BRAZIL: ARE THE STREETS LEFT OR RIGHT?

Last week, I think it was, I posted a couple of different pieces which analyzed the street uprisings in Brazil in very positive ways.  Yesterday, I found on a friends facebook page a very different interpretation in the way things are going.  The person who wrote the new piece is from Brazil and according to that person the people now in the streets have   lurched to the right and become basically a right wing populist movement who on top of everything else, including racist and homophobic actions, hope to end the "left leaning" Presidents term in office now.

I admit to not having done enough research to verify this latest conclusion.  I do know that there are many more middle class people in the streets of late than earlier in the uprising, so the possibility certainly does exist.  I am posting this new analysis in the hopes that people will read it and respond somewhere, if not here, and help to inform the rest of us as to what is going on.  My guess is that both are going on.  My guess is there is a right and a left and they are in struggle.  What I don't know is which side is more hegemonic at the moment.  What I obviously do not know is where it will all end up.

I don't know who to credit for this post, so I just will print it all with it's own introduction, which I believe was written by my friend in the first paragraph of the post.  I'll go ahead and give it a title of my own.

PS: take the translation issues in stride...

BRAZI:  ARE THE STREETS LEFT OR RIGHT?


This is a bit of a long analysis of events in Brazil taken from the Reddit Communism section and posted today to the marxism-request@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu blog site. It is interesting though.



I'm writing to you because I really can't think of anyone else to write,
and I (and my country) really need help. Right now, on the front page,
there is a post with 3000+ upvotes glorifying the protests occurring in
Brazil today. I need to tell someone, anyone, who's not in this country,
the real story behind what's really happening here. I figured, since you
people are in social justice movement, you'd be in a better position to
undestand.

I'm not sure if you have been following international news in the last two
weeks, so I'll summarise the facts. About two weeks ago, the major cities
in the country raised the bus and train fares to a value too high for the
average Brazilian (which does not speak English, does not visit Reddit and
in many cases doesn't even have Internet access) to afford. The rate of
this last increase was below inflation, but the accumulated rates of
increases in the last 10 to 15 years easily surpasses it.

MPL (Movimento Passe Livre, Free Fare Movement), an organization which
exists since the mid-2000s, and which is not affiliated to any political
party (although it does maintain communication with minority left-wing
parties), started calling for protests against the fare raise. The first
two protests didn't garner much mainstream media attention, but when the
third protest took over Avenida Paulista (Paulista Avenue), which is to S?o
Paulo what the Times Square is to New York, the newspapers started to
complain, painting protesters and the MPL as vandals and hooligans which
only were interested in destroying the city. They had, in fact, used public
trash bins as barricades against our violent PM (Pol?cia Militar or
Military Police, a direct heritage from our military dictatorship period),
which was using tear gas bombs, pepper spray and rubber ammunition on
protesters indiscriminately.

This third protest occurred on Tuesday the 18th. On Thursday, the day
scheduled for the fourth protest, two of the biggest newspapers in the
country printed heavily opinionated editorials calling for the PM to "take
action" and not be so "soft" on the protesters, and to defend the (mostly
middle-class's) right to cars to run on the city's streets. What happened,
then, was a massacre: the elite squad of the PM, Tropa de Choque,
transformed the fourth protest in a reign of terror. I wasn't there, but I
had close friends who were, and it was scary. The Tropa de Choque officers
managed to split the protest into various small groups, and stablished a
perimeter around the area so that no one could leave. They would surround
any small group they could and relentlessly throw tear gas bombs. A
journalist (and acquaintance of mine) was arrested on charges of carrying
VINEGAR (since it can be used to alleviate the effects of tear gas and
pepper spray). Two journalists were hit with rubber ammunition squarely on
their eyes, and one of them, a photographer, lost his vision (and most
likely his profession). Several journalists were arrested and injured, and
the mainstream media, mostly because some of their own were injured,
changed their discourse.

Since the disastrous procedure of the PM couldn't be buried under the rug
(mostly because the noise on social media was too high), the mainstream
media gave great exposure to this, instead. Throughout the weekend,
anticipation started to mount for the next protest, scheduled for this last
Monday. And that's when things started to get weird.

