At first glance, the April 1986 disaster at the nuclear power plant in Soviet Ukraine that spewed radiation around the globe and forced the permanent evacuation of 120,000 people from an area the size of Rhode Island could not seem more different from global warming.
Chornobyl exploded into global consciousness, resonating deeply in Cold War imaginations haunted by the specter of nuclear annihilation. No one could deny that it was a major catastrophe. Even the Soviet Union was finally forced to tell the truth, probably for the first time in history and in a likely cause of its later collapse.
Global warming seems so the opposite of an explosion. Explosions are sudden. But Earth’s warming has been so gradual and subtle that climate change denial even has an entire (Republican) political party and (Fox) cable news channel promoting it.
The radioactive no-man’s lands of Chornobyl remind us that all forms of energy have a price: be it trapped Bolivian miners, BP oil spills, two Iraq wars – or climate change.
But had I not made more than 25 trips to the Chornobyl exclusion zone, I’m sure I would not have seen the parallels with climate change when I was in Cancun for the summit and heard the news of progress on REDD+, a proposed scheme for rich countries to pay poor countries to reduce carbon emissions by protecting their tropical forests.
Living forests lock up huge stores of carbon and deforestation doesn’t only release that carbon into the atmosphere. The missing trees can no longer act as the planet’s “lungs” for removing other carbon from the atmosphere. Deforestation releases the carbon equivalent of burning fossil fuels and stopping it is one of the quickest and cheapest ways to reduce emissions.
Like Chornobyl spewing the radiation equivalent of 20 Hiroshima bombs (maybe more) into the atmosphere, industrial activity has spewed 35 percent more carbon into the atmosphere compared to pre-industrial levels. Both have caused untold human, social, political and economic hardship; and will have permanent effects on the planet for all imaginable time. They are the two greatest manmade disasters in human history.
Radiation and carbon are also invisible to the naked eye. Without special equipment, it’s impossible to know how much carbon is in the atmosphere or how much radiation is in that spot of moss you’re standing on in Chornobyl. But when dangerous things are invisible, you don’t want them floating around freely.
The best thing to do with both carbon and radioactive atoms is to lock them up, and the best place to do that is in trees. Like the carbon that tropical forests take in from the atmosphere, radioactive atoms get absorbed by Chornobyl trees, where they can safely decay away in the centuries of the trees’ lifetime.
But perhaps the most profound parallel between the two disasters is that both demonstrate how the greatest damage we do isn’t to the Earth, but to ourselves. Like the exclusion zone around Chornobyl, vast areas of the globe will become uninhabitable in the future because of rising sea levels and extreme weather.
Chornobyl is already uninhabitable. In absence of people, it has become Europe’s largest wildlife sanctuary, its lush woodlands teeming with large animals and endangered birds. They are all radioactive. But most species are also thriving.
So, too, the places abandoned because of climate change will revert to a natural state in the absence of people. It won’t be the same state as before global warming. But I suspect that Earth will probably do just fine with warmer temperatures, like Chornobyl will do just fine as a radioactive wilderness.
We, however, probably won’t.
Mary Mycio is the author of Wormwood Forest: A Natural History of Chernobyl and president of Kipling Global Media, providing international media development consulting services. Her blogs can be found at: http://open.salon.com/blog/mary_mycio/2011/01/18/chernobyl_in_cancun
