Nature Is Healing

Abstract

In August 2020, I found myself in Istanbul during a brief ebb between COVID-19 pandemic waves. The city was gripped with a heat wave that left its mask-wearing citizens sweltering, and in an effort to escape the overwhelming grip of the sun I walked west along the northern coastline of the Sea of Marmara. The wind off the sea was cool, and Turkish families with small children waded in the shallows. The water was full of ghostly jellyfish. Suddenly a cry went up: The curve of a dolphin's back had been spotted. Then another; a third one. The pod of dolphins was diving for fish, herding its prey into the angle of an outcropping where the dolphins could feast at leisure. Later, I read in an article from Agence France-Presse that the dolphins had returned to Istanbul as a result of the coronavirus: “Dolphins swim in the Bosphorus as virus silences Istanbul” (AFP New Agency 2020), the headline said. It was an example of a news genre that had emerged during the COVID-19 pandemic, distinguished by the announcement that this-wild-animal-or-another had suddenly appeared in a space that had once been seen as resolutely de-wilded. Swans and fish retook the canals of Venice; wild boars and hawks frequented European cities; a small town in Wales was suddenly overtaken by goats. So frequent and so uncritically embraced were these stories that they spawned a sarcastic meme in which an image of a decidedly un-natural presence (e-scooters, photoshopped dinosaurs, or inflatable toys) is combined with a caption that reads: “Nature is healing. We are the virus” (Figures 1 and 2; see Bosworth [2021] for an analysis of this meme's subversive potential).I was, like the meme makers, suspicious of what the New York Times called the “coronavirus nature genre” (Hess 2020). Eight months before my visit to Turkey, when the worldwide spread of the coronavirus was still invisible, I had visited the site of another widely touted rewilding: the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant Zone of Alienation, a transnational area considered unsuitable for human settlement after the 1986 Chernobyl accident. My purpose was to research the rhetoric that was being used to frame and market the zone, rhetoric that— since a 2005 report by the Chernobyl Forum that characterized the Zone as “paradoxically . . . a unique sanctuary for biodiversity” (30)— had increasingly focused on the inexhaustible vitality of nonhuman life in the absence of human intervention. In addition to a “sanctuary” (or “Earth's unlikeliest wildlife sanctuary” [Mycio 2013]), Chernobyl had been described as a “refuge” (Orizaola 2019), a “Primeval, Teeming, Irradiated Eden” (Shukman 2011), a “radioactive Eden” (Higginbotham 2019). Wired Magazine, in 2019, stated the central point of this discourse succinctly: “The Chernobyl Disaster May Have Also Built a Paradise” (Rogers 2019). By 2020, visitors to the zone could buy t-shirts featuring a sandwich-scavenging red fox seen in a National Geographic video before embarking on a so-called “eco-tour” of the area (Geddo 2019).It seemed to me, as I watched the semiotically overburdened dolphins chase fish so close to the shore that they were within range of touch, that the same narrativizing engine that had seen Eden in a postaccident Chernobyl was now revving up to turn a new disaster into fuel. Yet even as the story of “nuclear accident as revelation of natural limitlessness” persisted in parts of Chernobyl discourse, renewed interest in the disaster spurred by the 2019 Chernobyl HBO miniseries had, by 2020, prompted a turn toward a much more pessimistic view. Why, then, did the COVID-19 pandemic see such a marked return to the idea that human catastrophe was a corrective, and that an unchanging, inexorable nature was only awaiting our absence in order to build a better world? From the moment of the nuclear accident at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant on 26 April 1986, the narrative of the accident has been a contested one, mobilized to many different ends. On an international scale, the Cold War context of the event meant that it was politically, well, radioactive; in the midst of post-Three Mile Island debates surrounding nuclear safety and disarmament, Chernobyl also offered a powerful global warning about the dangers of, as philosopher Ian Angus termed it in a 1987 “Post-Chernobyl” reflection, “the domestication of nature through scientific-technological apparatus” (Angus and Cook 1987, 186). On a local-national scale, Chernobyl became a site of national identity construction for the citizens of Ukraine, part of a larger shift that saw anti-nuclear activism linked to nascent independence movements in the U.S.S.R. (Dawson 1996 67-79). In 1992, the establishment of the Ukrainian National Chernobyl Museum in Kyiv offered the opportunity for a coherent national narrative of the disaster to be articulated—a narrative that blended Orthodox Christian iconography, reverence for Ukrainian