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This chapter examines the sciences, politics, and international cooperations that informed Soviet state responses to the Chernobyl disaster and how they produced an image of control over unpredictable and largely unassessed circumstances of risk. More specifically, it investigates the relationship between individual suffering caused by the Chernobyl accident and the technical measures and scales of expertise used to assess radiation-related biological injury in Ukraine. To this end, the chapter considers the work of international scientific networks in patterning initial Soviet remediation strategies and public health responses. It highlights key aspects of the initial Soviet management of the Chernobyl disaster and shows how ambiguities related to the interpretation of radiation-related physical damage subjected post-Chernobyl state interventions and medical surveillance to a variety of competing scientific and political interests. It also considers the so-called Safe Living Concept regarding radiation dose exposure and Soviet-American bioscientific collaboration report on radioactive fallout.

This chapter examines the experiential and political aspects of biological citizenship in post-Soviet Ukraine, with particular emphasis on the relationship between an emerging medical classification of the ill effects of the Chernobyl disaster and the social process of distribution of disability entitlements. Drawing on the experiences of three sufferers, the chapter considers the kind of experiences and social initiatives that have emerged between state medical classification and the redistribution of social welfare goods. It also explores the importance that Soviet administrators placed on the environment as a political tool to “normalize” catastrophe, and how that normalized environment influenced life stories and medical case histories. Finally, it discusses the ways that law, medicine, and corruption intersected with respect to the processing of disability claims.

This chapter examines the ethical positions of local scientists and clinicians from the perspective of Soviet and post-Soviet scientific trajectories as well as in relation to international scientific influences. More specifically, it considers how the radiation research process makes connections between ailments and the Chernobyl disaster real—that is, organic. It also explores how scientific and political pressures at the international level restrict local discourses on the health effects of radiation from the Chernobyl disaster and influence the processes through which the biology of such effects becomes an object of contested scientific understanding and research. Finally, it shows how patients become captives of a new sociality in Ukraine and describes the changing doctor–patient relations, along with the in utero research carried out, at the Radiation Research Center.

This chapter explores some of the prehistory of reception of the Chernobyl disaster in various aspects of Soviet-era life from the perspective of individuals and families living outside state-designated zones. The discussion focuses on events in a time when bureaucratic lines between sufferers and nonsufferers were just beginning to be drawn, and when other informal structures of accountability regarding state-related abuses were in place. From the perspective of one family, the chapter shows how individuals reached the limits of their ability to reason, narrate, and project futures in the context of an invisible nuclear hazard. It explains how life narratives and family histories reflected a vexed and complex history of Ukraine, but also how these histories informed interpretations of the Chernobyl experience.

This chapter examines crises and disasters that resulted from environmental pollution. It deals with pollution related to radioactivity and chemical wastes. In each of the pollution crises, people evacuated their homes temporarily or permanently, voluntarily or by force, but only after a lengthy exposure to the hazard. It describes key examples of these types of environmental pollution disasters, which include the Chernobyl nuclear plant disaster in Ukraine, the Nevada Test Site, and the Love Canal in New York. This chapter provides tips for preventing disasters and crises from environmental pollution.

Sometimes a crisis tests one's mettle and fires one's soul. This chapter presents a story of coping with fallout, Chernobyl-style. These reflections are offered from the author's journal, written while living in Germany during the Chernobyl disaster, which rained radioactivity throughout Europe, and especially in southern Germany. It was his American nuclear epiphany in Europe, which caused him to consider the whole culture of radiation he had been raised in since birth.

The environmental movement of the 1960s and 1970s overshadows a second, less heralded intellectual development that took place at the exact same time: the birth of “ecological economics.” A cluster of nonconforming economists in this period drew on the fledgling science of ecology to rethink many of the assumptions of neoclassical economics, with its “growthmania,” general indifference toward pollution and ecosystem destruction, and dogmatic belief that “tastes and preferences” are innate in humans rather than culturally shaped. What emerged was a new school of thought that integrated ecological concerns into an essentially capitalist economic framework. These iconoclasts brought together the dual nature of the Greek word “oikos” (literally: household), which is the etymological root of both “economics” and “ecology.” They asserted that the human “household” could not exist without a healthy and functional natural environment. This has become the essential insight of economic sustainability—the second “E” of sustainability: that the world needs economic systems that exist harmoniously with nature (and which promote social equality and justice). Those who practice the economics of sustainability in the present day— William E. Rees, Mathis Wackernagel, Peter Victor, Tim Jackson, Richard Heinberg, and many others—are the heirs of these early critics who challenged the hegemony of business-as-usual economics. First-wave ecological economics shares the readability of the classic environmental works discussed in the previous chapter. The main authors associated with ecological economics—E. J. Mishan, E. F. Schumacher, Kenneth Boulding, Howard T. Odum, Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, Herman Daly, Amory Lovins, and the members of the shadowy-sounding Club of Rome—went out of their way to write nontechnical books that were meant to appeal to the average-educated reader. Collectively, these authors ask deep and penetrating philosophical questions: What is the point of endless economic growth? What are the environmental costs of a wasteful and fossil-fuel-addicted consumer society? What is the best way to measure the well-being of a society? What is the role of economics in ensuring that human society remains within its ecological limits and avoids overshoot and collapse? How can nature, society, and the economy be studied as a single system?

A self-defined sustainability movement crystallized between the late 1970s and the 1990s. No longer was sustainability merely a concept or set of ideas. There was now a set of organizations—the Worldwatch Institute, the Rocky Mountain Institute, the United Nations (UN ), and so on—that promoted something called “sustainability” and a growing number of individuals who sought to “live sustainably.” Scholars began to describe in vivid detail what a sustainable society might look like and discussed in no uncertain terms the unsustainability of modern industrial society. In 1975, a conference was held near Houston, Texas, on “how a modern society might be organized to provide a good life for its citizens without requiring ever-increasing population growth, energy resource use, and physical output.” A stream of books between 1976 and 1981 drew on cutting-edge science and ecological economics to sketch out the “qualitative components of a sustainable society.” In the 1980s, sustainability became the centerpiece of international agreements; a strategy objective for at least some nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), businesses, and governments and a philosophy of balance and durability with a wide range of applications. It found its greatest champion in the United Nations though, which recast sustainability as “sustainable development” and integrated its principles into international accords. Sustainability had thus become part of a political agenda and a clearly articulated ecological philosophy, and a plethora of frameworks, systems, and models were developed as a means of studying, measuring, and advancing its central tenets. This is the period, for instance, in which the three Es appeared as the basic model for sustainability. By the 1990s, sustainists had begun implementing principles of sustainability into economic analyses, planning commissions (on all governmental levels), the energy sector, education, agriculture, housing, transportation, business operations, and many other domains. The media picked up on the term, too, and sustainability became, by the end of the century, a buzzword meant to signify anything associated with green values. This chapter offers a brief overview of the formation, triumphs, and challenges of the sustainability movement at the end of the twentieth century.