Maria Mies
When, what we have theoretically known would happen does happen what then is the use of writing about it? The ecology movement, large sections of the women's movement, and other groups and individuals repeatedly campaigned against the construction of nuclear power plants, because nuclear power is a source of energy so dangerous that it cannot be controlled by human beings; a fact confirmed by the Chernobyl disaster and its aftermath. What purpose can be served by writing about it now? Should we not rather emulate those feminists who say: 'We are not responsible for this destructive technology. We do not want it. Let those men, or those patriarchs who are so enthusiastic about their technological dominance over nature now clear up the mess. We are fed up with being the world's housewives.'
This reaction is understandable, but does it help us? Women don't live on an island; there is no longer any place to which we can flee. Some women may feel that it is better to forget what happened at Chernobyl and to enjoy life as long as it lasts since we must all die eventually. But women with small children cannot afford this nihilistic attitude. They try desperately to keep children off the grass, because the grass is contaminated; they wash their shoes after they have been outside; they follow the news about the latest measurements of nuclear contamination in vegetables, milk, fruit, and so on, and become experts in choosing relatively uncontaminated food for their children. Their daily life has drastically changed since the Chernobyl disaster. Therefore we must ask: how has this catastrophe changed women's lives and their psychic condition? And what have women to learn from all this?
Everything has changed — everything is the same
Spring at last! Everything is green, flowers everywhere, it is warmer! After a long and depressing winter people long to get out of their houses, to breathe freely and enjoy nature. But everywhere there are invisible signboards which warn: 'Don't touch me. I am contaminated!' We can enjoy the trees, the flowers, the grass only as voyeurs, as if nature was a TV show, We cannot touch nature, we cannot communicate with nature as living natural creatures; an invisible barrier separates us. Those within whom an empathy for nature is already dead, those who have become machine-men, may not even mind. Their sensuality has already been reduced to a mechanical stimulus-response reaction. But those in whom it is still alive — the children and many women — experience this sudden separation from nature as a deep, almost physical pain. They feel a sense of deprivation, of loss. This barrier between themselves and the rest of the natural world seems to undermine their own life energy.
I met many women in April 1986 who felt that the Chernobyl event had destroyed their joie de vivre, as if radioactivity had already penetrated and broken their bodies. They reported not only depressions but also feeling sick; to look at children and the glorious spring made their stomachs turn and ache. Why go on? I had similar feelings when I had to face the young women and men who were my students. What was their future? What was the use of teaching and preparing them for a future profession? The physical radioactive contamination had become augmented by psychic contamination.
And yet women continued to live, to shop, clean, cook, go to their workplace, water the flowers, as they had always done. After Chernobyl, this meant more work, more care, more worries, similar to life in times of war. While the propagators of atomic energy, the scientists, politicians and economists still maintain that atomic energy is necessary to maintain our standard of living, women must worry where to get uncontaminated food for their family, their children. It is women who began to realize that this 'standard of living' had already been swept away. Can they still buy lettuce? Milk is dangerous, so are yoghurt and cheese; meat is contaminated. What to cook and to eat? Women began to search for cereals or milkpowder from the years before Chernobyl, or to look for imported food, from the USA or the 'Third World', Sweden flew in fresh vegetables from Thailand every week. What would happen when the pre-Chernobyl reserves were used up and when imports from non-contaminated countries stopped?
It was women who had to keep small children indoors, to keep them occupied, to pacify them. Those advocates of nuclear technology — and responsible for the Chernobyl disaster — the scientists and the politicians, simply decreed: 'Don't allow children to play in the sand!'
And what of pregnant women? What were their fears, their anxieties? How did they cope? Many asked their doctors if it was 'safe' to continue their pregnancy. Many felt isolated with their fears of perhaps giving birth to a handicapped child. Many others miscarried, without clearly being able to connect this to Chernobyl.