On Monday, the biggest (so far) protest occurred. At least 65 thousand
people were on the streets of S?o Paulo alone, although people who were
there were talking about figures of 200, 300 thousand. But it wasn't the
people, it was the middle/upper classes, and right-wing extremists.
Militants for small left-wing parties, who hold no political power
whatsoever, were openly harassed by "protesters". The protest agenda was
shifted right, mostly dropping the bus fare complaint to instead focus on
"corruption" (which, in Brazil, is a right-wing demand, since the party
holding the power is center-leftist), "high taxes", the "exploitation of
the middle-class", the excessive public spending for next year's World Cup
etc. The MPL and its demands were still present, but they were silenced by
the elitists' demands. The newspapers suddenly stared glorifying the
protests, and in the social networks memes like "O gigante acodou (the
giant has awakened)" started popping up, implying there has been no social
justice movement in Brazil before, which is a rampant lie - I can attest to
that, since I am part of left-wing and feminist movements myself.

On Tuesday, there was another protest. This time, people destroyed the
entrance to the City Hall in S?o Paulo. What's weird is that MPL, which
called for the protest, scheduled the date and set the rendezvous point,
did not go the City Hall's way. The rendezvous point was close to the City
Hall, but the route MPL set for the protest was exactly opposite of the
City Hall, and still a rather large group of people with national flags
(which, in Brazil, is usually a sign of far-right fascist movements) and
anti-taxes banners went that way. The PM, which was so ready to intervene
before, stood and watched as the same people who destroyed the City Hall
set a TV station van on fire on the middle of the street, according to
people I know personally and who were there. Less trustworthy, but
trustworthy (to me) nonetheless, rumours circulated on the social networks
implying the state governor (which holds authority over the PM) had
instructed the police -not to act- on any circumstances. The right-wing
agenda instead continued being broadcast by the mainstream media, specially
regarding the "impeachment" (lawful deposition, according to our
Constitution) of the legally elected president - who is herself hated by
the middle and upper classes, and adored by the lower classes. The
nationalism on this protest was so thick you could smell it, as the fascism
of it.

On Wednesday, S?o Paulo's mayor and the state governor (who are from rival
political parties) went on TV together to announce the bus fare increased
had been cancelled. The MPL scheduled another protest today, to celebrate
the decision, but is has been another disaster.

This time, there was confront between the protester themselves. Left-wing
protesters have been harassed. There are reports of anti-racism, feminist
and anti-homophobia activists being beaten by right-wing protesters.
Fascist skinheads have been spotted on the general surroundings of the
protests, looking for victims. And the media is now reporting all the
protests have been PACIFIC, which is an absurd lie. And the social justice
people, on the social networks, have been conjuring a theory that actually
makes sense, regarding our recent history.

In 1964, our country has suffered a coup d'?tat perpetrated by the military
and the establishment forces together. In the days preceding the coup,
there was uprising and political instability on the country, just as today.
There was a big protest, aptly named "Walk of the Family With God For
Liberty", which took place a mere two weeks before the coup, and on which
about half a million middle and upper class people took the streets to
protest against the center-left president Jo?o Goulart. What I mean is, we
have been there, we know the feeling in the air, and the anger of the
middle class against a president who has some pretty left wing policies is
boiling and ready to explode.

>From what I've seen, today's protest was very much akin to this 1964's
Walk. The MPL's protests have been hijacked by the right, and since the
left won't leave the streets to them, conflicts and confrontations are sure
to take place. And, what's more dangerous, the police is now ignoring it,
waiting for the popular clamor to call them back into action, so they can
take over, possibly together with the military. There are rumours of a
state of siege being prepared on the government dark corners.

I'm very worried, because these people who have "awakened" and who are now
on the streets are people who look back to a time when they had unlimited
and unchecked privileged, and who are so upset because that privilege has
been slowly being taken away from them. They are people who hates on
minorities, and who stand for exactly the opposite what I believe [you
stand] for. And, mostly worrying, they have the full cooperation of the
mainstream media, who had already shifted the protests' focus away from the
bus fare and towards their demands since Monday.

