A Radioactive Refuge: Caring for Contaminated Canids in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone

The effects of human political and economic systems on 'Nature' continue to expand and intensify in the Anthropocene -
the era in which humans have become a planet-changing force - causing spaces of contamination to proliferate (Tsing,
2015). From plastic-polluted oceans to radioactive zones, human ecological disturbance is becoming the norm; an
unavoidable consequence of human activity that humans and nonhumans must learn to live with (Haraway, 2016). As
contamination becomes omnipresent and intergenerational, it can no longer be placed in conceptual opposition to
pristine Nature. This project, therefore, aims to rethink notions of contamination and care for the Anthropocene as a
means of reorienting environmentalism towards ontologies of Nature more aptly aligned with the shifting ecological
baselines that emerge as a consequence of human activity (Castree, 2013; Hobbs et al., 2009). To do this, it will pay
specific attention to the human-Canid relations (dogs and wolves) that have emerged amongst conservation biologists,
the Clean Futures Fund (an animal welfare NGO), and tourists in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. In addition, the project
turns to the field of literary geographies (Hones, 2015). By analysing a set of sci-fi narratives that depict blighted
radioactive landscapes like Chernobyl to speculate on the future of humans and nonhumans in a contaminated world, it
will ask how we might configure relationships of care towards the nonhuman in contaminated spaces.