Visit Sunny Chernobyl
And Other Adventures in the World's Most Polluted Places
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
For most of us, traveling means visiting the most beautiful places on Earth—Paris, the Taj Mahal, the Grand Canyon. It's rare to book a plane ticket to visit the lifeless moonscape of Canada's oil sand strip mines, or to seek out the Chinese city of Linfen, legendary as the most polluted in the world. But in Visit Sunny Chernobyl, Andrew Blackwell embraces a different kind of travel, taking a jaunt through the most gruesomely polluted places on Earth.
From the hidden bars and convenience stores of a radioactive wilderness to the sacred but reeking waters of India, Visit Sunny Chernobyl fuses immersive first-person reporting with satire and analysis, making the case that it's time to start appreciating our planet as it is—not as we wish it would be. Irreverent and reflective, the book is a love letter to our biosphere's most tainted, most degraded ecosystems, and a measured consideration of what they mean for us.
Equal parts travelogue, expose, environmental memoir, and faux guidebook, Blackwell careens through a rogue's gallery of environmental disaster areas in search of the worst the world has to offer—and approaches a deeper understanding of what's really happening to our planet in the process.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Driving though the irradiated wastes around Chernobyl or traversing the deforested frontiers of the Amazon jungle rarely tops even the most seasoned travelers' must-see list, but this entertaining, appealing, and thoughtful travelogue covers some of the world's most befouled spots with lively, agile wit. Journalist and filmmaker Blackwell doesn't just present a list of environmental woes but undertakes provocative meditations on how to care about the planet while recognizing that plenty of people need to make a living, sometimes to the environment's detriment. Contemporary environmentalism is rife with contradictions, and as he ponders the impact of western Canada's oil sands, he notes: "Whether we're talking about recycling, or voting, or consumer choices... these are all attempts to square the circle, to mitigate or more often, to atone for our individual role in the disquietingly unsustainable system that keeps us alive." As his project to visit the wretched places of the Earth takes its toll on his personal relationship and well-being, he gives considerable thought to why he's doing it, realizing that he "love the ruined places for all the ways they aren't ruined." While he doesn't offer solutions or answers, the book does offer an astute critique of how visions of blighted spots create an either/or vision of how to care for the environment and live in the world.
