Irradiated Zone: Don’t Go There! (Missing in the Japan Catastrophe -- Thinking the Unthinkable)

from TomDispatch:




Irradiated Zone: Don’t Go There!
Missing in the Japan Catastrophe -- Thinking the Unthinkable

By Tom Engelhardt




I traveled that “old road” when it was still relatively new and heavily trafficked, and I was already a grown-up. I also traveled it when I was a teenager -- the version with “broken stone” -- through the blistered backlands of what had once been the American West, coming upon the “sports,” the mutants, “the misborn” who, in those grim lands, sometimes looked upon human stragglers “as a dependable source of venison.”

And if you’re now thoroughly confused, I don’t blame you. Let me explain. The passage quoted above comes from A Canticle for Leibowitz, a still-riveting novel published in 1959. I probably read it a year or two later and in that I was anything but unique. Like many American teens of the 1950s and early 1960s, I spent an inordinate amount of time in the irradiated lands between the Great Salt Lake and Old El Paso or other planetary dead zones like it, thanks to what was then called “pulp fiction.”

In those days, post-apocalyptic futures were us.

.....(snip).....

After all, we’re talking about atomic power; about, that is, the primordial forces of nature. So why shouldn’t we raise primordial questions that remind us of the powers we insist, most of the time, on handling so blithely? As Jonathan Schell wrote recently, “a stumbling, imperfect, probably imperfectable creature like ourselves is unfit to wield the stellar fire released by the split or fused atom... The earth is provided with enough primordial forces of destruction without our help in introducing more.” Understandably, for all sorts of reasons, including venality and simple fear, governments (and those who write about them) have the urge to try to tame the atom even as it threatens us, to turn Fukushima into a garden-variety 24/7 story, which it isn’t. ................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175370/tomgram%3A_engelhardt%2C_the_worst_that_could_happen/

effect on the environment?

Or that in a few hundred years people won't forget where those radioactive waste dumps are leaking into water tables like at Hanford, up the Columbia River from my hometown?

Ostriches with their heads in the sand are a bigger problem than chicken littles.

"I’m no scientist and have no scientific basis for assessing what’s going to happen in Japan"

This is bad, no question, and I don't know who the Japanese think they're kidding by rating Fukushima even with Three Mile Island. But we're not going to end up with Japan as a post-apocalyptic hellscape, either.