{"id":64854,"date":"2026-02-17T10:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-02-17T16:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.publicbooks.org\/?p=64854"},"modified":"2026-02-16T16:27:11","modified_gmt":"2026-02-16T22:27:11","slug":"recover-replant-return-talking-nuclear-history-writing-and-food-with-kate-brown","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.publicbooks.org\/recover-replant-return-talking-nuclear-history-writing-and-food-with-kate-brown\/","title":{"rendered":"\u201cRecover, Replant, Return\u201d: Talking Nuclear History, Writing, and Food with Kate Brown"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Kate Brown is a writer and a historian, an editor and a curator, a Soviet scholar and a gardener. She is the Thomas M. Siebel Distinguished Professor in the History of Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, with a reputation for integrating archive-based, journalistic, and creative modes of writing. It\u2019s a well-earned reputation, with five esteemed books\u2014most of them on the environmental history of nuclear landscapes, a new one on urban gardens\u2014plus fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, Carnegie Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities, American Council of Learned Societies, and more, and recognition with awards inside and outside the academy from the likes of the American Historical Association, American Society of Environmental History, and Organization of American Historians, and as a finalist for a National Book Circle Critics Award in nonfiction. Beyond the listing of the accolades is Kate Brown the person, someone colleagues look to for creativity and literary spark and readers look to for pushing conventional writing norms and opening up new forms of expression\u2014someone, I found out, who is very easy and fun to talk to. We caught up during a conference at a loud hotel caf\u00e9 that had us huddled in a corner making sure we could hear, trying to rise above the din. She spoke about her new work, Tiny Gardens Everywhere<\/em>, on the way to a longer conversation about her career, her ideas, and her passions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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B. R. Cohen (BRC)<\/strong>: You\u2019re a renowned Soviet historian and environmental historian of despoiled spaces, nuclear damage zones, and the like, plus someone fiercely committed to the craft of writing. You\u2019ve now written a book about urban gardens, which seems like a departure from the earlier work. The question, then, is how did\u2014<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Kate Brown (KB)<\/strong>: How did I get there?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

BRC<\/strong>: Basically, yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

KB<\/strong>: I spent 20 years writing about modernist wastelands, especially, as you said, nuclear history. I\u2019d go into the archives and think, When people find this out, it\u2019s going to change everything. And \u2026 and you\u2019re giggling, right, Ben? Because nothing changes and, in fact, not only does exposing the archive not deter things but we\u2019re having a nuclear renaissance. \u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n

BRC<\/strong>: The \u201cIf they only knew\u201d dream.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

KB<\/strong>: That\u2019s the one. And still, I keep writing catastrophe narratives about wastelands that contribute to a populace that feels paralyzed and anxious and unable to do anything. The problem is too huge and overwhelming. So there\u2019s that, my despondency over wasteland history, and, to your question about how I got here, there\u2019s this: I like to garden. And when I garden, I\u2019ve noticed, we don\u2019t have to go to the store to get produce. My garden is growing, we just go back there and pick something and make it for dinner. And I was thinking, as opposed to nuclear policy, that\u2019s something I have control over, my little tiny garden. It isn\u2019t helpless and hopeless. That got me more and more curious about the history of gardens and the history of how people gain control over their space and their food. Were people in the past like me, did they feel like they were in some historic maelstrom? If they did, how did they scrape by? I got into that question because of gardening, but then I connected the issue of self-provisioning with my other curiosity about cities of the future. As in, what place have small garden spaces, urban gardens, household garden, public gardens, played in ideas about the future?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

BRC<\/strong>: When I saw your title, my first thought was that it\u2019s a Victory Garden history. \u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n

KB<\/strong>: That\u2019s part of it yes, though the book is really about commons and people who are in the commons. Places where people have recreated common law right to food, fuel, and shelter, which they make manifest as land on the edge of the city. Like sand dunes and gravel and empty lots. People take the nutrients from growing food and return them to disparaged lands, they turn degraded dirt into productive soil, the most productive agriculture in yield reported in human history. But it goes beyond that, because they also create social conditions and ways to build connections, like with garden associations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

BRC<\/strong>: They create community.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

