on the human element, providing poignant descriptions of the samosely, or voluntary settlers, who wandered back to their homes in the wake of the accident." A Publishers Weekly contributor concluded that "not all readers will share her cautious optimism, yet her verdict … is convincing."