suffering, and mourning for a preindustrial landscape to create a fervent and troubling lament for human and natural fertility.A visitor approaching the museum from the street today sees two markers of its presence. The first is a sign (Figure 3) identifying the museum and displaying a split graphic: on the right an image of enormous, glossy red apples that seem to burst out of their black background; on the left, a black-and-white image of a withered tree (recognizable, to those familiar with Ukrainian history, as the “partisan's tree” from which Nazis hung resistance fighters during the Second World War) around which negative images of apples— apple-shaped absences— hover in the white air like ghosts. This striking and somewhat mysterious contrast between fertility and sterility (superimposed against an image of national resistance) is not far from a metal sculpture of a faceless woman (Figure 4), her hands gathered together in prayer, who gazes down at an equally faceless child emerging from between her legs. The Madonna-esque implications of the mother's pose are echoed by the fact that child holds its arms outstretched to form a cross.This focus on human and nonhuman fruitfulness is a major feature of the museum, which—apart from a thorough documentation of the Chernobyl incident itself—heavily emphasizes the incident's health impact on women, children, plants, and animals. One striking exhibit (Figure 5) features, the museum's audio guide explains, a “cut apple tree weav[ing] its branches through the empty cradle” in order to symbolize the “interrupted connection between the generations” who were forced to evacuate the villages that now form the Exclusion Zone. In this exhibit, fallen apples and broken twigs mix with scattered photos and empty frames in a room that resembles one of the villages’ disintegrating houses, littered with abandoned furniture, papers, and dust. The tree itself, branches of which recur throughout the museum, becomes synonymous with a human body that radiation has rendered no longer fruitful. The wedding of the tree and cradle also returns in an exhibit room where an ornate temple or altar contains a cradle filled with children's toys collected from the evacuated villages (Figure 6). The white walls of the rooms are covered in enormous sketches of tree branches and root systems and decorated with art and objects related to the disaster, including an Orthodox shrine showing a cancer-afflicted child and an image of a babushka and a child (the child clutching a Bible) who sit beneath a barren tree interwoven with traditional Ukrainian clothwork.There is a distinct and disturbing nationalistic element to the museum's focus on children and biological fertility, as well as to its heavy emphasis on a single, univocal traditional [pastoral, Orthodox Christian] Ukrainian culture, often at the expense of any acknowledgment of the Jewish community that flourished in Chernobyl prior to the multiple devastations of the early 20th century (Bednarz 2019). It's true that women, particularly pregnant women, and children were specially affected by the Chernobyl disaster. Not only did exposure to radiation in the Chernobyl area present a significant health risk to women and children (Kulakov et al. 1992), but as the radioactive cloud produced by the accident drifted west over Europe, anxiety surrounding the possibility of genetic defects also led some pregnant women to terminate their pregnancies (Trichopoulos et al. 1987). However, it is unclear how much this radiophobic anxiety and, indeed, the particular scrutiny afforded bodies that give birth are products of the larger cultural preoccupations that are foregrounded in the National Chernobyl Museum. The link between nationalism and concerns about birth, women's bodies, and fertility has been widely observed, from Nazism's creed of Kinder, Küche, Kirche and its Lebensborn Aryan breeding program to the current “trad wives” of the white nationalist movement who, in response to fears of “white genocide,” compete to birth the most white babies (Stern 2019; Kelly 2018). The German Romantic concept of “Blut und Boden” (Blood and Soil), adopted by the Nazis to express a range of perceived entanglements between the flesh of the body and the earth of the Fatherland, has remained powerfully attractive to latter-day “ecofascists,” who marry white nationalism to environmentalism. Ecofascism draws on Romanticism's location of meaning, order, and value in nature, viewing civilization and cosmopolitanism as forces that, in the words of the neo-Nazi German group the Freedom German Workers Party, “have torn humanity from its connectedness to the natural cycles of the earth” and “disrupted relations between humanity and the rest of nature” (Biehl and Staudenmeier 1995).It is sometimes difficult to draw a clear distinction between ecofascist principles and traditional environmentalism, which—from John Muir and Henry David Thoreau to Edward Abbey—has prized land rendered artificially