KB<\/strong>: They create community. Ebenezer Howard was a big name in the garden city movement\u2014<\/p>\n\n\n\n

BRC<\/strong>: This is in?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

KB<\/strong>: He\u2019s in England, it\u2019s the late 1800s, early 1900s, and he witnesses the social value and he goes, \u201cOh, garden communities create the first signs of a social welfare state. We have people with TB in a sanatorium all coming together to volunteer in their building. People\u2019s homes are burning down without fire insurance, let\u2019s take up a collection. We don\u2019t have anybody to look after the kids, let\u2019s create a child care center. Let\u2019s start summer camps.\u201d And later, the state picks up on these things and mimics them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

BRC<\/strong>: I take it you\u2019re thinking about commons in today\u2019s society.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

KB<\/strong>: Yes, because we have a lot of commons left in our cities, it\u2019s just that we don\u2019t talk about them that way. They are the spaces we devote to moving and parking cars, and I\u2019m thinking we\u2019re not going to need these big arteries and streets and parking lots because we\u2019re going to have little electric people movers, and so we\u2019re going to grow this space. We could let developers take it over, but with a change of ordinances and zoning permits and the like, we could instead keep these spaces collective and turn them into things like edible landscapes. Instead of curbside parking, you could have curbside gardens. Instead of needing parking spaces every time you build a condo, put garden spaces in the ground each time you build a new condo.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

BRC<\/strong>: Recover what too many think is not \u201cusable,\u201d right?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

KB<\/strong>: That\u2019s it, recover, replant, return. The book is about people doing just that in Europe and North America in the long 20th century, using urban agriculture as a kind of transformative politics.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\n Related readings <\/div>\n \n \n
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\n Public Thinker: Jayson M. Porter on Healing in Public<\/a>\n <\/h5>\n\n
\n \n Monica White <\/a>\n <\/div>\n \n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n\n \n <\/div>\n\n\n\n\n

BRC<\/strong>: When we started, I admitted I know you for historical work, true, but also for the ways writing is important to you. Not just scholarship, but for you as a person, as a voice in the world. I want to ask more about that. As in, how did you learn the craft, was that interest innate?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

KB<\/strong>: I always wanted to be a writer. But I didn\u2019t know anyone who was one and so didn\u2019t know how to become a writer. I landed in grad school at the University of Washington, less to get a PhD and more for insurance and to pay the bills while I pursued a freelance journalism career. I worked for the public television station for a weekly news show. Then I switched to a local NPR station, where I was a beat reporter. It was like \u201cBoeing\u2019s on strike!\u201d at 8:00 a.m, and I\u2019d have the story out by 4:00 p.m. It had to air, I had to get it done. The next day was a different story, say a controversy between Indigenous rights and hydropower, so I\u2019d go to Snoqualmie Falls. Daily stories on deadline. That taught me a lot.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I had another problem. I\u2019m there in grad school, I\u2019m supposed to be writing long-form history, and nobody is teaching me how to write. There was no such thing as creative nonfiction at the time, so I started taking fiction writing classes just to learn things like narrative arc, dialogue, and plot.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

BRC<\/strong>: Were you reading a lot? Fiction too?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

KB<\/strong>: Yes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

BRC<\/strong>: Did the reading passion come first?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

KB<\/strong>: It really did. I got my first degree in Russian literature and I always thought, I know a lot more about what happened in the past from novels than from histories. Most histories fell flat for me. They didn\u2019t tell me how it felt, or what it looked or sounded like to be there. That\u2019s what I wanted to know.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

BRC<\/strong>: I remember how much I felt I learned about Russian agriculture from Anna Karenina<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

KB<\/strong>: That\u2019s so great. And you learn about the War of 1812 from War and Peace<\/em>, the feeling, the mood, the tone. Which means, I was reading all these amazing dense theoretical texts in grad school, and I would also go to the movies or read a novel and I could see how the authors or directors were appropriating the big ideas I found in the scholarly texts and placing them in their art. So why can\u2019t we do that as historians? Why do we put the big ideas through filters and make them less readable?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

BRC<\/strong>: Did you get pushback on that impulse?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

