Swiss artist, Cornelia Hesse-Honegger, finds and draws bugs deformed by Chernobyl and other nuclear accidents and exposures

By Claus-Peter Lieckfeld

We speak of “dumb creatures” because animal utterances are largely incomprehensible to the human ear. But animals can show us things. And if you know how to look, they might even give you warning signals. Bugs, for example, give warnings where human perception fails. But to understand those warnings, you have to learn how to read their signals.

You can find the insect drawings of the Swiss artist and scientific illustrator, Cornelia Hesse-Honegger, in museums and galleries all over the world. Most of them reflect (and praise) the breathtaking beauty of the insect realm. But their beauty can be deceptive.

In 1987, one year after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, Hesse-Honegger came across deformed leaf bugs in areas of Sweden that had been hit hard by fallout from Ukraine. She sensed…

Wild boars remain too radioactive to eat, 32 years after Chernobyl

By Linda Pentz Gunter

Wild board in Europe, parts of the former Soviet Union and Japan are too radioactive to be safe for human consumption. That sounds like good news for the boars. But only partly so.

The boars are radioactively contaminated due to fallout from the April 26, 1986 Chernobyl, Ukraine nuclear power plant explosion. They were vulnerable because they love mushrooms and truffles. These fungi absorbed the cesium-137 fallout released by the Chernobyl nuclear explosion.

Because they lack stems and roots, mushrooms and other fungi use absorption to obtain nutrition from the atmosphere through their surface cells. As a result, they are prone to absorbing radioactive substances such as cesium-137 and other radionuclides.

When the boars eat the mushrooms and truffles, that radioactive contamination moves up the food chain. The mushrooms are also too radioactive for human…

If we treat each other like expendable dots, can we hope to preserve our humanity?

By Linda Pentz Gunter

The missile attacks this weekend on Syria — by US, French and British forces — are another reminder of just how impersonal war has become. Targets are reportedly hit. But what of the suffering on the ground which, in Syria, is already considerable?

This long-distance and impersonal style of war-making is nothing new of course. We cannot forget the aerial bombing campaigns during World War II and beyond, when terrorized civilians ceased to be human beings but were simply “collateral damage.” Today, we simply have bigger and faster weapons with even greater destructive power.

That’s why I appreciated the analogy former Swiss politician, Moritz Leuenberger, made during last September’s Human Rights, Future Generations and Crimes in the Nuclear Age conference in Basel, Switzerland.

Lamenting the loss of human compassion, he reminded…