Their discourse is becoming hegemonic, and if that happens, it spells a
very dark future for my country. And that is happening on the mainstream
media on Brazil, and now, as I see, on Reddit too. So please, if you can do
anything to help shed a light on the OTHER side of those protests here,
being it a meta post on prime (I mean, you don't have to take my word for
it, Google Translator does an acceptable job on Portuguese to English
texts, and I can link you to non-mainstream media news sources that will
tell you the exact same story I've told), or anything really, I'd be really
thankful.

I'm sorry for my bad English and for wasting you time with our 3rd world
problems, but again, this is one of the only places I think I could be
heard on Reddit.

Thanks in advance.

THE STATE IS SPYING ON YOU, DUH, WHAT ELSE IS NEW

I never have been able to figure out what all the fuss is whenever we learn something "new" about  the State spying on its people, listening in on their phones, monitoring their emails, looking at their facebook pages, and on and on and on.  I ask myself where is the surprise in all this.  Spying on the people and much worse is the legacy of the USA and is a big part of its history (and is pretty much this case with every other State around as well).  I would be shocked if the government wasn't watching me.  I would feel kind of bad, like I wasn't worth the effort or something.  It is what THEY do.  

The State knows it is the enemy of its own people.  The State knows that some of those people some of the time might be up to "something."  So they listen and watch.  

Sometimes I think they let us know about this just to make us even more paranoid, to build fear in the people, to make the security state seems that much more necessary.  After all, what the State is saying is "you can't trust anyone."  Then they throw in either drugs, or crime or terrorists, or always "the other" and tell us you should all be very scared, you should all understand that the State is really here to protect you...and for those of you who mean the State ill, you should know we are just over your shoulder or just behind your computer screen.

Get over it my friends, the State is the State.

And then I realize that my life experiences are not the life experiences of most people and consequently every time a new revelation comes out,  it actually does seem NEW and not the sort of thing that went on YESTERDAY.  

White people, even white progressives seem to be as prone to fall into this nonsense as much as the next person...sometimes more so.   White people have not experienced the history that people of color have and do experience.  White people in America have grown up with this bizarre picture of a fair and just America.  White people have been taught all their lives to fear everyone that doesn't look and act like them.  

So I guess I shouldn't be surprised when they are surprised...and really shocked that even they might be the target of the State.

Even in the post below, Tim reports how this and that even happened in the 80s, that when he was doing solidarity work in the 80s he was shocked to discover they State was watching his group.  I wasn't, but then I had the experience of the 60s and the 70s already.  I'd already seen some of my FBI and other federal files via the Freedom of Information Act and through discovery at my trial.  But even all I saw then came as no surprise, I had already experienced it all, assumed it all, and seen it all.  I expected it.  I took a certain pleasure out of reading my files.  It felt a little good that THEY cared and they THEY exerted energy and resources on little old me.

The following is from the blog of Tim Wise.

Whiteness, NSA Spying and the Irony of Racial Privilege

It’s not that I’m not angry.

It’s not that I’m not disturbed, even horrified by the fact that my government thinks it appropriate to spy on people, monitoring their phone calls — to whom we speak and when — among other tactics, all in the supposed service of the national interest.

That any government thinks it legitimate to so closely monitor its people is indicative of the inherent sickness of nation-states, made worse in the modern era, where the power to intrude into the most private aspects of our lives is more possible than ever, thanks to the data-gathering techniques made feasible by technological advance.

That said, I also must admit to a certain nonchalance in the face of the recent revelations about the National Security Agency’s snooping into phone records, and the dust-up over the leaking of the NSA’s program by Ed Snowden. And as I tried to figure out why I wasn’t more animated upon hearing the revelations — and, likewise, why so many others were — it struck me. Those who are especially chapped about the program, about the very concept of their government keeping tabs on them — in effect profiling them as potential criminals, as terrorists — are almost entirely those for whom shit like this is new: people who have never before been presumed criminal, up to no good, or worthy of suspicion.

In short, they are mostly white. And male. And middle-class or above. And most assuredly not Muslim.

And although I too am those things, perhaps because I work mostly on issues of racism, white privilege and racial inequity — and because my mentors and teachers have principally been people of color, for whom things like this are distressingly familiar — the latest confirmation that the U.S. is far from the nation we were sold as children is hardly Earth-shattering. After all, it is only those who have had the relative luxury of remaining in a child-like, innocent state with regard to the empire in which they reside who can be driven to such distraction by something that, compared to what lots of folks deal with every day, seems pretty weak tea.

