Ukrainian American activist's dream is realized with publication of 'Wormwood Forest'

by Zenon Zawada
Kyiv Press Bureau

KYIV - Back plugging away in her Khreschatyk office, it's hardly imaginable that a confident Mary Mycio was the victim of a life-threatening attack just two weeks ago, except for the fact she's started smoking again.

A thug had crashed a concrete block across her head as she was leaving her apartment near Independence Square at about 1 p.m. on September 15. A struggle ensued, but the attacker failed to subdue Ms. Mycio, an avid horseback rider, and fled.

The tenacious woman she is, Ms. Mycio received three stitches to her head and was back at work the next day. "Luckily, there was no concussion and I didn't lose consciousness," Ms. Mycio said. "But there was lots of blood. I'm still covered with bruises."

The last two weeks have been a bittersweet mix of highly anticipated achievement and violence in Ms. Mycio's life.

Among the first wave of Ukrainian Americans to re-settle in the newly independent Ukraine, Ms. Mycio's years of freelance journalism had paid off with her first book, "Wormwood Forest," published in late September.

The 242-page exploration of the 30-kilometer zone surrounding the shutdown Chornobyl nuclear power plant is available on amazon.com and at Barnes & Noble.

"What I tried to do was weave personal travels with lyrical explanations of the natural history and science of Chornobyl," Ms. Mycio said. "It's the story of my travels in a radioactive wilderness."

Just after the book was published, a man waiting by the apartment door assaulted Ms. Mycio on a sunny Thursday afternoon. After striking Ms. Mycio, the thug tried to slam the apartment door shut to prolong the attack.

Using her strength, athleticism and quick wit, Ms. Mycio lodged herself in the doorway, preventing the attacker from shutting the door behind him. Her ear-piercing shrieks caused him to flee after about a minute of violent struggle, or what Ms. Mycio said seemed to have been an eternity.

After her hospital visit, Ms. Mycio returned to her apartment the very same night, accompanied by friends. "I just wanted to be at home with familiar surroundings," Ms. Mycio said.

She suspects she may have been targeted, though she said she's confident the attack wasn't related to her book.

The day after the attack, Ms. Mycio was back at the offices of International Research and Exchanges Board (IREX), where she serves as a media law advisor.

She soon decided to recruit the services of "Zhenia," a handsome, 6-foot, 2-inch bodyguard decked in tight blue jeans, a white t-shirt and a weapon under his black leather jacket. He now accompanies Ms. Mycio wherever she goes.

Just two days after the attack, Ms. Mycio led an NBC television crew into the 30-kilometer "exclusion zone." The program, a feature on Chornobyl tourism, will air on the NBC Today show either on October 1 or some time soon afterwards.

Ms. Mycio has traveled into the zone at least 19 times, she said, and was able to point out places and natural phenomenon that the crew otherwise wouldn't have noticed. For example, forests are now devouring entire villages that had been evacuated, she said.

While the film crew was filming great white egrets, a moose suddenly appeared. "I like going there because it's a beautiful, haunting place," Ms. Mycio said.

"Wormwood Forest" is a dream she'd been trying to realize for almost two decades, ever since the Chornobyl nuclear reactor exploded on April 26, 1986, sending flames, sparks and red-hot chunks of nuclear fuel and graphite into the air.

Ms. Mycio is a Long Island native, but spent most of her college and post-college years in the East Village of New York, the epicenter of the East Coast Ukrainian community.

She spent those years active in promoting Ukrainian affairs and issues with future leaders, including former Justice Minister Roman Zvarych and Ukrainian World Congress President Askold Lozynskyj.

She earned a bachelor's degree in biology from Hunter College and a law degree from New York University in 1984. It was while she was practicing law that the Chornobyl disaster occurred.

She immediately became a "bi-coastal Chornobyl junkie," collecting any information she could about the accident and the Soviet Union's cover-up. Her hope was to write a book exposing the engineering mistakes and criminal negligence committed by the Soviet government.

"In 1989, the book was going to be 'The Truth About Chornobyl,' "Ms. Mycio said. "You know, exposing Soviet lies."

When Ukraine became open to the West in 1989, Ms. Mycio immediately went and wrote several freelance articles about the disaster for Omni magazine, none of which were published.

In September 1990, while reporting for the Rukh Fax Gazette, she played a role in the hunger strikes calling, among other things, for the rejection of a new union treaty with Moscow, the resignation of Ukraine's hardline Communist Prime Minister Vitalii Masol and new parliamentary elections. She then decided to settle permanently in Kyiv. "It was a very exciting time and I wanted to be a part of it," Ms. Mycio said.

She worked as a freelance journalist, with the Los Angeles Times as one of her major clients, and remained driven by the goal of writing a book on a Ukrainian topic.

