TED | 为什么要留在切尔诺贝利？因为它是家

中文讲稿

00:18

三年前，我站在离切尔诺贝利四号核反应堆一百码的地方，我的盖革放射量测定器，在量辐射度时就像疯了一样，我走得越近，它就跳得越疯狂，我的天哪。

00:36

我在核事故发生25周年之际去那里采写一份报道，你可以看到我脸上的表情此差事虽勉强，但有很好的原因，因为在1986年燃烧了11日的核火灾释放了比广岛的原子弹多400倍的辐射，而那石棺，覆盖在第四号反应堆上，是27年前草草建成的。现在又破裂又生锈，并泄漏辐射。

01:07

那时我在拍摄，我只想完成工作然后快速离去。但是，我看着远方的时候我看见由农舍传来的烟，我就在想，谁会住在那里？毕竟，切尔诺贝利的泥土，水和空气，是世上受污染最强的地方之一。而反应堆正正位于严密监管的禁区，又叫死区，的中心，还有，它是一个核警察州分，更有边防军助阵，你在任何时候都必须有核辐射测量计，你需要一个政府看守者，还有严厉的辐射规则和恒定的污染监测。即是说，没有人应该住在这里附近，但他们正是。

01:54

原来一个大概有200人居住的社區存在于那地带之中，他们是所谓的自我定居者。差不多所有都是女人，男人寿命短很多，除了因为辐射，部分是由于过量的喝酒和吸烟。意外发生时，数以十万计的人被疏散，但不是每个人都接受了这命运，这些女人，现在已经七八十岁，是最后的幸存者，并自然而然地违抗了当局部门的决定，回到他们祖传的家。他们这样做是违法地。正如一个女人向尝试第二次疏散他们的一个军人说的一样：「射死我然后给我挖坟，否则，我要回家。」

02:40

他们为什么要回到这么容易致死的地方？他们是不知道有风险，或是无视风险，还是两样都是？事实是，他们所谓的生命和他们要冒的险是非常不同。

02:53

在切尔诺贝利附近有零落的空无一人的村庄毛骨悚然地沉默，奇异地迷人，田园般，完全被污染。很多在意外时就被铲平，但有少许就像这样，就像悲剧后寂静的残余。另外的有一些住客，一两位"babushkas"或"babas,"那是俄文和乌克兰语文，是祖母的意思。另一条村落可能有六七人。那这就是区域里奇怪的人口，一起被孤立了。

03:28

当我走向那个我在远方看到烟囱时，我看到HannaZavorotnya，然后我认识了她。她自我宣称是Kapavati村的村长，那里只有八个人。（笑聲）我和她聊天时，我问了她最明显的问题，她回答：“我不害怕辐射，但我害怕饥饿。”

03:49

你们要记得，这些女人在二十世纪最可怕的灾难中生存了下来斯大林三十年代时强迫饥荒，大饥荒杀了数以百万计的乌克兰人，当他们在四十年代面对纳粹时，经历了放火，杀人，强奸，事实上这些女人很多都被运到德国做强迫劳工。所以在苏联开始当道几十年后，切尔诺贝利灾难发生了，他们不愿意因为这个隐形的敌人而逃走。所以他们回到自己的村庄，并且得知他们会病，很快会死，但他们的逻辑认为，快乐的五年比起住在基辅郊区里的高楼大厦十年要好，和自己的母亲，父亲和孩子的坟墓分离，还有春天时鹳的翅膀的微微细语。对他们来说，环境核辐射可能不是最残酷的。事实上，对于其他生物来说这样的逻辑都同样存在。野猪，猞猁，驼鹿，他们都回到了现行的区域，核辐射的非常真实的负面效果其实还不如人类大批离去带给他们的好处大。所谓的死区，其实是充满生命的。

