Earth Beat, 8 June 2012. The big comeback. In Europe that means the return of the sturgeon to its natural habitat, while in Siberia one man battles to return the wilderness back 15,000 years (minus the woolly mammoths, sadly).

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Sturgeon surgeon - listen in new player

In southern France some surgery has been taking place. With great skill and tenderness, and with the aid of some anaesthetic, cuts have been made in fifty sturgeons and receivers inserted.

It’s the preliminary stage in the attempt to reintroduce this extraordinary fish back into the rivers of Europe. View photos.

Esther Blom from WWF Netherlands tells host Marnie Chesterton why it’s worth making the effort.

More - Sturgeon returned to Dutch waters. View sturgeon videos from the WWF.

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Chernobyl, a quarter century on - listen in new player

In April 1986, one of the reactors at the Chernobyl nuclear plant in Ukraine exploded. Contamination was spread far and wide, leaving a swathe of countryside uninhabitable and tens of thousands were banished from their homes. Radiation is harmful to living things, but the long term effect on people and ecosystems remains unknown to this day, 26 years on.

You might imagine, like Mary Mycio, author of Wormwood Forest: A Natural History of Chernobyl did, that Chernobyl and the surrounding area would look lifeless, like a barren moonscape, but that’s not what she found at all. She paints Marnie a picture. View photos.

More - The trail camera in Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. BBC Future - Will we ever... clone a mammoth?

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Pleistocene Park - listen in new player

Fifteen thousand years ago, the great plains of Siberia swarmed with herds of mammoths, rhinoceroses and snow sheep. Global warming and the arrival of humans put paid to this ecosystem.

But scientist Nikita Zimov is hoping to stage a comeback for some of the species that once flourished during the Ice Age, with an experiment called Pleistocene Park.

And by doing so, cool things back down a little. View photos.

 

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From rubbish to riches - listen in new player

Garbage. You’d rather get rid of it than consider its value. Gone is the old computer in the basement, that blender that broke the second time you used it.

But what if there was a place that you could bring your junk to, to either give it away, or get it fixed for free, give it a sort of comeback? Would that change how you think about garbage? Would it no longer be rubbish, but a source of wealth?

Recently, NP3, an artist organization in Groningen, set up such a project - Urban Mining - and Earth Beat producer Anik See went there to see what it was all about, and what her garbage was worth. View photos.

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Car park creek - listen in new player

Many rivers and creeks that run through our cities are diverted off into underground concrete tunnels.

Marnie speaks to Richard Register about a car park which was dug up in Berkeley to bring the creek beneath it back to the surface, in what the locals term a ‘daylighting’ project. View photos.