Saving Baikal

Siberia’s Lake Baikal is old, very old.

At 25,000,000, it has long since exceeded

the average life expectancy (30,000 years)
of a lake on our planet.

It is slowly (about an inch per year)

growing into an ocean.

The first humans likely arrived at Lake Baikal about 100,000 years ago. The first domesticated reindeer herds may have been driven from here. It was in this region that Genghis Khan launched his empire. And it was here that White Guards mounted the last major campaign of the Russian Civil War. Yet these and other crucial turning points in human history hardly affected Baikal. The lake was huge, humankind small.

In the past century, however, the equation changed. An industrializing Soviet Union began to populate Siberia with people and factories on an immense scale and with a merciless rapacity. Then, in the post-Soviet era, the decentralized drive for a modern economy deepened the danger. Not even the world’s deepest, cleanest, and most bio-diverse lake could weather this century-long attack unchanged. And yet, the same changes that have brought new dangers have provided new possibilities for concerned residents to defend Siberia’s Sacred Sea.

Exploitation: Then

In Ulan-Ude, a city of 380,000 some 75 kilometers east of Lake Baikal, is the world’s largest Lenin head. The massive monument was unveiled in the 1970s and is a graphic reflection of the obscene gigantism of the Soviet era, first played out on Baikal with the construction of Irkutsk Hydro-electrical Station (dam) between 1950 and 1956.

The construction of the Irkutsk dam on the Angara River, which drains Baikal, caused Baikal’s water level to rise between four and five feet, swallowing up historic settlements. Shaman Rock, at the head of Angara River, once a location of both worship and social correction (criminals were left on the rock overnight; if they survived the whirling waters, they were forgiven), was turned into an unimpressive speck. The dam also hastened the demise of a massive system of islands in northern Baikal, which served as important nesting grounds for migratory birds from Asia and the Americas. These islands, already shaken by a massive earthquake in the 1930s (which lowered the level of the land six feet), are now largely submerged.

Yet worse was to come. In 1954, while the Irkutsk dam was being built, the Soviet government decided to build the Baikalsk Paper and Pulp Mill on the shores of the lake, to manufacture high quality cord for aircraft tires. Despite vehement scientific opposition (and some of the first published public opposition to the government in the Soviet media), the Baikalsk Paper and Pulp Mill went online in 1966, quickly exceeding all estimates of pollutants that would be expelled into the lake.

According to Baikal Environmental Wave (BEW), an Irkutsk-based environmental group, the mill’s wastes “have accumulated in large sludge ponds that stretch some 11 kilometers along the shores of Baikal.” The air is also being polluted – air pollution caused by the Baikalsk mill and another on the Selenga River (a Baikal tributary) has caused drying out of trees over an area of 2,000 square miles.

The damage wrought by the dam and the mills is unquestionable, but some Russian environmentalists have lately begun to question its severity. The dam may have flooded some beautiful islands, said Anna Lyutskaya, an environmentalist and teacher from Nizhneangarsk, but the birds have simply found other places to nest. And, despite the mills, Baikal remains one of the world’s most pristine natural wonders. Pavel Bodrykh, a manager at the ecotourism firm Green Express, said that current studies show that Baikal’s water is largely unaffected by the paper mill, “mainly because of the lake’s enormous size.”

Exploitation: Now

If Baikal escaped the Soviet Union’s drive to industrialization relatively unscathed, it may not manage the same trick in the years to come. The Baikal area is in desperate need of economic development. According to REAP International, an Iowa-based non-profit focused on rural development in Russia, Buryatia (which encompasses more than half of Baikal’s shoreline) is one of Russia’s poorest regions.

Thinly populated and largely rural, Baikal has an abundance of natural resources. Aside from fresh water, which may in this century become the world’s most valuable scarce natural resource), the region has long been exploited for its timber, game and minerals. Recent proposals to mine the watershed’s rich uranium deposits has local environmentalists particularly worried. And exploratory drilling for gas and oil in the Selenga delta in 1999-2000 was only halted after a public protest by the Republic of Buryatia’s chief prosecutor.

