Among the most shocking things noted, a pervasive confirmation that something deeply wrong had happened, was when the reindeer began to deliver deformed stillbirths. Radioactive particulate, spread by strong south easterly winds blowing in from Siberia, was pushed nearly a thousand miles from Ukraine into Scandinavia, so that drop-by-drop radiocesium-impregnated rain fell upon the lichen and mushrooms of Sweden and Finland as if the awful grace of God. Across the tundra of the great north there were a preponderance of mangled reindeer births, some even making it into adulthood. A two-headed animal sharing three eyes; a reindeer with a massive underbite nearly covering the front of its face; an infant which didn’t survive those early days whose entire body appears as if a deflated, tan balloon attached to a disturbingly porcine face. That last unfortunate briefly suffered from caudal duplication, its organs both multiplied and subtracted in number, five legs sticking out from its body, now preserved at the Ukrainian National Chernobyl Museum as if a piece of dried, tanned leather. Like a mutant mink head on a fur coat. Located in Kyiv, far from the nuclear contamination zone, the museum was dedicated by the Soviets shortly after the infamous meltdown, though in the initial days of the tragedy, Moscow was far more reticent to admit that anything was wrong at the powerplant, even as the Geiger counters in far away corners of the continent (like Sweden and Finland, where the reindeer are still born with deformities) signaled that something very wrong had been breached on the steppe of Ukraine. “Please keep calm and orderly in the process of this short-term evacuation,” read the Kremlin’s official announcement to the residents of the nearby industrial city of Pripyat on April 27th, 1986, still abandoned today. Meanwhile, “In the Chernobyl nuclear accident, the wind told the story that was being suppressed,” wrote the poet Linda Hogan in her 1991 The Writer on Her Work. The wind was a “poet, a prophet, a scientist.” Not just the wind, but the soil, the water, the animals themselves.
This weekend marks the fortieth anniversary of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, the worst-such incident in the history of atomic power, far surpassing either Three Mile Island before or Fukushima after. There are the detailed facts of the case itself, the actual ramifications of the reactor meltdown as a failure of engineering and the reactions of Soviet officials as a failure of governance. How on April 25th reactor 4 was shut down for maintenance, how the next day power plummeted precipitously and technicians had to remove cooling rods in a desperate attempt to stabilize the plant, but despite those troubling errors the test was to continue. On April 26th a power surge blew a thousand ton lid off of the reactor triggering a graphite fire. A Soviet manual claimed that the chances of a meltdown were one in ten-thousand years, but on a frosty spring afternoon four decades ago Deputy Chief Engineer Anatoly Dyatlov remembered “Not in my nightmares have I seen anything like this.” Firefighters, unaware and unprepared for the levels of radiation they’d be exposed to, ran into the melee. The citizens of Pripyat remained in their homes for 36-hours until they were finally evacuated. Moscow wouldn’t admit that the meltdown had occurred until two days after the explosion, while the fire in the reactor core wouldn’t be extinguished until May 10th. Caesium-137, iodine-131, strontium-90, all products of fission, along with americium, uranium, and plutonium fuel debris were spread throughout the region and beyond, with the longest half-life of dangerous radioactive material at the site being the last listed element at some 24,000 years. The site itself would be encased in a sarcophagus of a half-million cubic meters of concrete and seven-thousand metric tons of steel. With the powerplant not to be fully decommissioned until 2065, and the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, a thousand square miles around the site largely devoid of human life (save for around 150 elderly and hearty samoseli or “self-settlers” who refused to leave), the zone is believed to not be safely inhabitable for another two-hundred-thousand years. “Chernobyl is like the war of all wars,” writes Belarussian Nobel Prize Winner Svetlana Alexievich in her Voices of Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster. “There’s nowhere to hide. Not underground, not underwater, not in the air.” In the initial emergency cleaning, thirty Ukrainian workers died from the results of the meltdown, but organizations like Greenpeace have estimated that across Europe and central Asia it’s possible that over the past forty years nearly a hundred-thousand people will have been afflicted with leukemia and thyroid cancer that can be traced back to the events of Chernobyl. The world didn’t end at Chernobyl, but part of it did – a limited apocalypse in Vyshhorod Raion, now devoid of humans, but filled with those creatures that nonetheless survived the calamity.
