The Future is Now: While Men Fiddle, Women Reckon with the Effects of Disaster
An eco-feminist syllabus on environmental disaster during the pandemic
The highest function of ecology is understanding consequences. (Frank Herbert, “Dune”)
Because survival is insufficient. (Emily St. John Mandel, “Station Eleven”)
Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring is nowadays recognized as the catalyst for the environmental movement that began in the 1960s. In 2006, it was named one of the 25 greatest science books of all time. And yet, it opens like a Grimm fairy tale.
There was once a town in the heart of America where all life seemed to be in harmony with its surroundings.
Carson describes how the change of seasons ushers in changes in the color palette, and how pristine the land is, rich in animal and plant life. True to its fairy tale beginning, the story suddenly turns dark:
Then, one spring, a strange blight crept over the area, and everything began to change. Some evil spell had settled on the community; mysterious maladies swept the flocks of chickens, and the cattle and sheep sickened and died. Everywhere was the shadow of death.
The word blight reverberates all the way back to Biblical times, to the beginnings of our recorded history, when we turned from our nomadic life as hunters and began to settle down, cultivate the land, and write down stories about ourselves.
From then on, every once in a while, and for reasons unknown, nature would seem to turn on us — crops would fail, a plague would strike. And we would point the finger of blame away from ourselves: it was the Devil; it was the witches; it was the Jews. Or in today’s pandemic, it’s Bill Gates with his 5G technology.
But in Carson’s story, there was nobody to blame but ourselves.
No witchcraft, no enemy action had snuffed out life in this stricken world. The people had done it themselves.
For two millennia, like all living beings, we had to adapt our bodies, our diets, and our way of life to our environment; unlike all other beings, we were also continually striving to find new ways to shape and control it, to bend nature to our will and interests. It was only in the 20th century that we actually acquired enough power to weigh the scales in our favor.
As Carson explains, it was in the second half of the last century that this power enabled us to start threatening the existence of the planet, and of all life on it. We harnessed science for profit; we released radiation and chemical toxins into the air, water and soil.
In this now universal contamination of the environment, chemicals are the sinister and little-recognized partners of radiation in changing the very nature of the world — the very nature of its life. (R. Carson)
Fittingly, the opening chapter of Silent Spring is titled “A Fable for Tomorrow.” The fable is also a dystopian vision of the future.
It imagines what our landscape might look like if we continue unchecked on our course of what we like to call ‘scientific and technological progress.’ In a stunning poetic turn, Carson doesn’t trumpet this future landscape as a wasteland; instead, she quietly prophesies that one spring, when birds have stopped singing, we will wake up to silence. Hence the book’s title.
Reading it, I heard the echo of the words of Svetlana Alexievich, who subtitled her book about the Chernobyl disaster “A Chronicle of the Future”:
What lingers most in my memory of Chernobyl is life afterwards: the possessions without owners, the landscapes without people. The roads going nowhere, the cables leading nowhere. You find yourself wondering just what this is: the past or the future. It sometimes felt to me as if I was recording the future. (Alexievich, “Chernobyl Prayer”)
Carson was researching and writing her book in the late 50s and early 60s, and Silent Spring came out in 1962. She died of cancer in 1964, unfortunately before she could see her work result in a U.S. ban on the use of DDT and other pesticides, and give rise to the environmental movement.
Thankfully, though, she also died before she could witness chemical companies find a way to get around government regulations and continue to contaminate the environment simply by using unregulated chemicals.
And although she does list nuclear testing and consequent radiation release as a recognized universal contaminant, I don’t think even Carson had an inkling of another ticking bomb waiting in the wings to be fully developed and implemented at scale: nuclear power stations.
I’m interested in women who have followed in Carson’s footsteps: researchers and writers who are swimming upstream and speaking out against the prevailing narratives of the male-dominated world of science, especially when it comes to environmental hazards and public health.
They are also talking about people and places that almost nobody else is.
All of them have several things in common. Foremost perhaps is the understanding of the critical role time plays in shaping the natural world. As Carson wrote in 1962,
“Now, in the modern world, there is no time. The speed with which new hazards are created reflects the impetuous and heedless pace of man, rather than the deliberate pace of nature.”
Or Alexievich, 35 years later:
When we talk about the past or the future, we read our ideas about time into those words; but Chernobyl is, above all, a catastrophe of time.
Next is the clear recognition that man-made contamination is changing the very nature of life on Earth, down to its genetic make-up. This is something that’s taken the scientific and political establishment a long time to acknowledge, and still faces fierce resistance in some corners.
