The Seattle scientist Jonathan Golob recently directed me to a fascinating 2008 paper by Ekaterina Dadachova and Arturo Casadevall. Posted on the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) website, it concerns how “fungi cope, adapt, and exploit [the intense radiation at the site of the greatest industrial accident of the 20th century, Chernobyl] with the help of melanin,” the pigment that makes people like me black.
Melanin, which appears to be very old and is found “in all biological kingdoms,” not only protects fungi in extreme environments like Chernobyl but also spaceships orbiting the earth. The authors of the paper also believe that melanin might function in the manner of the energy-harvesting pigments in the leaves of plants (photosynthesis). This is called radiosynthesis, the conversion of gamma radiation into organic products (carbohydrates). There is more. The scientists suspect that melanin might have played an important role in the development of life on an early and very harsh earth. One more thing, microbiologist Ekaterina Dadachova, a co-author of the paper, thinks that melanized fungi could “serve as a food supply and source of radiation protection for interplanetary astronauts.”
Back to Golob. He writes:
One amazing thing (to me) about the aftermath of Chernobyl is the soil mold (fungus) has learned not only to survive the intense radiation, but actually use it to grow and make more copies of itself. Multiple well-done papers have described the fungus seeking out and growing around particles of (still) radioactive graphite from the former reactor core.
All of this, of course, brings up HBO’s superb miniseries Chernobyl.
Those who saw the third episode of this show will never be able to erase from their memory the gross images of the bedridden humans transformed into barely breathing monsters by radiation poisoning. This was the only horror. Not aliens from deep space, not zombies roaming country roads. It’s only what humans do to humans.
Chernobyl became so, so, so human that humans can no longer live anywhere near it. Its exclusion zone covers an area of 1,000 square miles. That could easily fit three New York Cities. (Fukushima’s exclusion zone is 311.5 square miles.)
Once a large zone becomes human-free, it transforms into what is called a Disaster Eden. Washington also has a famous Disaster Eden. It’s near the Tri-Cities, in an area, the Hanford Site, where the government of the previous century produced weapons-grade plutonium. Here, the key materials for one of the only two nuclear bombs ever dropped on a human population in the history of the world were manufactured. The waste was dumped into the ground. It did not go anywhere. It is still there.
What you will not find at Hanford are homes for sale, golf courses, land speculators. Instead there are scientific research facilities, a graveyard for the dinosaurs of the Atomic Age (nuclear reactors), and wildlife that’s thriving in the absence not so much of humans in the trans-historical sense but a very specific economic system that has unlimited growth as its conatus. The radiation is apparently not as deadly as capitalism. There are even deer in this area.
And this brings me to an important detail found in the miniseries Chernobyl and in the NCBI paper: “the pieces of graphite from the destroyed reactor.” The graphite (the black fungi loves them) is the key that opened the gate to the Disaster Eden. And the explanation for the presence of graphite in Chernobyl‘s cooling system reveals something that those who have a deeper understanding of the 20th-century economics have known all along. The state capitalism that emerged after World War II in the West was closely tied to the command economies of the socialist states. Both forms were responses to the crises of 19th-century laissez-faire (market-oriented) capitalism. One, for the survival of capitalism, increased government spending and welfare programs like the New Deal and social security; the other, to survive in a world dominated by market-directed progress, rapidly industrialized.
Moishe Postone writes in his masterpiece Time, Labor, and Social Domination:
The historical relation between the two implicitly indicates that “actually existing socialism” as well as the welfare systems in the West should be conceived not as fundamentally different social formations but as importantly different variations of the general state-interventionist form of twentieth-century world capitalism. Far from demonstrating the victory of capitalism over socialism, the… collapse of “actually existing socialism” could be understood as signifying the collapse of the most rigid, vulnerable, and oppressive form of state-interventionist capitalism.
What is it we learn in Chernobyl that’s so revealing? That the Soviet state tipped control rods with graphite, which proved to be dangerous when attempting to cool an overheating plant. And why were the rods tipped with graphite? It’s inexpensive. This detail should make you pause. How is it that costs were as a big concern for a socialist enterprise as they are for a capitalist one? You would think that socialism abandoned the profit-logic that makes planes and pet food deadly. But no. That logic was at the heart of the Chernobyl catastrophe. What this can only mean is that the two economic systems that defined the Cold War were not “fundamentally different social formations.”
