The Lybid River today is one of the most striking examples of how humanity can destroy nature. A beautiful legend, directly related to the foundation of Kyiv, over time, turned into a sad reality. This is because the ecological catastrophe of the Lybid River is already practically irreversible.
The Lybid River today is one of the most striking examples of how humanity can destroy nature. A beautiful legend, directly related to the foundation of Kyiv, over time, turned into a sad reality. This is because the ecological catastrophe of the Lybid River is already practically irreversible.
Just a hundred years ago which in the global temporal meaning is a relatively short period, Kyiv residents and guests of the capital could come to the banks of the Lybid River and enjoy beautiful landscapes. Today, the right tributary of the Dnieper River is a terrifying sight because a dirty stream remained on the site of a full-flowing river the riverbed of which is almost completely hidden in the collectors.
Only a single site with an area of 0.3 hectares could be preserved as a monument “Natural bed of the Lybid River”.
The complexity of the situation can be directly explained by the fact that large industrial enterprises are located on both sides of the river, and this makes it the reservoir f collecting wastewater and stormwater. So, if you take a sample of water from the river for chemical analysis, you can detect an excess of permissible chemical standards from almost the entire periodic table. Of particular note is the fact that over the past 50 years, the Lybid riverbed has been “cluttered”, in the literal sense of the word, with household waste, plastic, tires and other human waste. And with every year the already existing environmental disaster is gaining more momentum.
If we talk about cleaning measures that are periodically organized by environmentalists and volunteers, the latter partially save the situation but, for the full resuscitation of Lybid, a large-scale complex of work, approved at the state level, is required. And if such a program is not developed and implemented over the next ten years, in a short time the mention of the majestic Lybid River will be heard only in beautiful legends.
As for the diversity of the underwater world of the Lybid River, now it seems that fishing on its banks is nothing more than fiction. But in the days of Kyivan Rus and up to the era of technocratism, in the riverbed, there was an abundance of fish, especially crucian carp.
If it seems to someone that the disappearance of one river is a problem that does not require close attention, with such an attitude one can safely say that the fate of the Lybid river will soon be shared by many other waterways of Kyiv and Ukraine as a whole.
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