KB<\/strong>: Oh yeah. I wanted to write my dissertation as an intermittent first-person travelogue! It made sense to me that way. Most of my advisors thought that was a bad idea.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

BRC<\/strong>: What was it?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

KB<\/strong>: It became my first book, A Biography of No Place<\/em>. It was about a border zone between Poland and Russia in the early 20th century densely populated with different ethnic groups. There were Jews, Poles, Germans, Czechs, Swedes living relatively peacefully and then, after 25 years, they\u2019re all gone. Except for Ukrainians. The Soviets came in and emptied it. The Germans came in an emptied it. The Chernobyl accident finished No Place off. To tell the story, I had to travel. I had to go to places where people were deported or fled. I wanted it to be a first-person narrative in order to talk about the quest and problems involved in trying to tell the history of a place and people that no longer existed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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BRC<\/strong>: How did you get to Russia? Like, how did your training from grad school lead you to Russia and Ukraine?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

KB<\/strong>: I went to Russia when it was still the Soviet Union as a student. Then I worked for the American Collegiate Consortium for East-West Cultural and Academic Exchange run out of Middlebury College, which was part of a Bush-Gorbachev student exchange agreement. It was an older retired diplomat and me, a 21-year-old. My job was to arrange to send the American students wherever they wanted to go in the Soviet Union. If they wanted to go to Yakutia, we would send them to Yakutia. And then after three months and then six months, I would check on them, and I would solve their problems. That was \u201988 to \u201991. The Soviet Union was on fire during those years. I\u2019d watch as people dug in a church courtyard, pulled out some skulls, and said \u201cLook, see this bullet hole, our Communist Party did this, they killed our people.\u201d Soviets were using history to take apart the Soviet Union. That is power. I remember thinking, \u201cI want a piece of that.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I wanted to talk about the quest and problems involved in trying to tell the history of a place and people that no longer existed.<\/p><\/blockquote><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

BRC<\/strong>: Your background in Russian literature led you to an interest in Russian history, I can see that, but how did radioactivity and nuclear energy and nuclear pollution become a research focus for you?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

KB<\/strong>: In that first book, A Biography of No Place<\/em>\u2014which wasn\u2019t about nuclear power\u2014I included an epilogue about Chernobyl because that really was \u201cNo Place.\u201d Nobody was living there. So I put an epilogue there, and then I went to Chernobyl in 2004 when they first opened it to tourists.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

BRC<\/strong>: You visited from professional curiosity, or\u2014?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

KB<\/strong>: Honestly, I was interested because I came across a website by a Ukrainian woman named Elena. She had a motorcycle, a green Kawasaki, and a pass to go into the Chernobyl zone because her father had been a nuclear physicist there. She could just go in, saying it was the best place in the world to ride your motorcycle because there\u2019s no traffic and you can just zoom around. The thing that jumped out at me from her photos were those of letters and photographs people left behind in their apartments. Chernobyl occurred five years before the collapse of the Soviet Union. I felt in 2004 like our US empire was collapsing, and I wanted to know if late Soviet citizens could tell their country was collapsing ahead of time. So, I thought I would go to Chernobyl, not to look at the accident, but as an informal archive to read through people\u2019s journals and diaries.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

BRC<\/strong>: That was all from the website?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

KB<\/strong>: Yes. But hold on, because I went to the Chernobyl zone with an LA Times<\/em> stringer and our guide on the ground, Raita, asks me, \u201cWhat do you want to see?\u201d and I say, \u201cI want to see everything that\u2019s in Elena\u2019s website, those rooms with letters and photos.\u201d And she says, \u201cThat website was a fake.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

BRC<\/strong>: What?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

KB<\/strong>: She tells me, \u201cYeah, this woman showed up, she has this motorcycle helmet, and I was like, do you think that\u2019s going to protect you from the radiation?\u201dAnd Elena supposedly told her, \u201cWell, my husband has a fetish for photographing me with my helmet on,\u201d so she just took a bunch of photographs and added props to make it look better. I\u2019d been totally set up, she made it all up. There were very few real letters. Her website was staged.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

BRC<\/strong>: Well that took a turn.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

