2nd edition of The Chernobyl Herbarium: Fragments of an Exploded Consciousness
Thursday, May 7, 2026 at 3:09PM Together with Michael Marder and Anaïs Tondeur, we invite you to mark the 40th anniversary of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster with the second edition of The Chernobyl Herbarium: Fragments of an Exploded Consciousness.
The book is available as a free download via Open Humanities Press:
https://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/the-chernobyl-herbarium-2nd-ed/
'We entrust readers with forty fragments of reflections, meditations, recollections, and images — one for each year that has passed since the explosion… Through words and images, we wish to contribute our humble share to a collaborative grappling with the event of Chernobyl… taking stock of the consciousness it fragmented and, perhaps, cultivating another, more environmentally attuned way of living.'
Unthinkable and, in many ways, unrepresentable, Chernobyl continues to shape how we understand technology, ecology and responsibility. This edition offers a collective space for reflection - through text and images - on what it means to live with its aftermath.
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Also, don't forget to check out our earlier Ecological Rewriting: Situated Engagements With The Chernobyl Herbarium, edited by Gabriela Méndez Cota
https://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/ecological-rewriting/
Ecological Rewriting: Situated Engagements with The Chernobyl Herbarium (2023) was the first book in OHP's Combinatorial Books: Gathering Flowers series. Supported by the COPIM project, it was the creation of a collective of researchers, students and technologists from the Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico City. Led by Gabriela Méndez Cota, this group of nine (re)writers annotated and remixed The Chernobyl Herbarium: Fragments of an Exploded Consciousness (2015) by the philosopher Michael Marder and the artist Anaïs Tondeur (originally published in OHP’s Critical Climate Change series) to produce what is a new book in its own right – albeit one that comments upon and engages with the original.
The online version of Ecological Rewriting is an experimental publication with links to the original annotations that the group of authors made on The Chernobyl Herbarium, so that the reader can follow an associative trail between the two publications.