That later number is a hair-raising dose. Among children, numbers ranged from 30 to 1,500 rads. Counters detected radioactive iodine in more than half of their patients. In Belarus’ half of the 11,500 people checked into wards were children, of whom hundreds were diagnosed with radiation sickness. I counted at least 40,000 people in the records hospitalized. Officially, Soviet leaders reported that 299 adults were hospitalized, and 137 had radiation sickness. The files of the Ministry of Health described how thousands of medical personnel spread out across the contaminated countryside and looked at bodies of people who sat under clouds of radiation in the weeks after the accident. “You won’t find anything.” I asked to look anyway and quickly located whole collections labeled “The medical consequences of the Chernobyl catastrophe.” I started reading and have not been able to stop since. When I asked at the Ukrainian government archives in Kiev for the files on Chernobyl, the archivists laughed at me.
As historians do, I went to the archives to see what I could find out about the medical and environmental consequences of the spillage of an estimated 50 to 200 million curies of radioactive waste from the blown reactor number 4 at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in northern Ukraine on April 26, 1986. I was in central Europe to research a history of the Chernobyl disaster. The tree also confirmed that I had gained a small bit of literacy in more-than-human landscapes.
The sickly tree was a clue, a small piece of evidence on a quest to discover the origins of the great demolition, yet to be written, of the Pripyat Marshes, straddling Ukraine and Belarus. Here in the midst of the marsh where I stood in rubber boots, which I did not need because of the unusually hot, dry spring in a succession of hot, dry springs, I grasped the dramatic environmental changes of the past half-century in this place that had been soundly cursed as late as 1939 as an immovable impasse of land and people lost for centuries to a primitive existence (Bürgener 1939 Mankivell and Loch 1924).
Every territory on Earth is the site of some former ecosystem and of contaminants produced in the Anthropocene. There it stood before me, a spindly pine tree growing out of a bomb crater in a former village cemetery in a circa 1960 Soviet air force bombing range in part of what used to be the great Pripyat Marshes, which now is a vast, mottled range of drained swamps, forests, and fields abandoned because of an excess of radioactive contamination caused in large part, but not exclusively, by the Chernobyl accident of 1986.
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