Visit Sunny Chernobyl

Andrew Blackwell sets out on a years-long quest to visit some of the world's most polluted places, not to condemn them but to experience them as a traveler. His project grows from an earlier trip to Kanpur, India, where he toured dysfunctional sewage plants and poisonous tanneries along the contaminated Ganges and found the experience more compelling than any conventional sightseeing. Struck by Kanpur's absence from any guidebook, Blackwell resolves to explore other ecological disaster zones as a pollution tourist, seeking whatever beauty and human life persist in landscapes the rest of the world prefers to ignore.

His first destination is the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone in Ukraine, site of the 1986 nuclear reactor disaster. In Kiev, he hires Olena, a journalism graduate, as his fixer and translator, and the two buy a portable radiation detector at an electronics store. Blackwell enters the zone with a driver and a young guide named Dennis. They visit a buried village, drive through the Red Forest where radiation reaches about 30 times New York City background levels, and explore Pripyat, a city of nearly 50,000 that emptied within hours of the evacuation order on April 27, 1986. In Pripyat's overgrown plaza, hotel, and kindergarten, nature has reclaimed the space human beings left behind. At the reactor complex, a staff member describes the deterioration of the Shelter Object, the concrete sarcophagus containing the shattered reactor. The zone's central paradox becomes clear: By keeping humans away, radiation has effectively created Ukraine's largest wildlife preserve. Blackwell later returns to infiltrate the zone by rowboat with Olena, paddling through an unguarded stretch of the Kiev Sea.

In Fort McMurray, Alberta, Blackwell confronts a different kind of environmental transformation. In 2008, approximately 1,600 ducks died after landing on a Syncrude tailings pond—a mining waste reservoir—sparking a national scandal over Canada's oil sands industry. Canada holds roughly 175 billion barrels of oil reserves, most trapped in oil sand requiring massive strip-mining and energy-intensive processing. Blackwell stays with Don and Amy, a couple who both work for oil sands companies and readily acknowledge working for "the dark side." He visits the Oil Sands Discovery Centre, a government-run museum with exhibits including a Dig and Sniff display and a Play Lab, and takes a Suncor bus tour that offers greenwashing and no view of the actual mine. Only when he hires a small plane does he see the full scale from the air: a crater punched through the earth where trucks that tower over people look like ants. Don, an engineer with an environmental science degree, embodies the nation's contradictions, expressing awe at his work while worrying about carbon emissions he estimates rival those of Los Angeles. The actual figure, Blackwell notes, is twice as much.

Port Arthur, Texas, links the oil industry's origins to its present. The 1901 Lucas Gusher at nearby Spindletop, drilled through the persistence of self-taught geologist Patillo Higgins and Croatian-born engineer Anthony Lucas, launched the petroleum age. Now Port Arthur is encircled by refineries, its downtown vacant and impoverished. Blackwell meets Hilton Kelley, an environmental activist who runs a soul food restaurant, carries a loaded handgun against those who see him as a threat to their jobs, and leads "toxic tours" of West Port Arthur, a historically segregated Black neighborhood hemmed in by petrochemical plants. After a tanker collision spills roughly 462,000 gallons of crude into the ship channel, Blackwell witnesses the cleanup ecosystem that blooms around such disasters. He visits Steven Radley, perhaps the last person drilling on Spindletop, whose new well comes up dry. Two days earlier, the Deepwater Horizon rig had exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, linking Spindletop's origin story to the petroleum age's ongoing costs.

Blackwell joins the crew of the Kaisei, a brigantine (a two-masted sailing ship), for a three-week voyage to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. He debunks the popular image of a solid plastic island, explaining that the Garbage Patch is an immense, diffuse accumulation of debris gathered by the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre, a vast oceanic vortex. The voyage is plagued by delays and crew departures, and the volunteers' confidence rests on the first mate, whom Blackwell dubs "the Pirate King," a compact man with golden earrings and encyclopedic nautical knowledge. At sea, the propeller fouls on a ghost net, a discarded fishing net that drifts the ocean entangling marine life, and the Pirate King dives overboard to free it. Blackwell grows frustrated with the mission's fixation on finding dramatic concentrations of trash at the expense of scientific rigor. After about 10 days, tensions between Mary Crowley (Project Kaisei's founder), the Pirate King, and the captain force a turnaround. On the return voyage, Blackwell spots what he believes is a current line of concentrated debris, but no one stops the ship. He reflects that he went looking for degraded ecosystems to treat as beautiful but instead just found beauty.

In Brazil, Blackwell arrives reeling from personal loss: The Doctor, his fiancée, met him at the San Diego wharf when the Kaisei docked and called off their wedding. He and his friend Adam, a filmmaker, travel to Santarém, where Cargill built a soy export terminal declared illegal multiple times for lacking an environmental impact study. They hire Gil Serique, an exuberant local guide. Adam's research reveals that soy accounts for less than a tenth of Amazon deforestation, and a moratorium brokered by the Nature Conservancy, Greenpeace, and Cargill has effectively halted soy-driven clearing in the area. Blackwell meets Father Edilberto Sena, an activist priest who insists conservation must include the people living in the Amazon, and Rick, an American wood importer who bought 2,000 acres of rainforest to prevent soy conversion but can no longer afford to keep it.

In China, Blackwell and his fixer Cecily Huang visit Guiyu, a town in Guangdong Province where thousands of family workshops tear apart imported electronics, exposing workers to lead and toxic fumes. He befriends the Han family and spends hours alongside their eight-year-old son Lang, prying plastic off circuit boards. Mr. Han acknowledges the health risks: "You have to give something to get something." Blackwell then travels to Linfen in Shanxi Province, declared the most polluted city in the world by the Blacksmith Institute in 2006. He finds smog and coal dust but also vibrant civic life in Drum Tower Square: elderly residents playing hacky sack, couples dancing, and calligraphers painting characters in water on the plaza stones. At a coal mine in the mountains, the miners are sharp and witty, contradicting the iconic "Sad Coal Man" photograph that symbolizes Linfen in Western media.

The final chapter follows the Yamuna River through India. In Delhi, Blackwell takes a rowboat onto the river, finding it dark with sewage and bubbling with methane. Most of the Yamuna's clean water is diverted upstream for irrigation, leaving Delhi's 14-mile stretch to receive nearly a billion gallons of mostly untreated sewage daily. He visits cremation grounds where men wade into the polluted water to sift ashes for gold fillings, and learns that over half a billion dollars in government cleanup programs produced treatment plants that mostly do not function. He travels to Braj, Krishna's holy land, to meet Shri Ramesh Baba Ji Maharaj, a guru who launched a yatra, or pilgrimage-style protest march, along the Yamuna to Delhi. Blackwell joins the march for several days, walking with sadhus (Hindu holy men) along a rural highway. On his last day, Sunil, the march's logistical manager, drives the group to Panchnada, a confluence nearly 300 miles downstream where four tributaries dilute the Yamuna's flow and the river emerges clean at last. The yatra's arrival in Delhi draws no press coverage. Throughout his travels, Blackwell returns to a central argument: The line between natural and unnatural is an illusion, the places the world considers ruined are still places where people live and work, and caring about the environment requires seeing the world as it is rather than mourning what it is not.