KB<\/strong>: Right? But worse yet, then the LA Times<\/em> stringer wrote about me, stupid professor. But you asked how I got interested in Chernobyl and that was it. After that whole experience, an editor saw the story and I ended up writing about being hoodwinked and how without the gatekeepers of an archive, it\u2019s really hard to tell what the truth is. I used the whole episode to talk about how stupid I was, but also about all the work that happens before historians can substantiate a story. And without those people there, without a town anymore and archivists and heat and lighting, there is nobody to say \u201cThis is real and this isn\u2019t.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

BRC<\/strong>: But you didn\u2019t write about Chernobyl right then, right? I\u2019m not sure if I have your timeline right.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

KB<\/strong>: An editor asked me to write a history of Chernobyl after A Biography of No Place<\/em>, that was 2004, 2005, but I thought, There\u2019s too much attention on Chernobyl right now.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

BRC<\/strong>: This is despite your ill-fated trip after that website duped you?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

KB<\/strong>: That\u2019s right, but what I was reacting to was that even before that, in the \u201990s, I\u2019d spent a lot of time in Ukraine in the fallout zone, and when I was there I noticed that in Siberia there was a place where Soviets made plutonium called Mayak that had two times more spilled radiation than Chernobyl. And everybody was talking about Chernobyl and nobody had heard of Mayak, so I thought I\u2019d write about Mayak. That\u2019s in Plutopia<\/em> [from 2013].  But the thing is, I thought if I only wrote about Mayak everybody would say, \u201cYeah, the Soviets are just screwed up. First they had Mayak and then they had Chernobyl, they just don\u2019t know how to manage nuclear power.\u201d Except I\u2019d been living in Washington State for 10 years and I realized that Hanford, where Americans made plutonium, had almost the same number of spilled contamination, about 350 million curies. How did that happen? Two totally different societies and economies and one is supposed to care about its citizens, the other is supposed to not, but they have the same volume of environmental toxins. I decided to write about them alongside each other.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\n Related readings <\/div>\n \n \n
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\n \"\"<\/a> <\/figure>\n <\/div>\n\n
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\n Public Thinker: Ashant\u00e9 Reese on Food Geographies and Food Justice<\/a>\n <\/h5>\n\n
\n \n \"\" <\/a>\n \n B. R. Cohen <\/a>\n <\/div>\n \n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n\n \n <\/div>\n\n\n\n\n

BRC<\/strong>: This might sound like a digression, but I saw the panel at AHA you organized last year (2025) on \u201cHistory Unclassified,\u201d which is a section of the American Historical Review<\/em>. Years earlier, your grad school advisors warned you away from going rogue inside the profession by violating common professional writing protocols. But in that panel, you mentioned an experience trying to get an article published about Ukraine that went against common convention too, and led to the \u201cHistory Unclassified\u201d series. I promise I\u2019ll get us back on track, but can you say more about the origin story of that series?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

KB<\/strong>: Well, I was getting sick of reading, oh, I shouldn\u2019t say this\u2014<\/p>\n\n\n\n

BRC<\/strong>: Oh, go ahead, please.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

KB<\/strong>: Okay, so I sent an article to the AHR<\/em> and, yes, it was a weird submission. It was a screenplay that was fully footnoted. It was based on research I was doing in archives in Ukraine and Belarus having to do with Chernobyl. So your question isn\u2019t actually a big digression. As part of the research, I had to pay a former Soviet journalist who was elected as a deputy to the parliament before the fall of the Soviet Union. She was on a commission in 1991 investigating who was responsible for the Chernobyl accident and all of the health problems that ensued. Three nuclear plant operators went to jail, but nobody believed they were solely responsible for the accident. The journalist-parliamentarian realized the Soviet Union was falling apart and she xeroxed the commission investigation documents during one long night because she understood the whole parliamentary commission would disappear with the collapse of the Soviet Union.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

BRC<\/strong>: And she was right?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