There is also a deeper shared understanding that life on Earth is not just about survival (of the fittest), and that history is not just numbers and facts, but also feelings.
Men hide behind history, behind facts; war fascinates them as action and a conflict of ideas, of interests, whereas women are caught up with feelings. (S. Alexievich, “The Unwomanly Face of War”)
These writers and researchers are chronicling the future that Carson was imagining. They live, work, and publish in the dystopian world that she predicted; a world of nuclear catastrophes, blighted landscapes, microplastics-filled oceans, and trash on Mount Everest.
Who would want to live in a world which is just not quite fatal? (R. Carson, “Silent Spring”)
As Camille Paglia noticed, men tend to think in straight lines. They project upward, obsessed with erecting structures that are meant to impose order and structure on the unruly natural world that constantly threatens the safety of mankind.
Women, on the other hand, are forced by their physiology and biology to look inward and down, towards that other life-giver, nature. Our body shapes more round rather than straight, and so is our thinking.
Carson wrote that “the soil exists in a state of constant change, taking part in cycles that have no beginning and no end.” Women, whose bodies are in constant flux, capable of producing life, understand this intuitively. And because we are ruled and bound by our bodies, we tend to listen to them a bit more carefully and notice how they are connected to their environments.
All of this makes it harder for us to bulldoze, destroy, and follow (literal) scorched-earth policies. It’s also why Alexievich says that war doesn’t have a womanly face. I claim that no woman would ever conceive of atomic warfare and industrial structures that threaten to obliterate the entire planet.
Kate Brown, a researcher who has written extensively on nuclear history, is dealing with exactly that: the consequences of conceptualizing the world in terms of atomic power. More than anything, she’s trying to insert the human body, tied to a specific place, back into the conversation on environmental hazards.
She’s interested in how generations of bodies absorb and pass down the line radioactive isotopes and industrial chemicals dumped into the environment, as well as the scarcity of comprehensive scientific research into the consequences of doing so. Brown is here channeling Carson, who in 1962 could only speculate what cost humans would pay:
By one means or another, the new generations suffer for the poisoning of their parents. No one knows whether the same effect will be seen in human beings... (R. Carson, “Silent Spring”)
Brown’s earlier research into plutonium production and the creation of so-called atomic cities in the U.S. and the U.S.S.R inevitably led her to the Chernobyl catastrophe, and its effects on the surrounding environment and population.
The official number of Chernobyl fatalities — 54 — bothered her. What about the people who participated in clean-up efforts in the area for several years after the accident, with no adequate protections and unaware of the extent of danger? And what about the people who continue to live on contaminated land in Belarus and Ukraine, receiving non-stop low radiation exposure?
In pursuing this topic, she landed on an important insight: nuclear accidents are not single catastrophic events that happened once and ended, but processes that continue to unfold in the ground, water, and people’s bodies. All three locations absorb, accumulate, and concentrate whatever is dumped into them.
She also discovered that she wasn’t the only woman visiting contaminated zones and talking to people: the work of researcher Olga Kuchinskaya overlaps with hers. Like Alexievich, both women are interested in “missing” histories and data on people and places that have remained largely invisible in the aftermath of the Chernobyl disaster, but continue to suffer from its effects.
If any of this is giving you Erin Brockovich vibes, it’s because their stories are eerily similar.
Like a virus, radiation knows no borders and “zones of exclusion.” Also like a virus, radiation is invisible, which makes it hard to demonstrate its danger and effects. But unlike a virus, the effects of prolonged radiation exposure are not immediately visible. And as we are repeatedly told, what’s not visible doesn’t exist.
In her book The Politics of Invisibility, Kuchinskaya talks about the interplay of social and political structures in making an environmental hazard more or less visible.
In the specific case of the Chernobyl disaster, its visibility to the public mind has waxed and waned since it happened. From the early 90s onwards, after the accident site was more or less “cleaned up” (as if you could clean up radioactive isotopes), it’s been largely forgotten.
In the last five years, the Nobel Prize for Literature awarded to Svetlana Alexievich, followed by a few books about the accident itself, and finally the HBO series, briefly resurrected the topic. (This year, I’ve seen dozens of pandemic-related reading recommendations, but curiously, only one person, the translator and lecturer Anda Bukvic, mentioned Chernobyl Prayer.)
For many years before that, only a fringe group of people were interested in this topic: the so-called disaster tourists. People who, for different reasons, feel drawn to locations where disasters took place, like the Zone of Exclusion, or Zone of Alienation, around Chernobyl.