As Yasuragi, a blogger over at Daily Kos reminded us last week:

(This is) the nation that killed protesters at Jackson and Kent State Universities…The nation that executed Fred Hampton in his bed, without so much as a warrant. The nation that still, still, still holds Leonard Peltier in prison. The nation that supported Noriega, the Shah, Trujillo, and dozens of other fascist monsters who did nothing but fuck over their own people and their neighbors. The nation of Joseph McCarthy and his current-day descendants. The nation that allows stop-and-frisk.

Before all that: The nation that enforced Jim Crow laws. Before that, the nation that built itself on slavery and the slave trade. And before all of that, the nation that nearly succeeded in the genocide of this continent’s indigenous peoples.

So why are you so surprised that our government is gathering yottabytes of data on our phone calls?

Let’s be clear, it’s not that the NSA misdeeds, carried out by the last two administrations, are no big deal. They’re completely indefensible, no matter the efforts of the apologists for empire — from the corporate media to President Obama to Dick Cheney — to legitimize them. A free people should not stand for it.

Problem is, we are not a free people and never have been, and therein lies the rub.

The idea that with this NSA program there has been some unique blow struck against democracy, and that now our liberties are in jeopardy is the kind of thing one can only believe if one has had the luxury of thinking they were living in such a place, and were in possession of such shiny baubles to begin with. And this is, to be sure, a luxury enjoyed by painfully few folks of color, Muslims in a post-9/11 America, or poor people of any color. For the first, they have long known that their freedom was directly constrained by racial discrimination, in housing, the justice system and the job market; for the second, profiling and suspicion have circumscribed the boundaries of their liberties unceasingly for the past twelve years; and for the latter, freedom and democracy have been mostly an illusion, limited by economic privation in a class system that affords less opportunity for mobility than fifty years ago, and less than most other nations with which we like to compare ourselves.

In short, when people proclaim a desire to “take back our democracy” from the national security apparatus, or for that matter the plutocrats who have ostensibly hijacked it, they begin from a premise that is entirely untenable; namely, that there was ever a democracy to take back, and that the hijacking of said utopia has been a recent phenomenon. But there wasn’t and it hasn’t been.

Reaction to the most recent confirmation of this truth ranks right along with the way so many were stunned by the September 11 attacks. The shock in that instance also came from a place of naiveté, wrought by the luxury of believing that the rest of the world viewed us as we did: as a paragon of virtue, which had brought only light and happiness to the world, rather than military occupations, hellfire missiles, brutal and crippling economic sanctions, and support for dictators so long as they were serving our presumed interests. But some people — and again, they were mostly black and brown — were not stunned at all. Having long had no choice but to see the nation’s warts for what they were, and having never possessed the benefit of viewing America as most whites had, peoples of color, while horrified by that day’s events, were hardly likely to be knocked off stride by them. They had always known what it was like to be hated. And hunted. And solely because of who they were.

For myself, I long ago stopped being shocked by anything the empire did in the service of its continuity. Ever since I was in college, and it was revealed that the Central American solidarity group of which I was a member was being actively spied on by the FBI, I’ve taken it as a matter of faith that such things were probably happening, and that it would have been silly to the point of idiotic for me to assume such surveillance were a one-off thing, confined to the inner-workings of the Reagan Administration.

By 1988, at which point I was still a Democrat — hoping against hope to turn that party in a truly left direction — the realization that the government was actively spying on its citizens was fully concretized for me. It was then that I was disallowed from riding in a campaign motorcade for Michael Dukakis (despite being the head of the largest College Democrats chapter in the New Orleans area), because my activism against U.S. policy in Nicaragua and El Salvador had earned me an FBI file and caused me to fail a Secret Service background check.

So yeah, the government is spying on you precious. And now you’re pissed?