Women, both in the then Soviet Union and in the West, felt responsible for life. Not the men in science, politics, and economics, who are usually seen as the 'responsible' ones. It is the women who are afraid of contaminating their families, not their men. Women, not the politicians or scientists, feel guilty if they are unable to get uncontaminated food. As a woman from Moscow put it in May 1986: 'Men do not think of life, they only want to conquer nature and the enemy, whatever the costs may be!' (Die Tageszeitung, 12.5.1986). Men seem to be experts for technology, women for life, men make war, women are supposed to restore life after the wars. Can this division of labour be upheld after Chernobyl?
Some lessons — not only for women
What happened in Chernobyl cannot soon be undone. This technology is irreversible. We already knew this. What can we do? I think we must first draw the correct lessons from this event and then act accordingly to prevent worse catastrophies. These lessons are not new, but after Chernobyl they developed a new urgency.
1. No one can save herself or himself individually; it is an illusion to think that 'I alone' can save my skin. Industrial catastrophies like Chernobyl may happen far away, but their effects do not recognize political borders. Therefore, geographical distance is no longer a guarantee for safety.
2. What modem machine-man does to the earth will eventually be felt by all; everything is connected. 'Unlimited Progress' is a dangerous myth because it suggests that we can rape and destroy living nature, of which we are an integral part, without ourselves suffering the effects. As White Man has for centuries treated nature like an enemy it seems that now nature is hostile to us.
3. To trust those who call themselves the 'responsible' ones is dangerous. Chernobyl has shown clearly that the main concern of those 'responsible ones' is to remain in power. Politicians' arbitrary manipulation of permissible limits of pollution is clear evidence that science bows to political opportunity. The politicians' promise compensations only where they must fear election losses: traders and farmers. They would find the suggestion of compensating women for their extra work to protect their children absurd; such work does not appear as work and as labour costs. But all the work in the world cannot undo what Chernobyl has done to the environment.
4. Confidence in the ruling men in politics and science is dangerous, above all because their thinking is not based on principles of ethics. It is well-known that many scientists are prepared to do research which is morally questionable because it is paid for; in the US 60 per cent of scientists do research paid for by the Pentagon. Even scientists who warn of the dangers of nuclear energy and genetic engineering still distinguish between 'value-free' 'pure' research and applied research. At a public discussion on gene technology in Germany one of the leading researchers in genetic engineering, when asked where he saw the limits of scientific research said: 'I do not see such limits. In order to know whether certain technologies are dangerous we must first develop and apply them. Only then can the public decide, following democratic principles, whether these technologies should be used.' This means, in order to know the dangers of atomic energy, the atom bomb must be made and exploded. Similar arguments can be applied for gene technology. Many scientists' 'value-free' research is hindered by moral considerations, fears of the people, emotions, and particularly any financial restrictions by the politicians. Ethics and morality should have a say only after the research has been done, when the question arises whether or not it should be applied. Only then are ethics commissions created. But the final decision is left to the politicians. These, on the other hand, turn again to the scientists for guidance and expertise when they have to make difficult ethical decisions like fixing the permissible limits of contamination. In reality, both the scientists and the politicians are dependent on those who have the money to finance a certain technology and who want to promote it for the sake of profit.
5. It is dangerous to trust politicians and scientists not only because they have no ethics, but also because of their lack of imagination and emotion. To be able to do this type of research a scientist must kill in himself all feelings of empathy, all imagination that would lead to thinking about the consequences of this research. As Brian Easlea1 and the two Böhme brothers2 have shown, modem science, particularly nuclear physics, demands people who are emotionally crippled.
