Posted on 15-8-2002

Environmental Socialist Revolution?
From www.globeandmail.com, by MARK MACKINNON, Tuesday, August 13, 2002 ­
Page A12

Intro by Alan Marston

As in many post-Soviet states, the authorities around Baikal do nothing to
hide their belief that pumping up the region's sagging economy is more
important than mitigating any damage their projects could do to the natural
surroundings. Such a view is far from confined to Russia, on the contary,
it was the view of the old state socialists, it is the view that underpins
the so-called global economy - it is a world view that has never gone away,
but simply re-dressed to please the eye of each succeeeding generation of
compliant consumers. The raw power of modern mass production has lent old
views a new productive force unseen in the world before. And now we are
witness to production's partner, destruction.

Socialist revolutions were masses of people acting to balance the excesses
of human exploitation that is endemic to industrialism and which some
governments were incapable of mitigating against. The next socialist
revolution is already underway, as masses of people act to balance the
excesses of exploitation that transcends people and governments and touches
every aspect of life. Will Russia be the scene yet again for the greatest
of human dramas?

.

IRKUTSK, RUSSIA -- Five time zones west from Moscow, just above Mongolia,
Lake Baikal is so clear that swimmers who brave its cold, tempestuous
waters would risk vertigo if they looked down. The lake fills a crevice
that runs 1,600 metres in depth and more than 600 kilometres in length. It
is also the world's largest source of fresh water, with more volume than
Canada's Great Lakes put together and enough to account for four-fifths of
Russia's supply. And as locals like to remind visitors, it is the world's
oldest lake, perhaps 25 million years old, which would make it 24 million
years older than just about any other.

Baikal, remote and rugged, has long been appreciated for its unique place
on the planet and unparalleled ecosystem. With more than 2,500 species of
plants and animals in its waters and along its shores -- three-quarters of
them endemic to the region -- it is as diverse a place as one can find in
Siberia. But if Lake Baikal was once seen as a living museum for Earth, it
is now being thrust into an uncertain future. As Russia hurtles into a new
century of free-market enthusiasm, its new capitalists want to build a
pipeline, several thousand kilometres long, from the world's largest
reservoir to the parched lands of China. The idea is about more than
improving Russia's exports. It has pitted entrepreneurs against
environmentalists in a struggle over the country's vast base of natural
resources, and how best to develop them.

At Lake Baikal, the two sides have been clashing for decades over using it
for industrial development, with the environmentalists mostly losing. For
45 years, a massive cellulose plant has been spilling chemicals into the
southern end of the lake that Russians reverently call the Pearl of
Siberia. "It's not that it's in a terrible place," one municipal official
said. "It's in a beautiful place. It just happens to make terrible
things." As in many post-Soviet states, the authorities around Baikal do
nothing to hide their belief that pumping up the region's sagging economy
is more important than mitigating any damage their projects could do to the
natural surroundings. Even Vladimir Fialkov, the chief scientist in charge
of studying Lake Baikal, envisions a day when Baikal water will be pumped
to China, and possibly to the thirsty billions of Africa, the Middle East
and the United States. "Our analysis shows it is the most pure water in the
world," said Mr. Fialkov, who heads the Limnological Institute in the
lakeside town of Listvyanka. Within minutes of meeting a journalist, he
pulled out a half-litre bottle of "Baikalskaya" fresh water and put it on
the table. "Please, try some," he said.

Some officials believe the only reason not to build a pipeline right away
is that as the world grows thirstier, demand will drive up prices and make
an expensive pipeline project easier to finance. The majestic lake is deep
enough to satisfy humanity's demands for another 50 years. "If it's
profitable to export oil and gas by pipelines, it will eventually be
profitable to export Baikal water by pipelines too," said Anatoli Malevsky,
chairman of the Irkutsk regional government's natural-resources committee.
"When the shortage of water is higher, the price of water will be higher too."

Baikal's value has long been known to Russians, just as it has long been a
cause for ecologists. At least 336 rivers and streams flow into the lake,
and its basin has for decades been a base for mining, timber and
shipbuilding industries. In Soviet times, schoolchildren were taught to
refer to the crystalline lake as the Sacred Sea, and practised drawing its
jalapeno pepper-shape in class. Then, in the 1950s, the government decided
to build the enormous cellulose plant on the southern shores, in the
village of Baikalsk. Local anger gave birth to the first real environmental
campaign of the Soviet era -- decades before Mikhail Gorbachev rose to
power. "Really, perestroika and glasnost were what gave the environmental
movement a chance to voice itself more loudly. But that first fight over
Baikal was the start," said Jennifer Sutton, head of the Baikal Ecological
Wave, an environmental group based in the neighbouring city of Irkutsk. A
pattern for the next 45 years of wrangling over Lake Baikal was set: The
environmentalists won a public-relations war and generally made life harder
for the bureaucrats who wanted to build the cellulose plant. In 1987, the
Gorbachev government ordered the Baikalsk mill to be "reprofiled" so that
its activities would be harmless within six years. In 1996, the United
Nations declared Lake Baikal a World Heritage Site.