This is the irony of privilege: the fact that some have for so long enjoyed it, in its largely unfettered state, is precisely why some of those those same persons are now so exorcised at the thought of potentially being treated like everyone else has been, forever; and it is also why the state was able to get away with it for such an extended period. So long as the only possible targets were racial and religious and class others, shock and outrage could be kept at a minimum. And so the apparatus of profiling and monitoring and snooping and data collection and even targeted assassination grew like mushrooms in the dark. And deep down, most of the same white folks who are now so unhinged by the mere possibility — and a remote one at that — that they will be treated like those others, knew what was going on.

And they said little or nothing. White liberals — with some notable exceptions — mostly clucked their tongues and expressed how unfortunate it was that certain people were being profiled, but they rarely spoke out publicly, or challenged those not-so-random searches at the airport, or dared to challenge cops when they saw them harassing, or even brutalizing the black and brown. Plenty of other issues were more pressing. The white conservatives, of course, largely applauded either or both of those.

And now, because they mostly ignored (or even in some cases cheered) the violations of Constitutional rights, so long as the violations fell upon someone other than themselves, they are being freshly confronted with the surly adolescent version of the infant to which they gave birth, at least indirectly. And they aren’t too happy with his insolence.

Yeah, well, tell it to pretty much every Arab American, every Persian American, every Afghan American, everyone with a so-called Middle Eastern name walking through an airport in this country for the past decade or more. Tell them how now you’re outraged by the idea that the government might consider you a potential terrorist.

Tell it to the hundreds of thousands of black men in New York, stopped and frisked by the NYPD over the past fifteen years, whose names and information were entered into police databases, even though they had committed no crime, but just as a precautionary measure, in case they ever decided to commit one. Tell them how tight it makes you to be thought of as a potential criminal, evidence be damned.

Tell it to brown folks in Arizona, who worry that the mere color of their skin might provoke a local official, operating on the basis of state law (or a bigoted little toad of a sheriff), to stop them and force them to prove they belong in the country. Explain to them how patently offensive and even hurtful it is to you to be presumed unlawful in such a way as to provoke official government suspicion.

Tell it to the veterans of the civil rights struggle whose activities — in the Black Panthers, SNCC, the Young Lords, the Brown Berets, and the American Indian Movement, among others — were routinely monitored (and more to the point actively disrupted and ripped apart) by government intelligence agencies and their operatives. Tell them how incredibly steamed you are that your government might find out what websites you surf, or that you placed a phone call last Wednesday to someone, somewhere. Make sure to explain how such activities are just a step away from outright tyranny and surely rank up there alongside the murder and imprisonment to which their members were subjected. Indeed.

And then maybe, just maybe, consider how privilege — being on the upside, most of the time, of systems of inequality — can (and has) let you down, even set you up for a fall. How maybe, justmaybe, all the apoplexy mustered up over the NSAs latest outrage, might have been conjured a long time ago, and over far greater outrages, the burdens of which were borne by only certain persons, and not others.

And yes, I know full well that some were speaking out, loudly and clearly from the start and have never stopped. I am not speaking to them (to you?), so relax (after all, if what I’m saying doesn’t apply to you, why so defensive, buttercup?) But so too, there are those who know (perhaps you?) if they are among those who, like Rand Paul or Glenn Beck or — for that matter — Edward Snowden had never before raised too much fuss about those other things, until it began to potentially affect them and people like them.

Or provide them an opportunity for some publicity. Hero worship. Perhaps (at least in their own minds) martyrdom?

Maybe it is time to remind ourselves that the only things worse than what this government and its various law enforcement agencies do in secret, are the things they’ve been doing blatantly, openly, but only to some for a long time now.

This nation’s government has killed hundreds of thousands in Iraq and Afghanistan, openly, in front of the world.

This nation’s sanctions on Iraq in the ’90s contributed to the deaths of hundreds of thousands more, by the admission of Secretary of State Albright. All of it, out in the open. No secrets.

This nation stood by and even helped propagate massacre after massacre — an attempted genocide even — in Guatemala throughout the 1980s; and not only did we not hide that we were doing it, President Reagan openly praised the architects of the slaughter while proclaiming they were committed to social justice.

We incarcerate 2.5 million people — and have roughly 7 million people under the control of the justice system in all — openly, and increasingly for non-violent offenses: more than any nation on Earth.

