-
Conclusion
- The MIT Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
Clear, visible clues about possible actions and their potential consequences help us navigate the use of various objects we encounter; we tend to run into trouble when our environment does not make connections between possible actions and outcomes obvious.1 Radiation is a treacherous hazard because it gives us no clue to its increased levels in the environment, in our food, or even in our bodies; nor do we get any sense of what the consequences of staying in such an environment or consuming such food might be. One of my interviewees, a researcher at the Sakharov Institute of Ecology , emphasized the problem of delayed consequences with an example that “nobody is jumping in front of a car—it is clear how that would end.” In contrast, the extent of the danger from radiation must be made visible to us. My argument in this book has been that imperceptible hazards such as radiation can either be rendered more publicly visible and observable or be increasingly obscured, depending on how they are represented. Consider the contrast with the societal treatment of microbes, another imperceptible threat. So much infrastructure has been built around protection from microbes that they are tremendously visible to the public as a hazard; its presence is attested to, for example, by antibacterial soap or signs in restaurant bathrooms reminding staff members to wash their hands. A different picture emerges as we trace the representations of post-Chernobyl radiation risks in Belarus and as we consider what infrastructural conditions exist for articulating these risks or sustaining their visibility. Much of the analysis in this book has focused on how radiation risks in Belarus were ultimately rendered less visible to the public. The nearly complete public disappearance of an invisible hazard, radiation risks, is not unique to the post-Soviet context of Belarus. Countless other imperceptible hazards, including those in the West, are continually being made invisible by the industries that produce them, and that in turn are aided by administrative bodies that do not regulate them. The tobacco industry has Conclusion 160 Conclusion infamously worked to make the health effects of smoking publicly invisible . The chemical industry has been waging a campaign against recognizing the health and environmental effects of pesticides—and it waged a personal campaign against Rachel Carson, who did so much to make the risks of pesticides visible in her seminal book, Silent Spring. Historical and sociological studies have documented the various strategies used by industries to displace dangerous toxins as objects of public attention: reframing the public debate on hazards, promoting fake debate where there is a scientific consensus, silencing critics, orchestrating studies to counter even strong evidence of harm, blaming victims’ genetic makeup or lifestyles and denying environmental influences, and presenting a lack of monitoring as an absence of health effects.2 These strategies appear in cases of hazards created as a result of accidents as well as in cases of routine production of hazards. Indeed, even climate change is a complex phenomenon that cannot be perceived directly, that needs to be made publicly visible, and that some interests are trying to make invisible.3 In all these cases, the production of invisibility is relative; the term implies the comparison of different perspectives, some of which render the hazard more publicly visible and observable. The dynamic of the public recognition of an imperceptible hazard is subject to power relations; we cannot assume that public knowledge about hazards and protection standards just constantly improve. Public visibility depends on whose voices can be heard and which groups have what kinds of institutional and infrastructural support. What is distinctive about the disappearance of the consequences of Chernobyl in Belarus is not their disappearance per se but rather the trajectory of that disappearance—the historical waves of invisibility and visibility of Chernobyl’s consequences. What stands out especially is the eruption of the visibility of radiological contamination in the last years of the Soviet Union, with the corresponding media coverage, passage of laws, and establishment of research institutes. Official recognition of the vast scope of the hazard was made possible by the collapse of the old political regime, with its power relations and its expertise, and by the hope of international assistance. The influence of the Western nuclear industry is everywhere in the Belarusian case: in the lack of adequate international assistance on the state level, in the international studies that worked hard to find nothing, and in the reports that ignored the research of local scientists and...