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A review by sevenlefts
Visit Sunny Chernobyl: And Other Adventures in the World's Most Polluted Places by Andrew Blackwell
4.0
A humorous yet philosophical take on pollution and what it means to live with it. When I say humorous, I wouldn't exactly say funny. I did laugh out loud a few times -- let's just say I enjoy his sense of humor.
Blackwell visits some nasty places -- Chernobyl, the oil sands of northern Alberta, the refineries of Port Arthur, the Great Garbage Patch in the Pacific, Brazilian soy fields encroaching on rainforest, Chinese cities whose main industries are computer recycling and coal mining, and a putrid yet holy river in India.
In each of these places, Blackwell manages to find some beauty in the ugliness as well as encountering locals who are engaged in doing likewise. His focus isn't on how terrible these sites are -- that's obvious. Rather, he tries to find how these places might make us look at our own environments in new ways. For in most cases, even though these places might be far from us, we've all had our hands in their creation.
On page 226, Blackwell serves up the gist of his argument.
Blackwell visits some nasty places -- Chernobyl, the oil sands of northern Alberta, the refineries of Port Arthur, the Great Garbage Patch in the Pacific, Brazilian soy fields encroaching on rainforest, Chinese cities whose main industries are computer recycling and coal mining, and a putrid yet holy river in India.
In each of these places, Blackwell manages to find some beauty in the ugliness as well as encountering locals who are engaged in doing likewise. His focus isn't on how terrible these sites are -- that's obvious. Rather, he tries to find how these places might make us look at our own environments in new ways. For in most cases, even though these places might be far from us, we've all had our hands in their creation.
On page 226, Blackwell serves up the gist of his argument.
We also hold up these poster children—Linfen, Port Arthur, Chernobyl—to tell ourselves that the problems are over there. And we'd like to keep it that way. We’d like to keep a tidy bubble for ourselves, and draw a line around some trees, and declare no farther. That here, at least, inside this boundary, nature survives. As long as there is Yellowstone, we'll have a little something for what ails us. What a joke. So much of our environmental consciousness is just aesthetics, a simple idea of what counts as beautiful. But that love of beauty has a cost. It becomes a force for disengagement. Linfen is too foul to care about. Port Arthur is too gross.
So I love the ruined places. And sure, I love the pure ones too. But I hate the idea that there’s any difference. And I wish more people thought gross was beautiful. Because if it isn’t, then I’m not sure why we should care about a world with so much grossness in it.