6. After Chernobyl the reactions of some of the leading 'responsible ones' in science and politics were extraordinary. Those who, for years, had assured us repeatedly that nuclear energy was safe, that the scientists had everything under their control, that their safety measurements were correct, in 1986 told the public that the figures shown on their Geiger-counter — 200, 500, or even 2,000 becquerel — were not dangerous, there was no need to panic. Both scientists and politicians minimized the danger, in spite of the high level of radioactivity measured by their accurate machines. Instead of 'believing' their apparatuses they told the housewives to 'wash the lettuce', to 'keep the children at home', to 'wash their shoes'. And the wife of Chancellor Kohl appeared on TV, buying and preparing lettuce, in order to show people that even the Chancellor's family did not believe the evidence of the high rates of radioactivity revealed by the Geiger-counters. Suddenly the old magic of science with its statistics and precise measurements is being replaced by an older imitative and picture magic.3 The public relations managers try to pacify the people by showing public salad-eating performances on TV by some scientists and politicians. Scientific organizations publish full page advertisements in which they reassure the public that 'scientific analysis has shown' that radioactivity so far measured was so low that panic or fear for health risks were unnecessary. These advertisements were financed by the nuclear industry (Frankfurt Rundschau, 12.6.1986).
7. Chernobyl made dear there is no 'peaceful' use of atomic energy. Atomic energy, and, too, the other new 'future' technologies, such as reproductive and genetic engineering, are war technologies. Not only were they developed as a result of military research financed, originally at least, by defence departments, but their methodology is based on the destruction of living connections and symbioses. Modern science means, as Carolyn Merchant has shown, warfare against nature. Nature is the — female — enemy which must be forced into man's service.4
8. But all the frantic endeavours to pacify the people also showed that those in power were afraid of the people, they were afraid of the people's fear, they were less afraid, unlike the women, that life on this planet could be destroyed. But women were no longer ready to listen to them: they went into the streets, they demonstrated and demanded an immediate end to nuclear power plants. Women saw fear and anger as the most rational emotions, as the most powerful energies to be mobilized in the months after Chernobyl. Everywhere spontaneous groups of 'Women Against Nuclear Power', 'Mothers Against Atomic Energy', 'Parents Against Atomic Energy' etc. sprang up demanding a halt to this war-technology against nature.
9. Chernobyl taught us the lesson that it is not those who demand an immediate opting out of nuclear energy who push us back 'into the Stone Age' but rather those who propagate this technology in the name of progress and civilization. They are, as became evident in the months after Chernobyl, the 'fathers of want' not those who have warned against this 'progress'. They are responsible for the fact that in the midst of abundant commodities there is a lack of the simple necessities of life: of green vegetables, of clean water or milk for children.
Atomic energy, but also gene- and computer-technology are often legitimized by the argument that it would take too long to change social relations and to develop an alternative to the prevailing scientific paradigm and its technology based on a different relationship of human beings to nature; women also use this argument and demand short term, 'pragmatic' solutions or technological fixes. Chernobyl, on the other hand, forced us to think in other time dimensions. We had no time to form a different relationship to nature. We now have to wait for 30 years till cesium 137 loses half of its radioactivity; the half life of plutonium is 24,000 years; that of strontium 90,28 years.
The ruin of Chernobyl will contaminate the surrounding area for many years to come, causing disease, death and despair for many people. These time dimensions are the outcome of technical solutions propagated by the 'realists', the 'pragmatists', of those who favoured quick results. If we reflect on these time dimensions we should at last ask the really important questions now. And we should no longer leave the questions of survival to those experts in politics, science and the economy. It is time to demand an immediate end to nuclear power plants, an opting out of gene-and reproduction technology and to begin to establish a new, benevolent and reciprocal relationship with nature. It is time to end the warfare against nature, it is time that nature is no longer seen and treated as our enemy, but as a living entity, of which we are an integral part.
Notes
1. Easlea, Brian, Fathering the Unthinkable, Masculinity, Scientists and the Nuclear Arms Race. Pluto Press, London, 1986.
2. Böhme, Gerhard, Hartmut Böhme, Das Andre der Venunft, 1987.
3. Neususs, Christel, Sie messen und dann essen sie es doch: Von der Wissenschaft zur Magie, in: Gambaroff et al: Tschernobyl hat unser Leben verändert. Vom Ausstieg der Frauen, rororo aktuell, Reinbek, 1986.
4. Merchant, Carolyn, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution. Harper & Row, San Francisco, 1983.