05:05

然后就有一种英雄式的复原能力，一种纯口语的实用主义，他们早上五点起床，从井里拿水，在半夜才休息。蓄势用棍子打一桶水然后吓走可能偷土豆的野猪，陪伴他们的就只有自制的家乡伏特加。他们当中有些共同的藐视：「他们告诉我们的脚会痛，当然它们会。但又如何呢？」那他们的健康呢？刻苦劳动的生活带来好处，但有一个我们明白少许的敌人：辐射带来的有毒环境，这是很难去解释的。当地的健康研究，是相互矛盾，有误导性的。世界卫生组织估计因切尔诺贝利事故引起的死亡人数最后会是四千。绿色和平和其他的机构认为会有数以万计的人因此而死。现在每个人都同意甲状腺癌极多，而由切尔诺贝利疏散出来的人当中，很多遭受搬迁的心灵创伤：更多焦虑，抑郁，酗酒，失业，和最重要的，扰乱了社会网络。

06:21

就像你们一样，我可能搬迁了20、25次。家只是短暂性的概念。我对我的手提电脑，比对任何泥土有更多感情。所以对于我们是很难明白，但家，是这个农村的整个宇宙；而且他们与这土地的联系是十分明显的。或者有可能因为这些乌克兰女人是由苏联教导，并由苏联诗人口述，对于这些主题的格言经常会从他们的嘴里漏出。

06:57

“如果你走，你就死了。”

07:00

“那些已离去的现在生活得更差；他们正因伤心而亡。”

07:04

“故乡就是故乡。我永远不会离去。”

07:08

听起来像信念，柔弱的信念，但这可能是事实；因为令人惊讶的事实：虽然没有学术研究，但真相似乎是这些回到了家乡的女人，住在世上最放射性的土地之一大概二十七年，事实上比接受了搬迁的人有更长的寿命。根据某些估计，大概高出十年。

07:34

这怎么可能呢？有一个理论：会不会是那些和祖先的土地，那些在她们格言中反映的因素，真是会影响寿命吗？乡土的力量，对于那部分的人来说似乎是缓和的。家和社会是比辐射更强大的力量。

07:59

现在不管有没有辐射，这些女人都步向死亡。未来十年内，区域里的居民会不在，返回一个野生的，放射性的土地；里面只有动物，偶尔会有大胆，狼狈不堪的科学家。在我认识她们的三年里面，这些祖母人数已经减半，但她们的精神，会留给我们一个新的模板，去思考和探索，有关大自然的风险，有关与家的连系，有关自我价值观和自决的心灵补品。

08:45

谢谢。

The End

英文讲稿

00:18

Three years ago, I was standing about a hundred yards from Chernobyl nuclear reactor number four. My Geiger counter dosimeter, which measures radiation, was going berserk, and the closer I got, the more frenetic it became, and frantic. My God. 

00:36

I was there covering the 25th anniversary of the world's worst nuclear accident, as you can see by the look on my face, reluctantly so, but with good reason, because the nuclear fire that burned for 11 days back in 1986 released 400 times as much radiation as the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, and the sarcophagus, which is the covering over reactor number four, which was hastily built 27 years ago, now sits cracked and rusted and leaking radiation. 

01:07

So I was filming. I just wanted to get the job done and get out of there fast. But then, I looked into the distance, and I saw some smoke coming from a farmhouse, and I'm thinking, who could be living here? I mean, after all, Chernobyl's soil, water and air, are among the most highly contaminated on Earth, and the reactor sits at the the center of a tightly regulated exclusion zone, or dead zone, and it's a nuclear police state, complete with border guards. You have to have dosimeter at all times, clicking away, you have to have a government minder, and there's draconian radiation rules and constant contamination monitoring. The point being, no human being should be living anywhere near the dead zone. But they are. 

01:54

It turns out an unlikely community of some 200 people are living inside the zone. They're called self-settlers. And almost all of them are women, the men having shorter lifespans in part due to overuse of alcohol, cigarettes, if not radiation. Hundreds of thousands of people were evacuated at the time of the accident, but not everybody accepted that fate. The women in the zone, now in their 70s and 80s, are the last survivors of a group who defied authorities and, it would seem, common sense, and returned to their ancestral homes inside the zone. They did so illegally. As one woman put it to a soldier who was trying to evacuate her for a second time, "Shoot me and dig the grave. Otherwise, I'm going home." 

02:40

Now why would they return to such deadly soil? I mean, were they unaware of the risks or crazy enough to ignore them, or both? The thing is, they see their lives and the risks they run decidedly differently. 

