'Everything is ugly ... wish you were here'

Published 25 August 2012 in the Winnipeg Free Press:

Visit Sunny Chernobyl
And Other Adventures in the World’s Most Polluted Places
By Andrew Blackwell
Rodale, 306 pages, $30

Reviewed by Mike Stimpson

The best parts of this engaging travel memoir relate not to places but to people who live in some of the globe's most befouled locales.

A bright, friendly Alberta oil sands worker welcomes the author, an American journalist, into his home and asks: "So, are we raping the planet?"

A Texas oil refinery employee casually admits he knows he's "gonna get some kind of cancer," and says his co-workers share that expectation about themselves.

"Coin collectors" (who collect much more than coins) wade in India's filthy Yamuna River, philosophical about what they must endure to earn a living.

In Ukraine, the tour guides who take people to the site of a great nuclear meltdown seem unbothered by the high radiation levels and attend a disco at night.

Visit Sunny Chernobyl is the first book by Andrew Blackwell, a journalist, filmmaker and self-described "eco-friendly liberal" who lives in New York.

His aim isn't just to entertain us with stories about places far more polluted than our patch of the Canadian Prairies, though he does that very well.

No, he's also testifying to the adaptability of people and nature -- how they will make the most of even very bad situations.

Moreover, he's saying we should learn to appreciate even the parts of our world that are, to conventional thinking, the ugliest. It's a sadly narrow esthetic that loves only the prettiest.

Indeed, Blackwell contends in the concluding pages that "to chase after the beautiful and the pristine (is) to abandon most of the world."

Besides, he sees good things in each of the polluted destinations.

"I love the ruined places for all the ways they aren't ruined," he writes. "Does somebody live there? Does somebody work there? Does somebody miss it when they leave?"

He got the idea for this book a few years ago, when he happened upon Kanpur, India.

Kanpur is a big city, with a population in the millions, but it isn't mentioned in travel guidebooks. That's probably because it's been called India's most polluted city.

Blackwell could see how the old industrial city earned its reputation as grossly polluted, but he also saw that civilization and nature had worked out an entente in Kanpur.

He wanted to see how people lived in other highly polluted places, so he worked out a plan to see some of them as a pioneer in "pollution tourism."

He admits the silliness in declaring a few places the "most polluted" and declaring one more polluted than another.

Comparing Chernobyl's radiation to a Chinese city's heavy smog is, he says, "comparing cesium apples to carbon oranges."

Blackwell says many environmentalists have unrealistic goals of creating and preserving pristine conditions.

Like it or not, he says, that ship has sailed and we need to proceed with a clear-headed understanding of what can be done with what we now have.

He doesn't elaborate much on that philosophy, perhaps leaving it for another book (or deeper thinkers).

He does argue for an esthetic viewpoint that embraces both the "pure" and the "ruined" for what they have to offer.

Simplistic ideas about "what counts as beautiful" are "a force for disengagement," he writes.

In other words, people do their darndest not to give the "ugly" polluted places any thought. As a result, they don't care about those places.

And that's a woeful mistake, according to Blackwell.

Thoughtful and informative, Visit Sunny Chernobyl will entertain you and might change the way you think about the environment.