empty by genocide, while disparaging indigenous and/or Latinx people too “ignorant” to behave correctly in nature (Wakefield 1994; Abbey 1988), or, like Thoreau (1892/2007, 281), proposing that “the farmer displaces the Indian even because he redeems the meadow, and so makes himself stronger and in some respects more natural.” This ought to come as no surprise: Environmentalism is, after all, literally and inherently conservative in its efforts. Though in an explicit sense what must be conserved is the “pure” landscape (the landscape that is clean of human influence), in fact what is actually always being conserved is, in William Cronon's words, “our own unexamined longings and desires,” a “sacred myth of origin” that serves to locate and reify both moral and national identity and law (Cronon 1995). The figure of the child is useful for this purpose because it at once offers what Rebekah Sheldon describes as “another generational of species-survival posed as physiological self-similarity” (2016, 177) and acts as what Jack Halberstam (2020) terms “a kind of liminal figure through whom we can visualize our relation to animals” (191)—childhood is, or is positioned as, “a human experience of the wild” (177). The utility of the child therefore lies in the fact that it promises the possibility of an endlessly conserved and endlessly conservative spatiotemporal landscape, a reproduction that is not only biological but also a perpetual reinscribing of the values that render such a landscape desirable and meaningful.What the broken apple branches of the National Museum of Chernobyl therefore represent is not the biological damage done to fertility by radiation or the cultural transmission that has failed to occur between displaced generations of Ukrainian families. Rather, the broken element is precisely the process of reinscription that I have described. The children's toys reverently cradled under the shadows of tree branches represent, after all, not lost children (though some child survivors of Chernobyl did suffer terribly as a result of the accident) but lost childhoods—that is, lost opportunities for the child to perform its function of transmission, continuity, and meaning-making. As Margret Grebowicz (2021) notes, the special (and specially terrifying) quality of radioactive disaster “is not that reproduction fails as its result but that it continues, irremediably broken” (63). The National Chernobyl Museum reads Chernobyl as the site of a breakdown that is not so much political-bureaucratic or technological as it is cultural or even epistemological, a disruption in the ability of people to receive meaning from the nonhuman world. This is consistent with Ulrich Beck's suggestion that Chernobyl represents a case in which our “risk society” robs us of certainty. The senses can no longer be relied upon to gather and interpret information correctly; Beck (1992) describes a world “unchanged to [the] senses, behind which a hidden contamination and danger occurred that was closed to our view” (65). Where Beck interprets this transformation of the world as due to new forms of endangerment and attempts to mitigate these forms, the National Chernobyl Museum locates its lost certainty in a landscape that can no longer be entered, and in a geography that once bound this landscape back to the human, but now doesn't. (The central staircase of the museum features a sequence of signs bearing the names of the rural villages that once stood in what is now the Exclusion Zone.) If, the museum seems to suggest, we could simply return to a time before the rupture happened, then life would once more assume a natural order. Innocence would be recovered, and the certainty that we have lost would be restored.Yet what has become the dominant narrative of Chernobyl—what I will term the “eco-optimist” narrative—rejects this argument, or rather runs its data and arrives at a very different conclusion. This narrative fundamentally arises from turn-of-the-21st-century wildlife research in the Exclusion Zone, and from the 2005 Chernobyl Forum report (previously mentioned) where the conclusion was first offered that, though radiation-induced adverse effects were present in plant and animal populations throughout the Exclusion Zone, these populations were nevertheless flourishing at such a rate that the “removal of human activities” had rendered the zone “a unique sanctuary for biodiversity.” This notion gained traction throughout the early 21st century, but found perhaps its widest dissemination through an episode of the long-running and celebrated television program Nature that aired on American PBS stations in October 2011.The title of the episode, “Radioactive Wolves,” seems to suggest the worst fears surrounding nuclear disaster: that radiation could act as a kind of technological Lilith, issuing forth what the poet John Balaban (1994) describes, in his poem “Atomic Ghost,” “queer things” that are “sick in their seed/ wracked with lunatic genes”; that