RUSSIA: For Lake Baikal, an Unclear Future
© 2001 The Washington Post Company
August 24, 2001
By Robert G. Kaiser, Washington Post Staff Writer
BAIKALSK, Russia - Of all Siberia's treasures, the greatest must be Lake Baikal, a wonder of nature. Baikal takes the breath away. Even the statistics about Baikal take the breath away. But Baikal is in grave danger, threatened by human stupidity and inertia.
This is no ordinary lake, but rather a geologically unique crevice or rift in the Earth's crust formed at least 20 million years ago, probably by colliding giant land masses. The deepest spot yet measured in the lake is 5,715 feet below its surface, and there may be deeper ones. The lake is 380 miles long and as much as 48 miles across. Baikal holds more water than all five American Great Lakes -- it holds one-fifth of the Earth's supply of fresh water. And the lake is still growing: The crevice widens slightly every year, and the water level rises about a millimeter.
Much of the lake is surrounded by cliffs that become steep mountains, a dramatic sight. At this time of year the lake is a grayish blue, and from the flat southern shore, the hazy sky turns the mountains in the distance into dark protrusions into the horizon. More than 300 streams and rivers feed the lake, but only one leaves it, the mighty Angara River. Baikal is home to 1,500 species, two-thirds of them unique, most lovably the Baikal seal or nerpa, whose presence suggests that this is as much an ocean as a lake. (Hunters now poach the nerpa because it brings a handsome price from Chinese fur traders.)
The lake is blessed with unique forms of epischura, tiny crustaceans that purify the lake's water remarkably. A bright object can be seen clearly through 600 feet of water.
But Baikal's cleanliness has been compromised by four decades of pollution from enterprises built near the lake or on its banks, most significantly the Baikalsk Cellulose Combinat, on the southern end of the lake, and a similar plant nearby on the Selenge River, one of Baikal's principal tributaries. This factory uses a chlorine treatment to turn wood pulp into cellulose, the raw material from which paper, cardboard and other products are made.
Its construction was authorized in 1966, over the objections of some of the Soviet Union's leading scientists. Pyotr Kapitsa, who later won the Nobel Prize, said at the time that introducing chemical waste from cellulose production into this unique ecosystem "can utterly destroy the favorable balance of nature and totally ruin the lake's purity." The old Soviet State Planning Commission approved the plant anyway.
But Kapitsa was right, and the lake has never been the same. It remains as clear as glass, but appearances can be deceiving. Scientists have traced two giant plumes of invisible chemical pollution that start at the cellulose plant here, and at the point where the Selenge enters the lake. These plumes overwhelm the lake's natural defenses, according to Gary Cook of Baikal Watch, an environmental group based in San Francisco.
In the southern part of the lake where these plumes have formed, the omul, Baikal's most prolific fish, has declined substantially in number. Now the government is trying to save the omul by restricting fishing, but ordinary citizens around the lake angrily defy the rules. According to Georgi Nurullin, a schoolteacher who lives on the eastern shore of the lake, the natives there "have to fish -- it's their life, they have to have it." These people and their ancestors have been living on omul for millenniums.
Interviews in Buryatiya, on the east side of the lake, and Irkutsk on the west, suggest that the pollution of Baikal raises enormous questions that no one seems equipped to answer. In today's Russia, governments don't have money to fund the most basic services, let alone to launch innovative and disruptive schemes of the kind needed to assure Baikal's future. And businesses see the world in the shortest of short terms: "No one thinks about tomorrow, or the day after," said one of Irkutsk's most successful entrepreneurs, Stanislav Ogorodnikov, partner in an independent television station.
There are rules and laws theoretically protecting Baikal, and a few significant steps have been taken. For one, the Selenge River cellulose plant has created a "closed loop" system meant to prevent discharges of pollutants. Environmental activists here are dubious, since the harmful chemicals have to be disposed of somehow, even in a closed-loop system. New laboratory studies of the Selenge's cleanliness may give a clearer idea of the effectiveness of this new system.
A law on Baikal passed by the Duma in Moscow in 1998 bans the burning of coal in power plants around the lake, to limit acid rain and air pollution. But "the laws don't work," according to Vladimir Belgologov, a geologist who created the Buryat Regional Association for Baikal, a citizens' environmental group in the Buryat Republic, whose territory includes most of Baikal's shoreline.
