the unnatural — that too is natural
photo: DOE
THE Hanford Reach National Monument in the arid steppe of south-central Washington is a nature lover’s dream with the Columbia River flowing wide and free below chalk-white cliffs, an abundance of birds, and populations of deer, elk and coyotes. But there’s a twist: It surrounds the Hanford nuclear reservation, one of the world’s largest environmental clean-up projects.
There’s a nice set of photos, too.
Where else outside of the Ukraine can you get such plutonium chic?
Today marks twenty three years since the explosion at Reactor Number 4.
Otherwise, there’s no news. Construction of the New Safe Confinement (the shelter for the Shelter Object) is supposed to go forward sometime in the next year or so. You might want to visit the Sarcophagus while you still can…
I’m from Alberta, or at least was born there. I left when I was not even two years old, and have never been back. Ever since I was an arrogant little tyke, I’ve held a cherished image in my mind of the place where I come from as a magical zone of friendly cowboys and good, clean, Canadian common sense. And I’ve always wanted to visit.
A couple of interesting tours of the sewage world. Now someone needs to make a series of photos following sewage through the entire length of different sewage systems. People would eat that shit up. I mean, so to speak.
Good Magazine has Eric Smillie’s excellent roundup of five exquisitely trashy spots, all in the United States (except one in the Pacific Ocean). This is the first truly pollution-tourist-friendly article I’ve ever come across. Thanks to Adam Bolt for spotting it.
The list is garbage-focussed, but they all sound like excellent destinations, especially the giant trash pile floating in the Pacific. Smillie deserves special credit for not just rehashing the same lists of polluted places that everyone else has already gotten their teeth into. And he’s even got tips for how to get to each place and where to stay when you get there.
Hear that sound? It’s the zeitgeist sliding in this direction.
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Listmania never stops. At Neatorama I encountered a list of The Most Polluted Cities in the United States, as based on data from the American Lung Association. Pittsburgh and Los Angeles are duking it out for the title, with Pittsburgh moving to the top of the list for “short-term particle pollution.” In the LA Times, Mayor Villaraigosa crowed, “Today I’m proud . . . to say for the first time, it feels good to be No. 2.” And Outside Magazine’s blog phoned in some finger-wagging on Pittsburgh:
Congrats, Pittsburgh. Somehow, you beat out LA as the most-polluted city in America… You should probably start a public bike program, and pass some more green initiatives. In the meantime, pick up your phone. China’s calling. They have some facemasks to sell you.
Not so fast. (more…)
The mother of all pollution tourism itineraries has got to be the the World’s Worst Polluted Places, from an environmental NGO called the Blacksmith Institute. Any yahoo can throw together a grab bag of besmirchments, but the folks at Blacksmith are professionals. Not only do they have hardcore technical criteria and serious brainpower behind their selection process; they also try to be representative, geographically and by type of pollution.
This is only the second year for what everyone hopes will be a yearly tradition (can’t wait ’till the 2008 list comes out). TIME did a nice little slideshow about the list when it came out, but the seriously interested will head for Blacksmith’s site. It has a map, extra photos, and tons of information—a veritable treasure trove for pollution tourists everywhere. As Blacksmith President Richard Fuller says in the accompanying TIME article, “…we forget that ordinary pollution is still something that destroys a lot of lives. These cities aren’t on the tourist trail.”
Give it time, Rich. Give it time.
Elsewhere on the interwebs, Popular Science has put up a pretty weak list called the World’s Dirtiest Cities. (more…)
It’s easy to get caught up in the romance of exotic, faraway places when planning your pollution travels. Chernobyl. Linfen. Kanpur. These names conjure the romance and excitement that we’re all looking for. And what with all the air travel required (if you’re from America, at least), they offer you a chance to be not just a pollution-voyeur, but a part of the problem.
Yes, overseas travel is great. But let’s not neglect the virtues of places a little closer to home. Me, I live in New York City—a story of its own—and I’m dying to spend a day biking around that part of New Jersey on the other side of the Hudson that is so aggressively nasty-smelling. Exactly what are those guys brewing up?