creatures affected by it would become “progenitors of monstrosities” (Kaempffert 1955), attesting to what Rachel Carson (1961) terms “the unnatural creation of man's tampering with the atom” (7). After all, the popular imagination has, since the 1950s, envisioned what ordinary creatures affected by radiation much turn into—the science fiction pulp movie Them!, with its giant mutant irradiated ants invading the cities of America, appeared in 1954, just as the first Godzilla film was also being released on the opposite side of the Pacific. More recently, the Internet has served as the spawning ground of tabloid-style images, videos, and exposés that purport to show the monstrously mutated flora and fauna of the Chernobyl and Fukushima exclusion zones. “Radioactive wild boars rampaging around Fukushima nuclear site,” declares one headline (Worley 2016), while a YouTube video of “giant radioactive mutated wels catfish” in the Chernobyl cooling pools has, as of December 2020, racked up more than six million views (bionerd23 2014). A whole bounty of apprehension harvested from the bitter experience of the atomic era—and milled by the quasi-religious “risk consciousness” that, Beck argues, substitutes uncertain perils and invisible toxicities for “spirits residing in things” (72)—has been brought to bear on the site where the so-called natural is afflicted by the unnatural.Yet “Radioactive Wolves” was, in fact, not representative of such an apprehension. Its sweeping shots of the Pripyat River, its noble bison, its snuggling wolf cubs, its delicate storks and its splendid birds of prey, were instead a high-production-values endorsement of the Chernobyl Forum's view: Chernobyl had become a “sanctuary”—a word that traffics in connotations of religious power and consecration, and whose adoption in the term “wildlife sanctuaries” was deeply rooted in the sublimely inspired tradition of the “mountain as cathedral.” Indeed, Chernobyl wasn't only a sanctuary—it was, according to “Radioactive Wolves,” a “kind of post-nuclear Eden, populated by beaver and bison, horses and birds, fish and falcons—and ruled by wolves” (PBS 2011). The site of the worst nuclear disaster in history had now become man's originary garden, a perfect, and perfectly fertile, divine wilderness where man alone was too sinful to dwell.Surely Cronon, one of the foremost critics of the wilderness ideal, would find such a description irresistible. In his now-classic essay “The Trouble with Wilderness” (1995), he marvels at the conceptual evolution that has seen wilderness, once “the antithesis of all that was orderly and good . . . the darkness, one might say, on the far side of the garden wall,” become “frequently likened to Eden itself.” Cronon notes, too, the union of this particular environmental spirituality with “the powerful romantic attraction of primitivism,” which positioned wilderness as a place to shed the contaminating trappings of civilization and be reborn as a free, pristine, original man—a promise that is inherent in the title of a 2011 Outside Magazine ode to “Chernobyl, My Primeval, Teeming, Irradiated Eden.” In this article, which was later included in The Best American Travel Writing 2012, the author, Henry Shukman, faces down a boar that is “like some minor forest god,” embarks upon an “atomic safari,” and enjoys “rustic life at its timeless, bibulous best.” Lest one be tempted to assume that the “rustic life” he refers to is the traditional Ukrainian culture that farmed the Exclusion Zone prior to the explosion in the nuclear power plant and locate his sympathies with the Ukrainian eco-nationalism of the National Chernobyl Museum, he clarifies: “This must be like what life was like 1000 years ago . . . space for everyone, time for everything.” In other words, though Shukman is looking to the past in order to locate human identity and values, he is not looking to the pastoral past. His gaze runs to a deeper and more primitive era.Shukman's titular apposition of the Exclusion Zone to an antediluvian landscape is not unique to this particular text. In Nature's “Radioactive Wolves,” we hear frequent evocations of the Ice Age, the last time that wild horses roamed the area; the bison that have been reintroduced to the zone, the show states, are “the ancient icon of the wild woods,” and “primeval oaks” provide a habitat for storks. Yet at the same time as these narratives advance the idea of the Zone as a return to the Edenic, they argue for it as a turn in the opposite direction. “Is this the world before humanity?” Shukman asks. “Or after? Is there a difference?” Similarly, “Radioactive Wolves” asks: “Is this a glimpse into the fate of the world after doomsday?” The 2019 Wired Magazine article positing Chernobyl-as-paradise describes the Exclusion Zone as “a living experiment in what the world will be like after humans are gone” (Rogers 2019), while a May 2019 Guardian piece on the Chernobyl “wildlife haven” suggests that in its radioecological reserve “we see a flash forward to a world without people” (Allan 2019). Even the self-consciously nihilistic Ukrainian writer Markiyan Kamysh, who resists post-apocalyptic clichés in describing his experiences as an illegal Chernobyl tourist, suggests that the Zone warps past and future together: he envisions a future in which reenactors come to play out the accident as part of a grim festival, “[m]ass tourism into the past— the exclusive tour of the future” (154-5).If Chernobyl is an Eden, after all, it is a post-nuclear Eden. Though the word “timeless” makes multiple appearances in Shukman's account of the Exclusion Zone—emphasizing his near-note-perfect alignment of the zone with the mythic wilderness that serves as (in the words of Cronon) a tabula rasa, an “escape from history” into “the home of a God who transcends history by standing as the One who remains untouched and unchanged by time's arrow”—in fact the very nature of the Exclusion Zone means that it is not and cannot be timeless. Where Cronon's wilderness is defined by its ability to support the fiction of frontier emptiness, appearing as eternally prior-to-the-human in order to remain removed from history, Chernobyl is always simultaneously before and after the human—marked by rupture, and paradoxical in a way that threatens a peculiar contradiction in terms until one considers that such a contradiction in terms, and, indeed, contradictive peculiarity in general, is typical of radioactivity and its effects.The argument for radioactivity as productive of a confusion or distortion of time, space, and affect is one that has been most completely offered by Joseph Masco (2006), who characterizes this as one element of the “nuclear uncanny”—a “perceptual space” of dislocation, anxiety, temporal ellipsis, and ambiguous danger (28). Nuclear materials, Masco says, are “sources of invisible power” that offer a “nonlocalizable threat” (30–31). On the one hand, he suggests (echoing Ulrich Beck), “radiation traverses space in ways that can make the air, earth, and water seem suspect, even dangerous, though no sensory evidence is at hand” (32); on the other hand, the cumulative and/or stochastic nature of radiation's biological impacts creates temporal uncertainty, while the inhuman scale of its timeline—many times the dose of radiation considered lethal for a human can be emitted in a few tenths of a second, as in the 1946 criticality accident that killed Louis Slotin, while the half-lives of some radioactive isotopes are so long that the disposal of nuclear waste presents a unique problem: how do you create warning signs for a hazard that may outlast human language?—makes it difficult to parse, represent, and comprehend.The confusion of spacetime is characteristic of a violence that is delayed, attritional, and dispersed, as Rob Nixon (2011) characterizes the “slow violence” of environmental contamination and degradation (2), though radioactivity—specifically, depleted uranium—figures into the understanding of what Nixon calls “ecologies of the aftermath” (201–32). At the same time, as Adriana Petryna highlights at several points in her landmark study of biological citizenship after the Chernobyl disaster, the temporal uncertainty and distortion associated with radiation also interfere with our ability to effectively narrativize it. Not only does common sense reject the nature of radioactive danger— Petryna (2013) quotes a Chernobyl survivor who “didn't believe in radiation” at first, thinking it must have dispersed (88)— the stochastic effects of radiation may only be rendered visible through rigorous, long-term monitoring that utilizes technology capable of rendering these effects “statistically detectable” (11). Legislators in Petryna's account demand totalizing lists of symptoms for radiation-induced illnesses before they will issue official indicators/qualifications for these illnesses, yet any such totalizing list would require outlasting the “virtually infinite” half-lives of the most persistent radioactive isotopes, leaving a nuclear reality, Petryna suggests, fundamentally “open-ended” (117): a story for which the form and import are still being determined.Such a phenomenon might do much to explain why observers of the Exclusion Zone are eager to see in it a foreshortened preview of our long-distance future. Far from uncertain, it turns out that their version of its “ecology of the aftermath” looks a lot like the ahistorical, Edenic, and infinitely proliferative nature that emerged from the late 18th century as a counter to the enervations and corruptions of civilization: sublime, majestic, inexhaustible, and powerful enough to destroy all those who would repress or resist it, as Jonathan Bate (2012) characterizes the post-Enlightenment “state of nature.” In what is arguably the ur-text of modern nature narratives, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (2012), nature not only educates, heals, and inspires, but also regulates—a rather notorious essay by Anne