The Environment in the 20th Century: A Disaster Story

One of the key issues of 20th century world history involves changes in and anxieties about the natural environment. Human impact on the environment goes far back in world history, and the precedents are important. Agriculture, both in its settled and its slash-and-burn varieties, early involved deforestation and impacts on riverways. Several agricultural societies markedly altered their environments, and some may have perished as a result. Excessive grain growing reduced soil quality in part of the Middle East and North Africa, in some cases expanding desert conditions.

Modern environmental history adds three new factors to the old story of human impact and its frequent heedlessness. The first factor involves the massive increase in population. Handling human wastes, long a problem for some cities, takes on more general proportions. Efforts to expand the food supply, which so far, against some dire expectations, have been largely successful, involve use of chemical fertilizers and additional deforestation. The second new factor is the intensification and expansion of modern industry. Chemical pollutants jeopardize air as well as water quality, affecting rivers, lakes, and soils in many areas. Societies that have pressed for rapid industrialization as a means of catching up with the West have sometimes suffered particular problems, although the United States remains the world air pollution leader. By the 1990s one quarter of Russia was judged environmentally degraded. China, with its growing manufacturing as well as its vast population, was moving into the number two spot in generating air pollutants that cause global warming.

The third novel factor involves the international scale, as well as the extent, of environmental problems. Industry in the American Midwest affects trees in Canada, thanks to high smokestacks that spread chemical pollutants; the Ruhr mining and metallurgical center in western Germany has a similar impact on Scandinavia. International oil shipments recurrently generate ocean spills that affect many shorelines. The general increase in the international production of hydrocarbons is widely seen as raising temperatures worldwide, while global markets for certain minerals and agricultural products, inducing clearance of tropical rain forests, eliminate certain animal and vegetable species while reducing the production of oxygen. By the 1970s, international conferences began to take the global dimensions of the environment into account, and many countries pledged controls. But the tension between local economic expansion and more amorphous environmental criteria promised a long struggle to achieve effective implementation.

The document that I would like you to read deals with the most famous among several disastrous environmental “events” of the late 20th century: The explosions on April 25, 1986, that destroyed a nuclear reactor at the Chernobyl power plant in the Soviet Union (in the region that is now part of Ukraine). The result was an unprecedented meltdown that spread radiation over the whole region, with measurable increases in nations to the west and north. Twenty-six people died immediately; many others were injured and probably still more genetically damaged. Some who died from the explosion had to be buried in lead coffins, lest irradiated bodies further contaminate the soil. The account comes from Grigoii Medvedev, a nuclear expert who had held a high position at Chernobyl in the 1970s. He was assigned to report, and later wrote a book about, the whole catastrophe. In the first passage (that you can read by clicking here; read pgs. 86 and 87), he sketches some eyewitness accounts, and in the second (that you can read by clicking here; read pgs. 238-241) he describes his own visit, with a driver, Volodya, two weeks after the explosions.

It is important to note that this is only one of many examples of environmental “events.” An American chemical company operating in Bhopal, India, suffered an explosion that killed and injured far more people. A Japanese village experienced a series of deaths in the 1970s from chemical poisoning. An obvious question is: What general conclusions can be drawn from these recurrent if scattered events?

After reading the documents, I would also like you to reflect on and discuss the following: What happened at Chernobyl? What were the immediate environmental consequences? Why were initial reactions often casual? How does an event like Chernobyl fit into 20th century Soviet history? How does it fit into world history? Did the Soviet government seem to react vigorously to the disaster? Can and should governments be responsible for preventing such crises? Your thoughts…