Initially, she had prepared a two-chapter book proposal about a personal narrative of the Dnipro River interwoven with its history. When the book proposal didn't find a publisher, her literary agent, Andrea Pedolsky, said the chapter on Chornobyl was the best.

From that sprang the idea for "Wormwood Forest," also a personal narrative interwoven with natural history.

"Wormwood Forest" has now been released at a point when the impact of the Chornobyl disaster is suddenly under reassessment.

A September 5 release by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) claimed that deaths as a result of the disaster have been greatly exaggerated. Ultimately, Chornobyl's radiation fallout will amount to around 4,000 deaths, involving only emergency workers and residents of the most contaminated areas, the report said. Only 31 died as a direct result of the Chornobyl accident, the report claims.

Leaders in the Chornobyl relief effort strongly criticized the report produced by the Chornobyl Forum, which consists of eight United Nations agencies, including the IAEA, the World Health Organization and the governments of Russia, Belarus and Ukraine.

The estimate of only about 4,000 deaths resulting from the Chornobyl accident is "dubious, at best," according to Alexander Kuzma, executive director of the Children of Chornobyl Relief and Development Fund.

Ms. Mycio said she understands it's a sensitive subject, particularly among Ukrainians, who have had their devastating tragedies marginalized so often. The fact is that Chornobyl is not the death sentence for Ukraine that it was largely believed to be, Ms. Mycio said, without a twinge of doubt.

"The impression was that Chornobyl killed Ukraine," Ms. Mycio said. "But, in hindsight, we can say Chornobyl wounded part of Ukraine, but the land is more resilient than we had thought, and it's healing."

However, that doesn't mean humans can inhabit the area. To be specific, a 10-kilometer zone around the power plant will be uninhabitable for at least 400,000 years.

It also doesn't mean animals should inhabit the area, because they become radioactive as a result. However, being radioactive doesn't inhibit them from living in the zone, reproducing and thriving in it. "Even though it's very radioactive, there are more water birds there than most other places because there are no people there," she said. "The animals are radioactive, but they look fine."

In her assessment of the IAEA study, Ms. Mycio said she didn't see anything controversial about the environmental effects, but the health effects are "a little more controversial."

"They based their prediction of future cancer on the people they studied, but they didn't study all the people who were affected," she pointed out.

About 1 million people are considered among the most highly affected by Chornobyl, according to Ms. Mycio, but the study only examines 600,000 of them, while ignoring 400,000. "They're making conclusions based on a limited, incomplete population," Ms. Mycio said.

The report also states that there have been no increases in solid cancer tumors as a result of Chornobyl, yet there haven't been any epidemiological studies of these tumors, she said. "That's logically incorrect," she said. "Since there are no epidemiological studies on the changes in the rate of solid tumors, it's impossible to make any conclusions."

However, Ms. Mycio agrees with the report in the sense that Chornobyl's health effects have been exaggerated, especially when considering the poor level of health care in Ukraine and the unhealthy lifestyles that Ukrainians engage in.

"The problem with examining the effect of Chornobyl is that the public health system is crumbling and people don't take care of themselves - when you see how much people smoke and drink," Ms. Mycio said.

During the first months after the disaster, international scientists reported that between 10,000 and hundreds of thousands of deaths from Chornobyl were possible, based on a population of 75 million people in the European part of the Soviet Union. As a result, Ukrainians have a tendency to link their health problems with Chornobyl radiation fallout.

However, if a Kyiv woman gave birth to a child with Down Syndrome, for example, in all likelihood the disease is not related to Chornobyl, Ms. Mycio said.

In fact, scientists have found no detectable increase in birth defects among the affected populations, as there were none after Hiroshima, Ms. Mycio said.

"Higher mammals are more complicated," she said. "I don't know why it hasn't happened. It didn't happen in Chornobyl, and it didn't happen in Hiroshima."

What certainly increased were incidents of thyroid cancer in children, largely because their tiny glands were especially sensitive to radiation. Incidents increased from almost a handful in the affected population to at least 4,000 cases after the accident.

"The people in the villages were there for weeks," Ms. Mycio said. "That was criminal on the part of the Soviet government: not telling them of the precautions they could take, such as staying indoors."

It's the bursting of myths and stereotypes about Chornobyl that Ms. Mycio hopes will draw widespread interest in her book.

Chornobyl's forests are flourishing, birds are abundant and large mammals such as moose have found a home in what has become Europe's largest nature preserve.

"That was considered the book's selling point," Ms. Mycio said. "It's almost an oxymoron - the natural history of Chornobyl."

Copyright © The Ukrainian Weekly, October 2, 2005, No. 40, Vol. LXXIII

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