Few places on our over-developed planet have been so fully reclaimed by nature as the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone (possibly only the Demilitarized Zone between the Koreas can compare). A paradox of Chernobyl is that this most calamitous of single ecological disasters in human history should also signal a return to nature in the region most afflicted, where the willing extinction of humans in at least a circumscribed corner of Ukraine has generated a potent and strange rewilding. Radioactive particulate still permeates the soil and the streams, the air and, of course, the smoldering ruins of the plant itself. In the very genetic makeup of the lynx, elk, wolves, and bears that now proliferate through that thousand-square-miles where they live free of hunters. This may be the kingdom of Caesium-137, but after the dead “Red Forest” was cleared it also grows oak, birch, maple, poplar, Scots pine. The fungi near the core of the reactor have become particularly hearty, mutating in such a way that they literally thrive on the radiation still leaking out. Pripyat, a depressing Soviet city of brutalist apartments of concrete and small windows, is now nothing but smashed and overgrown cement, a decayed and ruinous settlement given back to aspen and poplar. “I’m not afraid of God,” an interviewee told Alexevich, but “I’m afraid of man,” though now neither can be found in Chernobyl, the land rather returned to its original masters of the bears and wolves. In the environmental scheme of things, the long-term global impact of Chernobyl is vanishingly insignificant, unless you consider the rhetorical ways in which the understandable fear over nuclear power after the disaster further solidified the influence of the fossil fuel industry whose effects on anthropogenic climate change are existentially threatening in a manner that the meltdown simply wasn’t. But as a signifier for the Anthropocene, for all of our guile, hubris, and stupidity, as well as for whatever follows our epoch, Chernobyl remains unsurpassed. Because everybody knows what “Chernobyl” means, even if we forget.
The exclusion zone is a memento mori for the rapidly approaching extinction of humanity, or at least of its radically altered future born out of the shortsighted decisions of our leaders. Entropy has reigned supreme in the ruins of Chernobyl, a potent demonstration of how all is vanity. Blown-out windows in a school whose remains still evidence the chipped institutional blue paint from when children learned there, the floor now covered in the grey detritus of what appears to be dust and ash; an old amusement park framed by brown ground and grey sky, a pair of mud-smeared bumper cars forlornly sitting there for forty years; a grand theater with a domed roof, murals having flaked off with the plaster, water-logged and empty red velvet chairs ripped apart by foraging animals. Critic Roy Scranton, describing a visit to the millennia-old Chaco Ruins of the Pueblo people in the deserts of New Mexico, writes in Impasse: Climate Change and the Limits of Progress how “There was something unreal in the cyclopean scale of the abandoned fortifications… a monument to human pride, and – like all ruins – a warning.” Those of us who’ve lived in the deindustrialized Rust Belt are privy to monumental ruins, ones that don’t look dissimilar to Chernobyl in some cases, albeit it was economic liberalization and not nuclear catastrophe which emptied out the towns of this region (even if there are gross environmental ramifications in both places). To look at sandy Chaco, pebbly Chernobyl, or rusted Homestead or McKeesport is to see ruins of a forgotten, faded, or fading civilization. In all of its intensity, Chernobyl is a convenient cipher for the ultimate dissolution of all civilizations, lest the powers-that-be truly grapple with the Anthropocene, or at least do so in a manner which is equitable and just for the billions (of people) normally unaccounted for in their ledgers. These ruins are “emblems of our arrogance and warnings against our pride, concrete remains of our human glory and decaying reminders of our human monstrosity, which in the end are one and the same,” writes Scranton.
