Vincent Mundy - 'Mother Nature recovers amazingly fast': reviving Ukraine's rich wetlands
A battered old military truck and rusting
Belarusian tractor are perched on the edge of degraded wetland in the heart of
the Danube
Delta Biosphere Reserve. They have been hastily deployed in a desperate
attempt to save an excavator from being swallowed by the squelching earth
beside the obsolete Soviet dam it is trying to demolish.
In the 1970s, 11 earth
dams were built on the Sarata and Kogilnik rivers as a crude alternative to
footbridges to access the area’s aquifers. Ornithologist Maxim
Yakovlev remembers that prior to the construction of the dams, the local rivers
slowly meandered through a rich wetland ecosystem which would store, hold back
and slowly release water after heavy rains. “Back then, before the dams, when
the ecosystem was functioning properly, we had healthier soil and vegetation,”
says Yakovlev, as he skirts the edge of a reeking swamp near the tiny, ancient
town of Tatarbunary on the northern fringe of the reserve, a 100-mile (160km)
drive south-west of Odessa.
“My grandparents told
me how different it was here and how so many more fish, birds and other
creatures lived here before the dams were made, but the dams quickly devastated
the ecosystem,” he adds. According to Wetlands International, about 64% of the
world’s wetlands have disappeared since 1900 and nearly 90% since the
start of the industrial revolution....
