Jennifer Horgan: Humans’ ‘out of sight, out of mind’ attitude to disaster the real threat

Chernobyl is the worst nuclear disaster in human history, never to be glossed over, but this week I’d like to highlight something extraordinary that occurred in its aftermath. Specifically, the seemingly bizarre response to the disaster by a small group of rebellious women.

Holly Morris is the director of The Babushkas of Chernobyl — a beautiful, haunting, and provocative documentary about this remarkable reaction to the disaster that, on the surface at least, defies logic.

Babushka is the Russian name for grandmother. The babushkas of Chernobyl are the dozens of women, an ever-dwindling group, who refused to evacuate the radioactive dead zone around the nuclear site.

Initially, they were evacuated along with everyone else, along with those people who believed they were leaving home for a matter of days, destined never to return. Well, the babushkas were the women who did return, and who persisted in returning, until the authorities eventually turned a blind eye. Beyond child-bearing age, they were not considered a priority.

They are now elderly, of grandmother age, all women in their seventies and eighties. Babushkas.

The zone these old women call home is a setting like no other. Without humans, the area has been reclaimed by nature and is host to a flourishing community of wild deer, boar, and wolves.

These defiant women, who crawled back under barricades to go home, exist by growing food in the most toxic earth on the planet. They also manage the presence of soldiers, scientists, and, as the synopsis of the documentary words it, "'stalkers’ — young thrill-seekers who sneak in to pursue post-apocalyptic video game-inspired fantasies.” 

The film is described as a “a remarkable tale about the pull of home, the healing power of shaping one’s destiny, and the subjective nature of risk.” But it is not only about the subjective nature of risk, it is also about the role visibility plays in how we humans react to risk.

Invisible enemy

Put simply, when a threat is invisible, we humans struggle to respond appropriately.

Hanna Zavorotyna, one of the babushkas interviewed, highlights this in the documentary. She talks into the camera, explaining her intransigence, her refusal to leave, whilst slicing thick chunks of salo, raw pig fat. This activity alone is highly dangerous. One is warned against consuming anything grown or grazing in the infected area of the Exclusion Zone. None of that seems to bother her. She is comfortable with her choices.

“Starvation is what scares me, not radiation,” she says.

Hanna, as we discover, is well-versed in assessing visible enemies, and that visibility is key. As a child in Stalin’s Russia, and throughout Nazi occupation, she knew and understood war — the violence of it, the physical hunger felt and seen on the faces of loved ones, and neighbours.

In the Exclusion Zone in April, 1986, there was no invasion, no rumble of tanks, no bullets or bombs. There was no obvious imposition of hunger. There were facts about radiation of course, and plenty of warnings, and in recent years there is the eerie silence, the rush of wind through nature reborn, but these do not invite the same response in Hanna.

And so, the women stayed; they stayed, and they managed a real-life post-apocalyptic world ever since.

Hanna fascinates me.

She reveals a great deal about how humans generally respond to threat. We can admire her bravery, but her behaviour highlights a basic and potentially difficult fact: the visibility of a threat determines our response to it.

Look at how we are all standing up against war right now. We march and we rage into the abyss. We understand it as an evil, and we react in commensurate ways. Yet we are comparably immobile when it comes to what is less visible.

The thousands of people suffering in Ukraine, in Gaza, in Libya, Yemen, and elsewhere, are certainly deserving of our attention, our horror, our solidarity. But we struggle to summon the same swell of support for the thousands dying in floods and earthquakes across the globe. We fail to prepare against, fight against, the direst predictions for our world’s future. 

More than five million extra deaths a year can be attributed to abnormal hot and cold temperatures, according to the world’s largest international study on the impact of climate change, led by Monash University in 2021. But we can’t see the enemy in front of us. We can’t touch it. The images are not the same. The messages are not clear enough. An old person dying of heat in their sitting room looks just like an old person dying. Unremarkable. And so, our response, even our emotional response, differs.

There is a science to it of course. Vision is the primary sense we use to evaluate and respond to threats. If we have sight, we simply must see. And there seems to be a cruel irony in the fact that just as we are becoming more visual as a species, less inclined to believe in what is not visible, our biggest threats are becoming less discernible to the human eye.

This paralysis in the face of a less visible enemy is local as well as global.

We blame the vulnerable immigrants sheltering on our streets because we see them clearly. If they didn’t come here, we tell ourselves, we would have houses for all, for our own. We simultaneously ignore decades of poor policy, the ravaging of housing stock by vulture funds, and the machinations of a powerful elite who put together planning objections online. We see no irony in opportunistic politicians blaming our country’s ills on immigration, when their personal histories are filled with poor political decisions, their inboxes littered with objections against developments, against much-needed housing and change.

They get away with it because it is all so hard to see.

Similarly, we do little to prevent social media from infecting the minds of our young, encouraging unhealthy sexual habits and causing anxiety in children. If children are sitting quietly on the couch, up in their room, the danger is imperceptible, and so, we wrongly assume, not of any great concern.

As a society, we do little to defend children against this insidious harm. We fail to protect their mental health. If these illnesses were physical — if they arrived with a rash, some striking disability, we would do more, care more.

I don’t write any of this as a kind of damnation or judgement. I write it to suggest that our evolution as a species has tricked us into believing that threats come as threatening figures on the horizon. 

But the deadliest threats to our survival today, excessive power and wealth, viruses, climate disaster, and technology, come silently, with stealth.

It is deeply challenging, and to a degree the story of the babushkas makes me feel a certain compassion for us all, for our failure to see, a failure of design really.

But one thing is clear, ignoring these threats and staying put, just as we are, is not an option for us. We must help one another to see these threats more clearly. What has worked for the babushkas of Chernobyl, whatever their bravery, their beautiful doggedness, simply cannot work for us. The babushkas will die out, old and alone; their destiny is fixed. Our destiny, I hope, is not.