They come, they snap pictures, they buy souvenirs. Having brushed with risk and danger, they feel strangely thrilled. And then they leave, understanding little. Who can blame them, when the real issues have been made invisible?
One of these tourists was Kate Brown, for whom the interest was also professional. She came to understand that places like the Zone of Exclusion,
… which journalists and tourists regularly visit, serve as a distraction, a way to flag people’s attention, while the catastrophe plays out elsewhere. (“Manual for Survival”)
This reminded me of another historian, Timothy Snyder, who warned against using Auschwitz as a stand-in for the entire experience of the Holocaust. As he rightly points out, “while Auschwitz has been remembered, most of the Holocaust has been largely forgotten.”
When a catastrophic historical event, be it the Holocaust or a nuclear disaster, is reduced to one mythical and exceptional place — Chernobyl, or Auschwitz — we don’t have to confront its consequences, or the fact that it was our choices and actions that brought it about.
The catastrophe in this case is not just the nuclear accident itself, but even more so the continued existence on contaminated territory of thousands of people in Belarus, the country most affected by fallout from the Chernobyl explosion. People whose livelihoods and health, and that of their children, have been blighted by long-term exposure to radiation isotopes lodged in the ground and water after the accident.
Who are we, for heaven’s sake? We live on contaminated land, plough, sow, have children … What sense is there in our suffering? What is it for? Why is there so much of it? I talk about that a lot now with my friends. We discuss it often. Because the Zone is not just rems and curies and microroentgens. It is our people. Our nation. (Alexievich, “Chernobyl Prayer”)
Their suffering is all but invisible. Politics, backed by the powerful nuclear industry, ignores it, or downright denies it, claiming these people have “radiation phobia,” or even worse, are just making noise so as to receive financial support. As Kuchinskaya argues, “the production of invisibility is a function of power relations.”
The media, often in the guise of disaster tourists, aren’t even aware of their existence. As Brown notes,
Disaster tourists rarely stop at the inhabited towns and villages surrounding the Zone. Yet that is where the real drama is taking place. (“Manual for Survival”)
If hell is other people, what is a world with almost no people in it? (Emily St. John Mandel, “Station Eleven”)
I love watching David Attenborough’s documentaries. His newest one, A Life on our Planet (2020), opens in the ruins of the abandoned atomic city of Pripyat, next to the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. We can tell that a poignant story is about to be told.
Drone footage sweeps over a post-urban landscape swallowed up by a canopy of green. Wild animals roam the deserted streets. In the absence of human activity, silence reigns. We might be back at the beginning of Silent Spring.
Attenborough narrates:
The explosion was a result of bad planning and human error. Mistakes. It triggered an environmental catastrophe that had an impact across Europe. Many people regarded it as the most costly in the history of mankind. But Chernobyl was a single event. The true tragedy of our time is still unfolding across the globe, barely noticeable from day to day. I’m talking about the loss of our planet’s wild places, its biodiversity.
On the surface of it, a beloved and authoritative male voice like Attenborough’s is raising awareness and visibility of the Chernobyl disaster by reminding us of where our arrogance can lead us. But when I stopped to unpack his words, I realized that
a) he’s minimizing a nuclear disaster of cataclysmic proportions by relegating it to the past (“it was a single event”);
b) he’s implying that it was the only such event in nuclear history; and
c) he’s merely using it as a narrative vehicle to redirect our attention to an ostensibly different, “true tragedy.”
I nearly fell off the couch at this breathtaking display of misinformation and utter nonsense.
Contamination of the environment is precisely what’s caused the loss of wild places and biodiversity. An environmental catastrophe like Chernobyl is just one of the links in the long chain of wholesale destruction, but you cannot say that it’s not part of the same tragedy engulfing the whole planet.
This reminds me of medical doctors who treat, say, thyroid illness as if that organ didn’t have anything to do with the rest of the body. So Attenborough is diagnosing terminal loss of biodiversity as if the fallout from nuclear catastrophes wasn’t directly contributing to it.
He goes on and on about how all life on the planet is interconnected, but dismisses a nuclear catastrophe with far-reaching consequences as only a “single event.” The inaccuracy of such a statement, coming from a man of his stature, is stunning.
Consider this:
Instead of an accident, Chernobyl might better be conceived of as an acceleration on a time line of destruction or as an exclamation point in a chain of toxic exposures that restructured the landscape, bodies, and politics. (Brown, “Manual for Survival”)
Sadly, standing there and contemplating the ruins of Pripyat, Attenborough amounts to little more than another disaster tourist.