KB<\/strong>: She was right. She cited a snippet of what turned out to be a 45-page transcript of a top-secret politburo meeting with Gorbachev. All the big players were there. It occurred July 6, three months after the Chernobyl accident, and they were discussing what happened, who\u2019s responsible, was this American sabotage or the KGB?, things like that. The head of the KGB says something to the effect of, \u201cActually it wasn\u2019t American sabotage as much as we wish that were the case.\u201d In the midst of this, guys like Gorbachev are making moves. He\u2019s a real player, he\u2019s using the accident to clean house and get rid of the people he thinks are standing in the way of his proposed reforms and put in new people.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

BRC<\/strong>: That\u2019s dramatic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

KB<\/strong>: Exactly what I thought. So I made this document into a screenplay. I liked the format of the stage\u2014action from different times could be configured alongside one another onstage, a spatial rather than chronological narrative form. I figured out where they met at this gilded, mahogany table, an oval table with Gorbachev at the front and all these guys showing up who were bald because they had been at the Chernobyl site and lost their hair. I set the scene and they are talking and I wrote stage directions to give the context.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

BRC<\/strong>: What\u2019s a screen direction in that case?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

KB<\/strong>: I couldn\u2019t write extra dialogue because that would be fiction. So I put all the historian interpretation in the director\u2019s notes. Screen directions would say characterize historical actors and give their biographies, like that. On another side of the stage the lights would go up on a man, a former nuclear operator, in a hospital ward\u2014he says what he wrote in a letter I found in the archive to somebody in the Soviet government, where he says, and I\u2019m paraphrasing here, \u201cYou guys told us how to run these plants, but this exact same accident occurred in 1975 in Leningrad and you revised the manual, but you put in special instructions in small normal print where you needed upper case letters.\u201d Then I wrote how other people came in and gave their view of the accident to the politburo men. It was a way that I could have things happening asynchronously but brought together by the stage.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

BRC<\/strong>: This was your submission to the AHR<\/em>?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

KB<\/strong>: Yes, I sent it to AHR<\/em>, and it was all footnoted, it was my interpretation of the accident. I say to the editors, \u201cI know this isn\u2019t your normal format. I know you expect a thesis paragraph and then the author goes through a discussion of sources, and then another discussion of the historiography, and so on.\u201d I tell them I don\u2019t know why AHR<\/em> has to have this one boilerplate for an article, but I would like you to consider my screenplay written in a fictional format, but it\u2019s nonfiction, it\u2019s history. I told them the story about how I got that document. I had to buy it from that woman, that former journalist, former parliamentarian. She charged me 600 Euros for it and it was a cloak and dagger transaction. Alex Lichtenstein was the editor and he sent it just to members of the board.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

BRC<\/strong>: And?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

KB<\/strong>: They hated it. I mean, except for one who said, I guess you could publish it, though I knew that was my friend. I told Alex, \u201cLook how mad they are! Look how engaged they are!\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

BRC<\/strong>: Was it the style violation that upset them?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

KB<\/strong>: That\u2019s the long and short of it, yes. They didn\u2019t engage with the format, let\u2019s put it that way. Alex was great, he was trying to decolonize the AHR<\/em> at that time and that was part of my message too\u2014only certain people can have the research support to produce the kind of article that gets published in the AHR<\/em>. It takes hundreds of archival references and the funding for that travel and time. So we talked and he asked, \u201cDo you want to start a section that does something different?\u201d Of course I said yes, I\u2019d love to. I thought, \u201cIf this kind of experimental narrative format could be published in the AHR, a journal of record for historians all over the world, maybe that could start to chip away at the boilerplates of history writing we\u2019ve adhered to since the 19th century.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

BRC<\/strong>: It\u2019s been going for about eight years now; it looks like you\u2019re nearing 60 separate contributions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

KB<\/strong>: Yeah, and that\u2019s what the AHA session (New York, 2025) was about.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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BRC<\/strong>: I should let us get back on track then. We were talking about Soviet history before I jumped in to brag that I was at AHA.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

KB<\/strong>: Though still, the two are connected, for sure. For me, it\u2019s been about finding the most effective ways for people to care about history. And a lot of my work after the earlier stint in journalism did feel, indeed, journalistic. It was just through other venues.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

BRC<\/strong>: Your book Manual for Survival<\/em>, from 2019, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Nonfiction. I saw a review in the Economist<\/em> that called it \u201ca magisterial blend of historical research, investigative journalism and poetic reportage.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