Opponents of the mill acknowledge today it is one of the cleanest operating
plants in Russia. But environmentalists say many of their victories have
been hollow, which they fear will be the case again in their fight to stop
any plans for a water pipeline to China. New laws, including a tax on
polluters to pay for the damage they cause, are frequently dodged.
Moreover, a court recently ruled that the polluter-pay tax is
unconstitutional, leaving open the question of what regime, if any, the
government will introduce to
replace it. The decree to clean up the Baikal mill also led nowhere. The
plant continues to spew dioxins, sulphur oxides and chlorinated organic
compounds into the lake, polluting an area of more than 30 square
kilometres from its southern tip. "Building the plant there was one of the
biggest mistakes the Soviet government ever made," said Roman Pukalov,
chief Baikal campaigner for Greenpeace Russia. "The government knows that
now, but the plant is still there because of local corruption."

While Baikal remains startlingly pure, the location of several plants along
the Selenga River, its largest tributary, has meant that sections of the
lake are deteriorating. Inside the 30-kilometre zone around the cellulose
mill, there were once 30 species of crustaceans. Today, only four can be
found. Species of plankton crucial to the ecosystem have also disappeared,
and scores of Baikal's signature species, the nerpa freshwater seal, have
turned up inexplicably dead on the shores. Ms. Sutton worries most about
the plankton because they eat bacteria and thereby play a crucial role in
keeping the rest of the lake clean. While they can handle almost any type
of natural bacteria, the tiny organisms have proved no match for the tonnes
of industrial waste that have been discharged into the lake in recent
decades. "These endemic species are very sensitive to pollution," she said.
"You destroy the natural filter, you'll destroy the lake eventually."

In many ways, the continuing battle for Baikal, whether over the quality of
its water or its purpose, epitomizes the state of Russia's environmental
movement. The greens are waging public-relations battles, and winning some,
but have yet to declare victory. "We raised public awareness 40 years ago
[during the struggle against the Baikal cellulose plant]," one veteran
Russian environmentalist said. "But that's about it. Now, the situation is
worse, not better, than it was then." Part of the problem is that Russia's
system is not yet a truly democratic forum, and remains a place where the
most powerful vested interests eventually get their way. Last year, in its
biggest show of strength to date, the green movement collected 2.5 million
signatures calling for a referendum on two of the biggest ecological
questions facing the country: the government's plan to start accepting
foreign nuclear waste for storage, and President Vladimir Putin's plan to
abolish Russia's two main environmental-protection agencies. The country's
Central Election Committee, however, rejected the request, disqualifying
nearly 700,000 of the signatures for "technical reasons" such as
incorrectly filled-out passport details. That left the movement below the
two million signatures the Russian constitution requires to trigger a
referendum. The greens have not made another attempt.

While that failure could easily be laid at the feet of an obstructionist
political system, some veteran observers say it's also a sign that the
environmental movement in Russia has yet to catch up to its counterparts in
Western Europe and North America. "Without a civil society, there's no
pressure on politicians, and therefore there's no political will to get
things done," said Alexei Yablokov, a former top adviser to former
president Boris Yeltsin. "We have no civil society." Though the groups
spearheading the Baikal campaign -- Baikal Ecological Wave and Greenpeace
-- are among the most developed non-governmental organizations in the
country, they have not been able to penetrate the political process far
enough to influence decisions.

At the Irkutsk natural-resources committee, Mr. Malevsky has lost his
optimism about the lake's future, even as he promotes it as a source for
water exports. He said that in the two years since Mr. Putin came to
office, the closing of environmental-protection agencies and the transfer
of their tasks to the Natural Resources Department have meant fewer people
doing environmental monitoring and policing. "Nowadays, enterprises can
cause air pollution and water pollution and not pay at all," Mr. Malevsky
said. Budgets have also shrunk unexpectedly, leaving programs such as water
purification around the Baikal cellulose plant in the lurch.
"Unfortunately, over the last few years, we have seen a worsening of the
ecological situation across the country," he said. "A lot of ecological
programs are going to have financial problems because of this terrible
federal law."

In Canada and other Western countries, environmental groups and their
political allies would mount a public-relations offensive, leaking reports
to the media and lobbying sympathetic politicians to press the government
to reverse course. But in a remote corner of Russia, drumming up support
for the world's oldest lake has been as difficult under a democracy as it
was under the Soviet regime -- in part because the people fighting for
Baikal feel they are not yet living in a true democracy. "A developed
democracy has a developed civil society," Mr. Yablokov, the former Yeltsin
adviser, said in an interview. "In Russia, we're just not there yet. We're
allowed to take part in the debate, but we're not allowed to win."