Visiting Sunny Chernobyl
Q: What was the biggest learning experience you got from your travels and writing this book?
A: If visiting polluted places taught me one thing, it’s that you can get used to anything. First of all, there’s a huge disconnect between what you expect a devastated environment to look like and how it really seems when you’re inside it. Even though the destinations lived up—or down—to my expectations, they often didn’t look amazingly bad. The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, for instance, is a huge problem, but it’s not nearly as visually spectacular as people imagine. This made me realize that, when we think about the environment, we often depend on the idea of how it looks, and on whether it’s beautiful or ugly. And that really limits our understanding of what we’re doing to the world.
From a Rodale Q&A with Andrew Blackwell about his forthcoming book, Visting Sunny Chernobyl and Other Adventures in the World’s Most Polluted Places.
Loading...
About
Boston Review is a magazine of ideas, independent and nonprofit. We cover lots of ground—politics, poetry, film, fiction, book reviews, and criticism. But a few premises tie it all together: that democracy depends on public discussion; that sometimes understanding means going deep; that vast inequalities are unjust; that human imagination breaks free from neat political categories; and that powerful images are worth piles of words.