He is right. In Ulan Ude, capital of the Russian republic, the local electric power plant is planning to modernize and replace its coal-burning boilers -- with new coal-burning boilers. The "Law on Baikal" is more a declaration of high-minded intent than a serious legal impediment to pollution.
Belgologov's sardonic assessment: "Relax, the worst is yet to come." But he is not giving up. His organization, active and determined, is emblematic of something new in Russia, where, until quite recently, citizens demonstrated their enthusiasm for causes only when instructed to do so, and in the manner prescribed.
Now citizens' groups have blossomed all over the country, not least here in eastern Siberia. In Russia these are called "public organizations," or, by some participants, "NGOs" (the American abbreviation for nongovernmental organizations) or sometimes "noncommercial organizations." They are the early shoots of a movement its supporters hope can blossom into a real civil society. According to Belgologov, there are 300 such organizations registered in the Buryat Republic.
After 15 years in the trenches and, by his own account, very few successes, Belgologov is an experienced lobbyist who is invited to meetings of government bodies in Buryatiya where his issues are discussed. Nataha Travnikova, 20, enjoys no such status, but she, too, is a determined environmental activist. One recent Saturday she could be found here on the rocky beach of Lake Baikal leading "Brigade No. 3" of volunteers picking up trash and scrap metal along a stretch of the shoreline. They were part of a month-long campaign by Greenpeace Russia, which is hosting an international camp near here for volunteers who want to help Baikal.
Travnikova is studying journalism at Irkutsk State University (one of six colleges in Irkutsk offering a major in journalism). She runs the youth volunteer program for a well-established Irkutsk public organization, Rebirth of the Land of Siberia.
Her brigade -- nine women and two men, all of them of college age except one middle-aged woman -- was working less than a mile from the giant Baikalsk Cellulose Combinat. Luckily for the volunteers, the odors from the factory's smokestacks were blowing in the other direction. Was it really worth the effort to pick up the cigarette packs and beer bottles, when Russians seem used to the idea of dropping such items wherever they may be? "We're making a little progress," Travnikova replied. "People have heard that we're picking up the trash, and now a lot of them leave their trash in bags." But they still leave it. For the most part, changing Russian habits "is hopeless," she said.
Roman Pukalov, the bearded and charismatic director of the Greenpeace campaign for Baikal for the last six years, agreed with Travnikova about that. In an interview at the Greenpeace camp, on the banks of a fast-moving Siberian river 200 yards from the lake, Pukalov said using volunteers to try to keep the lakeshore clean was "useless -- it will revert to the same condition it was in in a week, or a month, or a year."
But Pukalov hoped to make a meaningful contribution by recycling the 30 tons of trash his volunteers will pick up this summer, to demonstrate to local residents that "trash is money." And he planned to try to persuade local businesses to assume responsibility for a portion of the lake's shoreline, something like American "adopt a highway" programs. The strategic objective, he said, was to convince citizens and local authorities that it would be worthwhile to get the trash away from the lake and out of its watershed.
The oldest public organization trying to protect the lake here is Baikal Wave. One of its key members is an Englishwoman named Jennie Sutton who moved to Irkutsk a quarter-century ago out of a love for Russia. Realistically, she said in an interview in her handsome Irkutsk office (provided to Baikal Wave by the German Green Party), the environmental movement here "is very small, very weak." Its successes have been few, while economic realities and political inertia allow the pollution of the lake to continue. She is appalled at the prospect that the World Bank may lend money to allow the Baikalsk plant to alter its production line to make it somewhat cleaner. The only real solution, she said, is to stop making pulp and cellulose next to Lake Baikal.
In the years she has lived here, Sutton has seen more and more construction on the banks of the lake, more human pollution going into it, and the hardening of local opinion that the region cannot do without the 3,000 jobs that the Cellulose Combinat provides. Hard times and the absence of public funds to protect the lake are chronic problems to which she sees no obvious solution. Even the scientific institutes that once monitored the lake with care now have no money to do so.
Pukalov of Greenpeace shares Sutton's pessimism. His hope now is that a scheduled UNESCO inspection due at the end of the month will lead to designation of Baikal as an "endangered" World Heritage Site, which would oblige the Russian government to strengthen protections under treaties it has ratified.
The real state of the lake is very difficult to determine, because "no one knows where the point of no return may be," in Sutton's words. Cook of Baikal Watch -- who is more optimistic -- made a similar point: It takes about 400 years for the rivers flowing into Baikal to completely replace the water in the lake, so big is its volume. So the toxics in the lake now will be in it for centuries to come.