In Conversation with Radioactive Plants: Reflecting on the Future of Contaminated Environments

This chapter discusses whether the analysis of contaminated spaces—in the present context, post-nuclear ones—could contribute to building new relationships between society and nature. Furthermore, it explores the role that radioactive plants can play in this process. Focusing on the nuclear disasters at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant and the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, this chapter proposes taking these contaminated environments as models for the future, not only in the sense that they constitute abundant ecosystems and as such could become humans’ only hope for any wildlife in the future, but also because such places constitute areas where new attitudes towards the environment are formed and negotiated. Plants play a crucial role in this process since they dominate in exclusion zones. In this sense, plant ethics can be understood as a new ethics for humankind because the anthropocentric image of the world has become obsolete and the need to create new communities is more urgent than ever. The knowledge that plants offer about survival could thus become the salvation of humankind.