Environment Rant

After the jump you’ll find my response to an essay question.  This was in-class, and we only had to respond to readings previously assigned, so it is decidedly not a scholarly work.  There are no works cited, and any mistakes in the rant are no one’s but my own.  That being said, the Aral Sea did come up, and I thought it might not be totally irrelevant to the readers of Registan.

PS – my bump of trouble is itching.  Look to Kyrgyzstan next week for the shiznit to go down.  When the fecal matter hits the ventilator, I hope to be able to respond.  However, Nauryz is a big event here at Indiana University, and my work requires me to be herding cats [handling logistics], so I might not have a chance to write.  Next Friday I’ll be heading for some R&R with my girlfriend, but I’ll be back at the beginning of April.

[Rant]

Characterize the major features of environmental protection and nature conservation in the former Soviet Union and contemporary Russia

The world’s history of environmental protection can be cynically summed up by the following general plan; make the problem so awful that it can’t be ignored, and then slowly do the least amount of repairs necessary to sustain operations.  The former Soviet Union was no different from most other governments in this regard.  However, it helps to understand that the Soviet Union did not inherit a pristine wilderness wonderland from the Russian Empire.  Naturally, as Northern and Central Eurasia have sustained human populations for thousands of years, the lands they inhabited have long been affected by their presence.  The steppe grasslands that stretch from the Danube to Mongolia have been in turns ignored, over-grazed, burned to prevent pasturing of enemies, and plowed under to support inappropriate levels of agriculture.  By the middle of the nineteenth century, virtually all of the arable agricultural land was under the plow of landed gentry.  As a direct result of this, the European bison and tarpan [wild horse of Eastern Europe] died out, while the saiga antelope was pushed back onto a miniscule percentage of its former inhabited area.  Beaver and moose were also common creatures of the steppe that are no longer found there.  It was the lure of fur that drove the Russians to expand, all the way to the Amur River and the great seaport of Vladivostok.  Perhaps some of the greatest environmental impact was that of the great Trans-Siberian Railroad, constructed during the last decades of the Russian Empire.  Scholars estimate that seven million peasants moved to the East between 1801 and 1916, settling in the fertile steppe of the Altay region, and in western and central Siberia.   During this same time the populations of urban centers exploded, such that Moscow and St. Petersburg more than doubled in size from 1858 to 1914.  Due to increased industrialization and heating needs, forests were clear cut, and though half of European Russia had forest cover in 1696, only 35 percent of Russia had forest cover by 1914.

The depressing picture that this presents is only the beginning, of course.  The Russian Empire attempted to industrialize, but it was the drive of Stalin that led Russia in its great leap forward – though entirely at the expense of the people, their health, and their environment.  It was only in the last decade of Imperial rule that nature preservation enjoyed institutionalization and official recognition.  Accordingly, such organizations did not enjoy widespread support among the Bolsheviks, though in 1924 the All-Russian Society for the Protection of Nature was founded.  During the 1920s, people’s commissar for education Lunacharskii created the Department of Nature Protection, which was responsible for the first series of zapovedniks, protected territories exclusively dedicated to scientific study.  However, other organizations did not fare as well.  Foreshadowing the demise of environmental protection, the Interagency State Committee for Nature Protection was closed in 1931 after opposing targets of the first Five Year Plan as destructive to nature.  What is most surprising is that the zapovedniks were able to survive the 1930s, though they were attacked as well.  After the abolishment of the Interagency State Committee for Nature Protection, no similar institution existed until 1986, long after the most harmful policy decisions had already become standard practice.  This lasted in various forms until the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991.  Since that time, both Russia and Uzbekistan have closed the surviving agencies of environmental protection, in Russia’s case merging it with the Ministry of Natural Resources.  Minor success stories like the cleanup of the Moscow River and marginally improved strip mining techniques pale in comparison with the ecological disasters perpetrated on the people of Eurasia.  Those same citizens are themselves prone to fatalism and apathy, regarding the degradation of nature as an unavoidable occurrence in our modern times.

A short list of the failures of environmental protection and preservation would include the Aral Sea, Chernobyl, the Sea of Azov, the areas of Chelyabinsk and the industrial centers of the Urals, the Donbas and Kuzbas, the pollution of the Black Sea and its coast, the agricultural damage to the Fergana Valley in Central Asia, the industrial nightmare land of the Kola Peninsula, Norilsk, northern and eastern Kazakhstan, Kalmykia, the Siberian oil and gas fields, the gas craters in Turkmenistan and the travesty of the Kara-Kum canal, both the world’s longest and world’s least efficient and most wasteful canal, Novaya Zemlya, and the Kara and Barents Seas.  Added to this list would be the stockpiles of pesticides and dangerous chemicals still awaiting disposal and cleanup across the former Soviet Union, though most famously inducing foreign aid in the case of Resurrection Island in the Aral Sea.

The fact is that the rhetoric and policies of the Soviet Union did not match up.  While the Soviet Union had a constitution that guaranteed many rights, including those of the environment, the reality was that industrial and military progress would be attained by any means necessary.  The environment was viewed as a passive retainer of limitless resources.  The disappearance of the Aral Sea, for example, was not a mistake or an accident, but a coldly calculated result of civic and agricultural engineering that failed to take into consideration the horrible after effects of its disappearance.  Moreover, the same over-the-top exploitation of nature that caused natural catastrophes like the disappearance of one of the world’s largest lakes often offered similarly horrendous solutions.  Take for example the plan to reroute Siberian rivers across the steppes to revive the fishing and shipping industries of the Aral.  In effect stealing from Peter to pay Paul, this surely would have had even greater ecological costs.  Fortunately for the world and the citizens of Eurasia, the age of monumental public works disasters like the Kara Kum canal had passed.  Another case in point would be the reservoir north of the modern city of Almaty, once Alma Ata, capital of the Kazakh SSR.  Originally built by the ministries responsible for electricity, its purpose and necessity were doubtful from the start, but the nomenklatura, or Soviet elite, stood to gain far more from building the wasteful and unnecessary dam than through environmental preservation and concern over the only remaining undammed major Eurasian river.  It was for this precise reason, in fact, that the river was dammed at all – it was the only one still untamed.

Unfortunately, contemporary Russia seems to be returning to the exploitative nature of the Stalin years.  The reforms of the Gorbachev era are not blamed for many of the same problems they were the first to recognize and combat.  Most telling is the lack of any environmental oversight at the federal, national level.  The number of zapovedniks remains at the same low level, and the pollution continues, as does the wasteful extraction of oil, coal, gas, nickel, and other polluting processes.  Russia is possibly in worse shape than it has ever been before.

[/Rant]