For those of you who might be living in the fair environs of Houston, I point you to Port Arthur, TX. (more…)
We’re introducing a new section on Visit Sunny Chernobyl today. (That’s not the royal “we” there, by the way. It’s the optimistic “we”.) Every regular traveler (regular in that they would prefer to avoid toxic sludge, radiation, etc, while on vacation) has a list, or an idea of a list, of places he or she would like to visit. As often as not, the list has precious little to do with where a person actually will travel, but it’s still nice to have the list as an ideal. And the pollution tourist is no different. Yes, I have a list. And I’m going to reveal that list here. Gradually. Post by post. When I feel like it. A few of the places I’ve had in the back of my mind for years. Others are the product of recent eureka moments, or have been suggested by friends.
Thus is born the Destinations section of our humble site. (If you can think of a name that sounds even more like a section of Parade magazine, please let me know.) These will be the posts that explore the pollution tourist’s dream vacations. And though I fully intend to visit all these places myself in the months and years ahead, I’ve got special prizes for any person out there who first gets to any of our featured Destinations and sends me some photos and a report.
Anyway. There’s been a heat wave in New York City. A sultry (or, if you like, oppressive) closeness hangs in the air, and whatever you’re doing, you find yourself suddenly sweatier than you had expected. The spring is out of Spring’s step. Actually let’s face it, Spring isn’t stepping at all anymore. It’s stopped in its tracks, stunned and overtaken, undone by the heat. The euphoria that came with the end of Winter is long gone, and there’s a bit of dread about the hot months unfolding before us, a yin-dread that fits perfectly hand in hand with the yang-dread you get on a cold November day when you see Winter stretching out in front of you.
In short, it’s Summer. And so unless you’re a communist or something, it’s time to think about the beach.
The main problem with the beach, aside from all that sand and water and sun, of course, is the presence of so many other people. And for some reason, beaches just shouldn’t have too many other beachgoers around. No beach, whether it be on Long Island or in the Caribbean, is ever advertised as having more than, say, three people on it, and one of those people is supposed to be you, looking much better than you actually do in a bathing suit. (The other two people allowed on advertising beaches are attractive, sexually available members of the opposite sex.) These idealized beaches are completely pristine, their sands virginally white, their waters a supernatural indigo unseen even in Oliver Sacks’s weirdest acid trip.
Reality usually diverges from this ideal, naturally, and the crowded, trash-strewn mediocrity of most beaches is the counterpoint to every magazine ad you’ve ever seen for the Bahamas. The idea of the pristine beach depends for its allure on our memories of sullied beaches, in the sort of structuralist codependency that used to turn college students on. I once saw a beach that managed to be both pristine and sullied at once. It was near Pondicherry, on the southeast coast of India. It was perhaps the most beautiful beach I’d ever been to, with miles of smooth sand and warm water. But then I noticed it was scattered with all kinds of shit. Literally shit. Maybe not all kinds, though—it was pretty much just human shit. The beach, though coveted by foreigners for its picturesque beauty, was valued locally for its usefulness as a toilet, and there were little bowel-ziggurats everywhere you looked. It was a nasty disappointment, unless you understood that the shit was actually guarding that beach, driving the crowds away like a little army of plucky brown sentinels. Standing there, surrounded by the morning bowel movements of an entire community, I realized that the problem with dirty beaches is not that they’re dirty, but that we wish they were clean.
Ok, I’m digressing. This whole post could have read, “Screw Cancun, I’m going to Sitakunda.” (more…)
A couple weeks ago K. and I were on vacation, and we headed down to Washington DC, my old home. Originally we had been thinking of going to Costa Rica, maybe Bogota, but then I thought of how many good friends we have in DC, and what nice guest rooms they have. So I thought I’d treat my gal to something a little more… free. She loves free. Right, sweetie? Sweetie?
Within the first couple of days, we had hit a good range of my favorite places, and Katie was tiring of hearing me say thing like, “This is the spot where I used to catch the bus in October ‘94,” and “Well I’ll be! That building wasn’t there before!” For my part, revisiting my old haunts was pleasantly nostalgic, but I was getting a little worn down by how it also reminded me of how long it had been since I first moved to DC, and how long since I left, and of how much things had changed, and of how even if I live to be a hundred, I’m still the better part of four fifths of halfway into the grave.
It was time for something new‚ and a little environmental degradation is always a pick-me-up. Pollution tourism in Our Nation’s Capitol! (more…)
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