KB<\/strong>: I worked on that after Plutopia<\/em>, from 2013, where I also tried hard to bring a more journalistic sensibility to the work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

BRC<\/strong>: Like what you said about grad school days, freelance reporting on Boeing in the morning, working the NPR<\/em> beat.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

KB<\/strong>: It felt that way. I\u2019ll give one more example, if we have time. This is from what became Manual for Survival<\/em>. I found a treasure trove of documents in Ukraine\u2019s Ministry of Agriculture records, and I knew it was a story. The papers were about the food chain, they were measuring food contamination, and it all keeps coming up radioactive. They\u2019re trying to figure out what to do next, I read in the documents; how to keep people safe. I hired a research assistant in Belarus and one in Ukraine and we tracked the story. We got down to the county hospital records. I felt like I was working like a journalist again, but with far more time and resources than a beat reporter. I knew I was fortunate, I had three years straight to work on this project thanks to Carnegie and NEH grants.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

BRC<\/strong>: What did you spend the time doing?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

KB<\/strong>: A lot of it was talking to people, because, at the time the records were produced, thousands of people were writing to their government to say, \u201cIn our town, the fallout clouds passed us by, but the trucks come from Chernobyl and they drive right through the town and it goes right by the school and the kids are all sick. It\u2019s this radioactive dust. And could you make a bypass?\u201d Just thousands of letters like that.     <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In our travels to the old sites, we saw all these people picking blueberries, industrial-scale blueberries along the swamp where the Chernobyl plant had been. Women and children would come out with these wooden baskets of blueberries and they\u2019d sell them to people with vans on the street. There were hundreds of vans buying blueberries.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So then we decided to go undercover blueberry picking. We went into the swamps and we picked berries and we sold them to the buyer, and then we followed the buyers to the warehouse, where the wholesaler was purchasing all the berries. She had a Geiger counter. I said, \u201cHow many of these berries are radioactive,\u201d and she said, \u201cThey\u2019re all radioactive, some are just really radioactive, like 3,000 bequerels a kilogram.\u201d The threshold at the time was 450. Some were cleaner berries, some were dirtier; they were all purchased and mixed together to get to the threshold. I wanted to know how far they went in consumer markets.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I got all the way to the US and kept searching. There I am in a Whole Foods in Washington, DC, with a Geiger counter in the freezer, scanning all the berries that are labeled \u201cwild.\u201d I didn\u2019t know if they were from Ukraine, it wouldn\u2019t have said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

BRC<\/strong>: Did you get looks? Or everybody\u2019s like, this is normal?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

KB<\/strong>: No, actually, nobody looked at me. There was a woman poking in the next freezer with her phone\u2014it looked a lot like my Geiger counter. But I didn\u2019t find any radioactive blueberries. So I checked homeland security records and I found trucks coming across the border from Canada to the US where the Geiger counters were going off. When I called the officer who signed that record, I asked, \u201cWhat was in the trucks?\u201d And he says, as if I scripted him, \u201cBlueberries from Ukraine.\u201d I needed to find that, because I knew that for the American audience, even if they felt sorry for Ukrainians, it\u2019s still a distant remote story. But when the blueberries are on their own breakfast table, then, suddenly, Chernobyl takes on new meaning.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

BRC<\/strong>: I like that we started in urban gardens as spaces of vitality and uplift, and we\u2019re ending along the traces of radioactive blueberries. They\u2019re the produce you left behind for your new tiny gardens.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

KB<\/strong>: That\u2019s true, and in all of it, whether Soviet, Ukrainian, or in a tiny garden, I\u2019d like the sum result of my history to be about people and their care around these issues. If that\u2019s about how you, the reader, thinks more carefully about waste, thinks more carefully about living in places where there aren\u2019t accidents, thinking about, in the least, not dumping nuclear contaminants and running away, then that\u2019s a good direction. If it\u2019s about spaces of uplift instead of places of desolation and decay, either way, I\u2019d like to have a political impact. You spend a lot of time and energy on a book, it drives you crazy, but still, for me, it should have a political objective.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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