We have the highest child poverty rate in the developed world, and there is nothing secret about it. Our leaders don’t even care about covering it up. In fact, an awful lot of them just don’t care. At all.

These are the crimes of empire. These and a lot more. And it didn’t take Edward Snowden to tell you about them. They’ve been hiding in plain sight for a long time.

A RADIOACTIVE FOREST FIRE IN YOUR FUTURE, WHY THE HELL NOT

I have been busy all day long and have no time to write anything here, but I ran across this scary title and thought...be good for Scission readers.  You know me, always the voice of doom and gloom...and let's hear it for the formerly "existing socialism" led by the vanguard party known as the CPSU.  It's all capital to me...

The following is from Scientific American.

At Chernobyl, Radioactive Danger Lurks in the Trees

By Jane Braxton Little


For 26 years, forests around Chernobyl have been absorbing radioactive elements but a fire would send them skyward again – a concern as summers grow longer, hotter and drier

Chernobyl reactor Nos. 5 and 6 were under construction at the time of the No. 4 explosion and remain frozen in time. But forests in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone have been absorbing radioactive elements since the 1986 accident, and scientists fear a wildfire could trigger another release.Image: Flickr/Matt Shalvatis

CHERNOBYL, Ukraine – Most days Nikolay Ossienko patrols the forests surrounding the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, clearing brush and dead trees from the grid of fuel breaks that crisscross the 1,000-square-mile area. But on hot July afternoons, when black thunderheads loom on the horizon, he climbs a rusty ladder 75 feet up a rickety fire tower. When he spots smoke, he radios the six other towers to pinpoint the location, then trucks off to the blaze.

"Our number one job is to save the forest from fire," said Ossienko, a burly, blue-eyed Ukrainian whose warm smile winks with a missing tooth.

It’s a job with international consequences. For almost three decades the forests around the shuttered nuclear power plant have been absorbing contamination left from the 1986 reactor explosion. Now climate change and lack of management present a troubling predicament: If these forests burn, strontium 90, cesium 137, plutonium 238 and other radioactive elements would be released, according to an analysis of the human health impacts of wildfire in Chernobyl's exclusion zone conducted by scientists in Germany, Scotland, Ukraine and the United States.

This contamination would be carried aloft in the smoke as inhalable aerosols, that 2011 study concluded.

And instead of being emitted by a single reactor, the radioactive contamination would come from trees that cover some 660 square miles around the plant, said Sergiy Zibtsev, a Ukrainian forestry professor who has been studying these irradiated forests for 20 years.

"There's really no question," he added. "If Chernobyl forests burn, contaminants would migrate outside the immediate area. We know that."

Overcrowded pines


Combined with changes in climate, these overcrowded pines are a prescription for wildfire. In their assessment of the potential risks of a worst-case fire, Zibtsev and the team of international scientists concluded that much of the Chernobyl forest is "in high danger of burning."

Zibtsev has been worrying about catastrophic wildfire in Chernobyl since witnessing runaway wildland fires in the western United States while on a Fulbright Scholarship in 2005. He has watched the threat get worse each passing year. Rainfall in the region is decreasing and seasonal droughts are lasting longer, changes Zibtsev attributes to climate change. Scientists say these patterns of drier and longer summers are contributing to forest drying and increased insect attacks.

The predominantly pine forests themselves are part of the problem. After the explosion – the worst nuclear accident in human history – the area surrounding the power plant was evacuated, the fields and forests abandoned.


 To keep the contamination from moving beyond the area known as the "zone of alienation," the Ukraine government forbade all commercial activity. For forests, this meant a halt to logging, thinning and removing dead trees. While most of Ukraine boasts woodlands that are carefully manicured, the Chernobyl forests have grown into unmanaged thickets with dense brush below and lifeless canopies above.

The risk of fire in these forests has concerned scientists since 1992, a drought year when more than 65 square miles of forests burned. They know that these ecosystems are trapping radionuclides and slowly redistributing them in soil and vegetation, a process called "self-repair." In some places the contamination level is the same as it was in 1986, most of it in the top 10 centimeters of the soil. Absorbing cesium, plutonium and strontium helps contain radionuclides within the exclusion zone, but it dramatically heightens the alarm over wildfire.