02:53

Now around Chernobyl, there are scattered ghost villages, eerily silent, strangely charming, bucolic, totally contaminated. Many were bulldozed under at the time of the accident, but a few are left like this, kind of silent vestiges to the tragedy. Others have a few residents in them, one or two "babushkas," or "babas," which are the Russian and Ukrainian words for grandmother. Another village might have six or seven residents. So this is the strange demographic of the zone -- isolated alone together. 

03:28

And when I made my way to that piping chimney I'd seen in the distance, I saw Hanna Zavorotnya, and I met her. She's the self-declared mayor of Kapavati village, population eight. (Laughter) And she said to me, when I asked her the obvious, "Radiation doesn't scare me. Starvation does." 

03:49

And you have to remember, these women have survived the worst atrocities of the 20th century. Stalin's enforced famines of the 1930s, the Holodomor, killed millions of Ukrainians, and they faced the Nazis in the '40s, who came through slashing, burning, raping, and in fact many of these women were shipped to Germany as forced labor. So when a couple decades into Soviet rule, Chernobyl happened, they were unwilling to flee in the face of an enemy that was invisible. So they returned to their villages and are told they're going to get sick and die soon, but five happy years, their logic goes, is better than 10 stuck in a high rise on the outskirts of Kiev, separated from the graves of their mothers and fathers and babies, the whisper of stork wings on a spring afternoon. For them, environmental contamination may not be the worst sort of devastation. It turns out this holds true for other species as well. Wild boar, lynx, moose, they've all returned to the region in force, the very real, very negative effects of radiation being trumped by the upside of a mass exodus of humans. The dead zone, it turns out, is full of life. 

05:05

And there is a kind of heroic resilience, a kind of plain-spoken pragmatism to those who start their day at 5 a.m. pulling water from a well and end it at midnight poised to beat a bucket with a stick and scare off wild boar that might mess with their potatoes, their only company a bit of homemade moonshine vodka. And there's a patina of simple defiance among them. "They told us our legs would hurt, and they do. So what?" I mean, what about their health? The benefits of hardy, physical living, but an environment made toxic by a complicated, little-understood enemy, radiation. It's incredibly difficult to parse. Health studies from the region are conflicting and fraught. The World Health Organization puts the number of Chernobyl-related deaths at 4,000, eventually. Greenpeace and other organizations put that number in the tens of thousands. Now everybody agrees that thyroid cancers are sky high, and that Chernobyl evacuees suffer the trauma of relocated peoples everywhere: higher levels of anxiety, depression, alcoholism, unemployment and, importantly, disrupted social networks. 

06:21

Now, like many of you, I have moved maybe 20, 25 times in my life. Home is a transient concept. I have a deeper connection to my laptop than any bit of soil. So it's hard for us to understand, but home is the entire cosmos of the rural babushka, and connection to the land is palpable. And perhaps because these Ukrainian women were schooled under the Soviets and versed in the Russian poets, aphorisms about these ideas slip from their mouths all the time. 

06:57

"If you leave, you die." 

07:00

"Those who left are worse off now. They are dying of sadness." 

07:04

"Motherland is motherland. I will never leave." 

07:08

What sounds like faith, soft faith, may actually be fact, because the surprising truth -- I mean, there are no studies, but the truth seems to be that these women who returned to their homes and have lived on some of the most radioactive land on Earth for the last 27 years, have actually outlived their counterparts who accepted relocation, by some estimates up to 10 years. 

07:34

How could this be? Here's a theory: Could it be that those ties to ancestral soil, the soft variables reflected in their aphorisms, actually affect longevity? The power of motherland so fundamental to that part of the world seems palliative. Home and community are forces that rival even radiation. 

07:59

Now radiation or not, these women are at the end of their lives. In the next decade, the zone's human residents will be gone, and it will revert to a wild, radioactive place, full only of animals and occasionally daring, flummoxed scientists. But the spirit and existence of the babushkas, whose numbers have been halved in the three years I've known them, will leave us with powerful new templates to think about and grapple with, about the relative nature of risk, about transformative connections to home, and about the magnificent tonic of personal agency and self-determination. 

08:45

Thank you. 

The End