Chernobyl Nuclear Catastrophe: Existential Crisis from an Environmental Justice Perspective

This is one of the first studies on the nature and meaning of home in a post-Chernobyl world, based on the lived experience of the survivors of the Chernobyl nuclear catastrophe. The participants were refugees from the former Soviet Union, who had lived their whole life in little towns close to Chernobyl, were directly impacted by radioactive contamination of home due to Chernobyl nuclear catastrophe in 1986, and continued to live there for more than a decade, till they immigrated to the USA. Upon immigration, they resettled in Denver and live in a subsidized housing complex.

Data was collected in a series of deep in-person individual interviews. There were 8 participants, both males and females. Purposeful sampling procedure was applied. Moustakas's (1994) transcendental phenomenology method of data analysis was used in this research.

Based on the findings, Chernobyl nuclear catastrophe forever changed the participants' very fundamental, taken for granted, understanding of home, both on the local and the planetary scales. An ecological catastrophe triggered an existential crisis, making the participants acutely aware of the fragility of life (their own and life on Earth), of interdependence of local and global dimensions of home, from an ecological and existential perspectives. Based on the findings, implications for public health social work are discussed. Suggestions are made regarding specific intervention strategies and post-disaster planning of individual and community resilience, based on principles of ecological justice.