Two-acre test fire


A 2002 test fire offers insight on the scope of the radioactive risk. Set to assess plume and radionuclide behavior, the two-acre ground fire near the failed power plant released up to five percent of the cesium and strontium in the biomass. A high-intensity crown fire would release much higher amounts than burning needles and leaf litter, said Vasyl Yoschenko, who set the fire and heads the radioecological monitoring laboratory at the Ukrainian Institute of Agricultural Radiology. Other studies predict that the fine particles emitted from a forest fire could be transported hundreds of miles away.

"Imagine going to bed at night knowing something like this could happen," said Chad Oliver, director of the Global Institute of Sustainable Forestry at Yale University, who has studied the region since 2005.

Oliver, Zibtsev and others began calling attention to the potential for another Chernobyl disaster at variety international and scientific conferences, but the issue drew little more than finger pointing. Until their 2011 study, no one had assessed the human health effects of a catastrophic wildfire in the exclusion zone.

A worst-case scenario


Led by Oliver and Zibtsev, scientists at several institutions in Europe and North America analyzed a worst-case scenario: A very hot fire that burns for five days, consumes everything in its path, and sends the smoke 60 miles south to Kiev. A separate worst-case study is underway looking at the risks for Sweden, Finland and other European countries heavily impacted by the 1986 explosion.

Women in their 20s living just outside the zone face the highest risk from exposure to radioactive smoke, the 2011 study found: 170 in 100,000 would have an increased chance of dying of cancer. Among men farther away in Kiev, 18 in 100,000 20-year-olds would be at increased risk of dying of cancer. These estimates pale in comparison to those from the 1986 Chernobyl explosion, which predict between 4,000 and over a million eventual deaths from radiation exposure.

Instead, the greatest danger from forest fire for most people would be consuming foods exposed to smoke. Milk, meat and other products would exceed safe levels, the 2011 study predicts. The Ukrainian government would almost certainly have to ban consumption of foodstuffs produced as far as 90 miles from the fire.

No need for evacuation


After years of anxiety, the results of the study surprised Oliver. People living outside the exclusion zone would not have to be evacuated. There would be no cause for panic in Kiev, he said.

But the predictions for Ossienko and his fellow firefighters are not so rosy. They would be exposed to radiation beyond all acceptable levels. In addition to "normal" external radiation, they would be inhaling radionuclides in the smoke they breathe – being irradiated both outside and inside.

On top of the significant health risks, these crews are utterly unequipped to fight large fires, Zibtsev said. At Ossienko's fire station near the Belarus border, four well-maintained fire trucks gleam inside a shed, all ready to roll. But the fire lanes designed to get them to a blaze quickly are untended, often blocked by fallen trees and brush. Ossienko is proud of the Soviet tank modified for firefighting with a 20-foot blade like a gigantic pointed cow-catcher. He says it can "crush trees and brush – anything." But reporting smokes by climbing fire towers is no one's idea of an early-warning system, and the lone helicopter occasionally available lacks even a bucket for dropping water on a fire.

'They're obviously not prepared'


The firefighters themselves are dedicated and hard working, Zibtsev added, but they don't have much professional training, protective suits or breathing apparatuses – standard equipment for American firefighters dealing with hazardous materials. "They're obviously not prepared for a major wildfire situation," he said.

The United Nations recently acknowledged the potential for another Chernobyl disaster and has mounted a $20 million sustainable development project designed to address wildfire and other environmental issues. 

The UN project recognizes – "finally!" said Zibtsev – that well-managed forests will contribute to the decrease of fire hazards within the region. Zibtsev, who is responsible for the program’s fire management system, and Oliver envision a four-pronged approach that starts with cutting trees out of the roads so firefighters have access. Modern firefighting and fire detection equipment should dramatically improve fire response time. And then? "Start thinning!" Zibtsev said.

All this will take time, said Oliver: "If we can live out 30 to 40 years and not have a big one, we might be a lot safer."

Meanwhile, Ossienko is at work in the heat of the Chernobyl summer, watching for smoke and, with the rest of the world, hoping for none.

This article originally appeared at The Daily Climate, the climate change news source published by Environmental Health Sciences, a nonprofit media company.