Chernobyl and the end of nature.

Man is the fruit of nature, and we have been aware of this for a long time. As myths about origins testify, humans imagined themselves to emerge from mud or water. We imagined returning to nature after death, either to undiscovered skies or to the earth, mother and sister at the same time. Nature was mystery and conquest. We imposed on ourselves the mandate to unravel it: "Conquer the earth," it was decreed in the Bible. In this way, every territory, plant and deposit that was discovered became trophies for the cunning and obstinacy of those who followed that mandate. The assault on nature transformed it in such a way that this word now has the patina of a relic when it jumps out of the chronicles of Alexander von Humboldt or the soliloquies of Henry David Thoreau. With the nostalgia of what is gone, we live in the Anthropocene, the age of man, the time of a "nature" that suffers our excesses and will retain our imprint. It has been written that it was the exterminators of the megafauna of America who initiated this era; others prefer to point to James Watt, the architect of the steam engine. Others attribute the end of nature to the domestication of the atom.