Mellor (2012) holds that nature “punishes,” “prevents,” and “pursues” Victor Frankenstein in order to contain his “unnatural” science and enforce its own universal moral code. This vision of nature as both natural order and natural orderer—a substrate from which man may opt to deviate, but one that is always capable of overruling and reabsorbing him—posits an ecology in which even the broken atom can be made whole by restorative powers that work to ensure an eternal self-similarity.Rebekah Sheldon has argued that popular environmentalism has a tendency to locate itself outside of causality, discounting the possibility of change. “The landscapification of the future,” she writes, “organizes the present around the need for security . . . The threat to the future, in this sense, emanates from the notion, inherent in the idea of the future, that tomorrow may not resemble today, that is, that radical change is not only possible but also continuously operating” (2016, 29). In the face of fears about the relentless vitality of nonhuman life and the extent to which it challenges—perhaps now, perhaps in the future—the dominance of the human, we reassure ourselves with narratives (Sheldon argues) in which the human child, and therefore the human future, is preserved. Yet the eco-optimist narrative deviates from this example in embracing a future from which the human is totally excluded. Though it participates in a trend that Ted Toadvine (2018) identifies as “the ‘temporal suspension’ of the present” (53), which, in concord with Sheldon's archive, “tacitly assum[es] that our responsibility towards future generations is to sustain the world in a state that as much as possible resembles the present” (ibid.), its preoccupation with eschatological visions of the posthuman arises alongside “our [emerging] awareness of an ancient geological past that precedes us opens our imaginations to an indefinitely distant future after us” (54).Toadvine suggests that anxieties about the end of the world are not about the end of some spatiotemporal world (just as what is conserved in conservation is not really nature, as such), but rather “the world as we know it, the total horizon of meaning, value, and possibility within which our lives unfold” (56). Yet there is a problem with this idea in the age of the ecotechnical, that is, in an era “beyond any demarcation of the ‘natural’ from the ‘technological’” (58). As Jean-Luc Nancy (1997) articulates, “for as long as the world was essentially in relation to some other (that is another world or an author of the world), it could have a sense. But the end of the world is that there is no longer this essential relation, and that there is no longer essentially . . . anything but the world ‘itself’” (8). To this rather abstruse declaration, Toadvine joins Derrida's reflections on the individual nature of “a world” and the way in which “the death of any living thing marks not merely the end of a world or of a life within the world, but rather the absolute end of the one and only world” (Toadvine 2018, 65), in spite of the fact that this absolute end of the world is survived by a surviving other. Where Nancy sees the world as having already ended (in the sense that it has ceased to have a sense, and simply now is), Derrida's remarks are more ambiguous (Derrida 2005). (What about nonliving things? Do human and nonhuman elements inhabit the same world?) Toadvine's concern is, primarily, about what it means to believe that “the world” can end, and what commitments are involved in sustaining this belief. What the eco-optimist narrative of Chernobyl asks is what commitments are involved in sustaining the belief that a certain kind of world cannot or will not end.Elizabeth Povinelli (2016) suggests that we are currently witnessing a shift into a new kind of ontological “drama,” the struggle of which acts as a lens through which we understand our experiences. This is not a struggle surrounding how to maintain the distinction between the human and the nonhuman; it is not even a struggle surrounding how to maintain the distinction between Life (“birth, growth, reproduction”) and Death. Rather, Povinelli sees the current drama as a struggle to maintain the distinction between Life (all biological life) and Nonlife (the inanimate). The human, Povinelli says, is now “foreground[ed] . . . as just one element in the larger set of not merely animal life but all Life as opposed to the state of original and radical Nonlife, the vital in relation to the inert, the extinct in relation to the barren” (8). It is a fraught opposition. The stone that Toadvine ponders as a nonliving thing that might nevertheless have “a world” and share a world with us presents problems insofar as, if (to use Povinelli's example) humans are not clearly more important than rocks, then much of our society unravels, and we are forced to consider new forms of ontology and their new demands.I suspect that Toadvine would say that Povinelli's observations are