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Visit Sunny Chernobyl - Adventures In The World's Most Polluted Places (2013)

by Andrew Blackwell(Favorite Author)

3.65 of 5 Votes: 5

ISBN

0099549646 (ISBN13: 9780099549642)

languge

English

genre

Memoir & Autobiography

publisher

Arrow

review 1: I can only call Andrew Blackwell an environmental voyeur. He is not content to read about bad things – he has to see them. He knows of Chernobyl, but he has to have his meter tell him he is being cooked by the nuclear energy that is still all around. Unlike most of us who travel to pristine areas to avoid the ugliness that is being foisted on the world, his vacations, if you can call them that, are in the tar sands. He goes to these places knowing that are bad, but he does not go to preach. He takes us along and lets us look over his shoulder; shake our heads and wonder – what next.His writing is descriptive and vivid, “…rose the Syncrude upgrading plant, the flame-belching doppelganger of Disney’s Enchanted Kingdom, built of steel towers and twisting pipes, ... morecrested with gas flares and plumes of stream.” And his writing also conveys a dark, foreboding vision of the future that is filtered through these awful and apocalyptic. Then as we move through the dark areas of polluted earth on this bizarre trip our Dante guide lets us listen to the nonsense that lets people accept their fate and the fate of their land – “I think that dirty oil thing comes from a lobbying group in Saudi.”Resignation is obvious in a statement from a drunken worker “Lemme Tell You something. By the time I’m fifty, I know – I don’t guess, I know – I’m gonna have some kind of cancer.” But he is not going to quit. He is stuck in our make a living world where the cost of survival is the debt of education, acceptance of contributing to destructive acts, or the sacrifice of years of health. This is not a descent into Hell, rather it is a horizontal path that zigs and zags with destinations like the massive gathering of trash in the midst of the ocean – the vortex of human waste, coal mines of China and the sewage of India.But our guide has a strange affliction – he wants to see the rosy aspect of each corner of Hell. He wants us to see happy people content in their apartments with electronic parts boiling in solder and emitting toxic fumes, he wants to see the soy farm intrusions in to the rain forest with much more innocence that some might feel. Perhaps this joyride into the horrors of pollution is really a reminder that each Hell hole is created to serve the demands of those of us who want to live in a clean and beautiful environment. That behind Yellowstone and the other magnificent parks lays a consuming matrix of people and industry that is leaving a mark throughout the earth and each tendril of the pollution center reaches in to the center of humankind throughout the planet. They are really not the worst or the most; they are just artifacts within hundreds of sores from the cancer of our consumption.In a way the author’s enjoyable romp also downplays the serious situations. After reading about the coal mining in China chapter I thought that this review in NYTimes was a more appropriate look at the serious situation. China’s Poisonous Waterways By SHENG KEYIAPRIL 4, 2014“BEIJING — Over the past few years, trips back to my home village, Huaihua Di, on the Lanxi River in Hunan Province, have been clouded by news of deaths — deaths of people I knew well. Some were still young, only in their 30s or 40s. When I returned to the village early last year, two people had just died, and a few others were dying.“My father conducted an informal survey last year of deaths in our village, which has about 1,000 people, to learn why they died and the ages of the deceased. After visiting every household over the course of two weeks, he and two village elders came up with these numbers: Over 10 years, there were 86 cases of cancer. Of these, 65 resulted in death; the rest are terminally ill. Most of their cancers are of the digestive system. In addition, there were 261 cases of snail fever, a parasitic disease, that led to two deaths.“The Lanxi is lined with factories, from mineral processing plants to cement and chemical manufacturers. For years, industrial and agricultural waste has been dumped into the water untreated. I have learned that the grim situation along our river is far from uncommon in China.“The nation has more than 200 “cancer villages,” small towns like mine blanketed with factories where cancer rates have risen far above the national average. (Some researchers say there are more than 400 such villages.) Last year the Ministry of Environmental Protection acknowledged the problem of “cancer villages” for the first time, but this is of little comfort to my parents’ neighbors and millions like them around the country.“More than 50 percent of China’s rivers have disappeared altogether, and few of the surviving waterways are not completely polluted. Some 280 million Chinese people drink unsafe water, according to the Ministry of Environmental Protection. Nearly half of the country’s rivers and lakes carry water that is unfit even for human contact.And China’s cancer mortality rate has soared, climbing 80 percent in the last 30 years. About 3.5 million people are diagnosed with cancer each year, 2.5 million of whom die. Rural residents are more likely than urban residents to die of stomach and intestinal cancers, presumably because of polluted water. State media reported on one government inquiry that found 110 million people across the country reside less than a mile from a hazardous industrial site.”There is more, but the picture is clear. He literally ends up in shit – that is, he finishes in the over populated country called India (which translates to river) and it is the country of rivers – religious rivers in fact. But the growth of population has another graph – the growth of municipal waste – merde. It is a country without the controls and systems to handle run away population (something the author does not mention directly) and consequently the shite does not hit the fan – it fills the rivers and Krishna’s sacred river is an open sewer. There is much to think about – but the real lesson is that behind the places of beauty we have protected are places of ugly that are the result of our human choices, greed, and indifference.
review 2: Exactly how much unexamined privilege does it take to write a book such as this? A white guy from the US goes and voyeuristically tours some of the world's most polluted places, sort of brushing over the fact that for some (generally economically disadvantaged and exploited) people, pollution and its inevitable hazards is their lived reality.I also could have lived without the liberal sprinkling of ablist language. Absolutely offensive and added nothing to his story. less

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