Invoking true tragedy unfolding all over the globe, he’s completely oblivious to the equally true tragedy unfolding in the small towns and villages around the Exclusion Zone. His own visibility in the public eye, coupled with a misleading narrative about a “single event,” effectively renders Chernobyl, and all that it stands for in the lives of people directly affected by it, invisible.
Reframing Chernobyl as a thing of the past might be another strategy of rendering it invisible. (Kuchinskaya, “Politics of Invisibility”)
But wait, there’s more.
The documentary closes in Pripyat again. Here’s Attenborough:
The truth is, with or without us, the natural world will rebuild. In the 30 years since the evacuation of Chernobyl, the wild has reclaimed the space. Today, the forest has taken over the city. It’s a sanctuary for wild animals that are very rare elsewhere. And powerful evidence that, however grave our mistakes, nature will ultimately overcome them.
In Attenborough’s telling, Chernobyl was a singular, isolated nuclear event after which nature bounced back because the humans left. Nor is he alone in perpetuating this narrative: there are countless articles about the return of wildlife to the Exclusion Zone.
Don’t get me wrong, the wild has indeed reclaimed the space. But to call an area where soil and water were saturated with man-made radioactive isotopes, which don’t exist in nature, and whose half-life is measured in thousands and billions of years, a “sanctuary for wild animals,” is really pushing it.
Once again, Kate Brown offers a counter-narrative: the work of evolutionary biologists in the Zone, who track birds, shows up a “zone of ecological calamity,” along with hot spots completely devoid of certain forms of widlife, such as bumblebees, spiders, and butterflies. In Brown’s words, “whole zones in the Zone are dead.”
But the narrative of nuclear disaster sites as wildlife preserves is a political one. Its aim is to naturalize such disasters, and allow the public to turn a blind eye to the issue of how we deal with nuclear waste. Brown understands that “it is difficult to face the problem … because it is so outsized.” Or as Alexievich puts it, an event like Chernobyl is a “cataclysm for the mind.”
It’s always easier to look the other way, especially if someone is helpfully pointing the finger in a different direction.
There are very few men that I know of who take the long view on environmental hazards and catastrophes. Even Attenborough, now a powerful spokesman for the cause, is a relatively late convert. A less well-known voice is the one of Gerd Ludwig, a National Geographic photographer who first got me interested in the aftermath of Chernobyl some 6 or 7 years ago.
His project The Long Shadow of Chernobyl is a huge eye-opener and a good place to start finding out more on the topic of nuclear safety, especially if you don’t want to pore through half a dozen books.
It’s a cliché, but his pictures often speak more than any amount of words can. Below is an interview with him published on Medium:
Why am I persistently reading and writing about gruesome topics like the Holocaust and Chernobyl? I’m not quite sure myself what the answer to that is. That’s why I write about it — reading helps me notice things, and writing about them helps me think.
I guess I’m just trying to understand the self-destructive instinct in humans, particularly men. I’m also trying to understand the “eco gender gap” in how the public sees climate change, which Tabitha Whiting wrote about here on Medium. From Rachel Carson to Greta Thunberg, it’s been predominantly women who have been speaking up on environmental issues.
If it sounds like I’m overstating my case on female environmental activism, then just take a look at how the work of Greta Thunberg has been criticized and construed in some quarters, especially by men. Only this time, it’s a very young woman who is swimming upstream and raising her voice in the halls of powerful men.
There’s one point that David Attenborough nails perfectly in his documentary: This is not about saving our planet… it’s about saving ourselves. We talk a lot about the planet, but people rarely do something for others’ benefit. Not to mention that so many still think that climate change is a hoax.
But if we focus instead on framing the conversation so that it’s about ourselves, about our children and their survival that’s now endangered, we might be able to get more people to listen.
Further reading:
Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (1962)
— Part I digitally available at https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1962/06/16/silent-spring-part-1
Svetlana Alexievich, Chernobyl Prayer: A Chronicle of the Future (English translation: 2016)
Svetlana Alexievich, The Unwomanly Face of War (English translation: 2017)
Olga Kuchinskaya, The Politics of Invisibility: Public Knowledge about Radiation Health after Chernobyl (2014)
Kate Brown, Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters (2013)
Kate Brown, Dispatches from Dystopia: Histories of Places Not Yet Forgotten (2015)
Kate Brown, Manual for Survival: A Chernobyl Guide to the Future (2019)