If you’re of an apocalyptic disposition, as I clearly am, than perhaps the Grand Algorithm feeds you the kinds of AI slop images through Facebook Reels that mine does, these faux-videos of celebrated human architectural achievements (Times Square, the Golden Gate Bridge, the Capitol Building) at a hundred years, five hundred, and a millennia after the sudden disappearance of humanity, vines and trees slowly strangling steel, glass, concrete, and marble, until all evidence of human habitation is erased and everything returns to a state of nature. An irony, no doubt, in such images supplied by the energy-intensive technology of artificial intelligence, its data centers cooled by the privatized commons of our waterways in which toxic waste is then dumped. AI hallucinating this simultaneous horrific nightmare and aspirational fantasy of a rusticated return to original things. In some ways, the current crisis of imagination is so dire that we feel better to have our robots dream of a restoration of the environment without us rather than accomplishing the necessary work of building an industrial and technological commons both congruent with nature and humanity. Part of what makes Chernobyl so representative of our moment is that in the irradiated horror of the exclusion zone, there is a bizarre utopian promise in a land given over to poplar and spruce, lynx and elk, ash trees from the ash. “When a sacred order collapses, despair can ensue,” writes the controversial philosopher and novelist Paul Kingsnorth in Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity, “even amongst those who would not want its return or who are not even aware of what is missing.” According to Kingsnorth, all cultures have a certain model of the sacred at their core, but the locus of their worship is all that differs. In the epoch of capital, wealth, industry, and especially today’s technology are the idols genuflected before, but as our order enters its most decadent phase many yearn for a terrifying simplicity, the videos of humanity erased, the reality of rewilded Chernobyl.
Is there not a different model of the sacred, a means not of integrating the human and the natural, but the unitary acknowledgement that they were never distinct categories to begin with? An evocative scientific thought experiment known as the “Silurian Hypothesis,” its name deriving from the plot of an old Doctor Who episode, asks what exactly a technologically advanced civilization could leave behind so that descendants millions, maybe hundreds of millions of years later, would need to discover so as to be aware of their existence. Some 200 million years ago, there was a massive spike in carbon dioxide – evidence of a long-lost industrial civilization (though probably volcanos)? In Gabon, Africa there is a deposit of uranium that had undergone nuclear fission more than a billion years ago – an ancient reactor (most likely the results of a natural process)? What will remain of us in two hundred million years, in a billion – just an indication in ice cores of the warming we caused, a level of the geological strata where rock and plastic intermingled? In a maintenance corridor beneath Chernobyl’s reactor 4 there is a massive, once-molten, lava-like conglomeration of corium intermingled with uranium oxide, concrete, steel, and sand that weighs about two tons. To spend just five minutes in the presence of what’s been nicknamed the “Elephant’s Foot” would mean certain death from radiation poisoning in merely a matter of days. Even in a full radiation suit, visitors to Chernobyl can only be within the vicinity of reactor 4 for about five minutes without long-term damage. The Elephant’s Foot itself will remain lethal for the next hundred-thousand years, roughly twenty times longer than all of recorded human history.
And yet, the half-life of the materials in the Elephant foot means that the danger in this place will dissipate relatively quickly, and millions of years from now it will reintegrate into its surroundings (or creatures will adapt, as they already are, that thrive in the residual radiation). Not even Chernobyl, already in the process of being returned to nature, will serve as a reminder that we once were here, the evidence of our existence in the billions, or even millions of years, made of subtler stuff (assuming anything indicates us, assuming that that Triassic CO2 spike wasn’t greenhouse gas, that the Gambon reactor wasn’t a power plant, made by hands before hands and conceived of minds before minds). “A small ‘self’ suffers and causes suffering,” writes Robert MacFarlene in Is a River Alive?, while a “love of the living world lets single identities and selfhoods expand and encompass other beings, entities and whole landscapes, such that the self becomes a spacious thing.” Potent wisdom, and humility, in that (though those are the same thing). Yet the bulk of humans, especially late-stage humanity during the Anthropocene, does what it does. In the last decade, the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone was opened to limited-term tourism, which was later halted during the Russian Invasion, fighting actually occurring on the grounds of the powerplant itself. In Pennsylvania, Three Mile Island is repurposed to provide power to a Microsoft data center. Meanwhile, only briefly aware of us and how we destroy ourselves, the forest continues to grow, fields of reeds and wild grass, woods of oak and spruce, spreading out to a limitless horizon while patiently awaiting whatever shall come next.