Other proposals seek to exploit Baikal’s geographical position. Four and five years ago, a number of oil companies, including Yukos and Transneft, proposed oil pipelines through the Baikal basin to China and the Far East. Environmentalists such as BEW’s Jenny Sutton and Ariadna Reida of the Great Baikal Trail Association, were quick to point out the infeasibility of these proposals, primarily because of the high level of seismic activity in the Baikal basin – home to thousands of measurable quakes each year, and a severe magnitude quake every 10-12 years. In 1862, a quake measuring 10.5 on the Richter scale sunk 80 square miles of shoreline, forming Proval Bay. But even without the frequent earthquakes, activists argue that frequent floods, fires and landslides make breaks in any pipeline inevitable.

Meanwhile, current natural resource exploitation is grossly underrecorded. Poaching of nerpa seals (see box, page 25) is very common and logging far exceeds official numbers. On a recent ski trip, Aleksandr Doniliko, an Irkutsk student and member of the Trail Club, pointed to a train hauling away freshly-cut lumber. “When you see lumber being cut here, it’s usually contraband. Nearly everywhere here it’s illegal to log the forest.” Yet, on most forest excursions near the lake, loggers are a more common site than bears. Sergei Kez, in a 1999 article in Noviye Izvestia, wrote that illegal logging from Irkutsk Oblast – which includes the western shores of Baikal – measures at a million cubic meters a year.

Interestingly, if you ask most concerned locals what the biggest environmental problem at Baikal is, their most common answer is neither the dam nor the mill nor uranium nor the pipeline. It is the trampling of Baikal’s beauty by tourists.

Tourists tear roads through the untrammeled steppe with their cars. They cut trees for firewood, trample flowers and erode steep banks. They build campfires and pitch tents. Perhaps most noticeable of all, they leave heaps of trash everywhere.

Older locals describe this problem – especially the trash – as a new development. Nikita Bencharov, owner of an Olkhon Island tourist resort, blames the trash on the increased availability of metal and plastic containers. Anna Lyutskaya points to disillusionment following the collapse of the USSR, while one Siberian police officer queried attributed it to the current besporyadok (“lack of order; chaos”). But no matter the cause, if much of Baikal’s allure is its remoteness and pristine state, discarded plastic bottles and tire tracks are a clear threat. And that may be more than as simply an eye-sore. Lyutskaya and her colleagues have concluded that the destructive concentration of heavy metals and toxic substances on Yarki Island in Northern Baikal is due to decomposing trash, and that the steady destruction of the island is at least partly connected with the activities of tourists.

Conservation: Then

According to Gary Cook, US Project Director of Baikal Watch, prior to 1991 “there were precious few environmentalist activities in any part of Russia.” Yet, to the extent those activities existed, Baikal was a focal point. As Jenny Sutton of BEW described it, “it was very much a protest movement – marches, petitions, meetings, pickets.” At first, these were connected with trying to prevent the construction of the paper mills, and then with a proposal to pipe the waste out of the Baikal watershed. Although both movements were absolute failures, historians often call the protests over the paper mills (which began as early as 1959) the “first cracks” in the Soviet system. Some even trace all subsequent USSR protest and dissident movements to the furor over the mill.

The other defense of Baikal was the zapovedniki (nature reserves) and national parks, which encompass most of Baikal’s shoreline and have a long history in the area (the Barguzin Zapovednik is Russia’s oldest, nearly a century old). Yet zapovedniki and parks have always existed or been curtailed at the whim of Russian leaders (see Russian Life, Sep/Oct 2003). In 2000, President Vladimir Putin handed the reserve and park system over to the Ministry of Natural Resources, which, according to Sutton, has as its main function the oversight of resource exploitation, rather than conservation.

Conservation: Now

The decision in the early 1990s to legalize non-governmental organizations (NGOs) has had a dramatic effect on environmental activities at Baikal. Russian and international NGOs not only work to affect policy, but often execute that policy: monitoring illegal logging, collecting trash, educating youth and developing the infrastructure of ecotourism. “Environmentalism and environmental activism have become true professions in the region – as they are elsewhere around the world,” said Baikal Watch’s Gary Cook. “With this new professionalism comes added respect and a feeling of permanency.”

To a certain extent and with some success, environmentalists continue to employ protests and meetings to effect change. BEW’s Jenny Sutton said protests and petitions pushed President Putin in 2004 to announce the creation of a new department to oversee the zapovedniki and national parks, answerable directly to the Kremlin rather than to the Ministry of Natural Resources. Protests, she said, also helped bring an end to oil drilling south of Baikal.

Yet it is the presence of full-time environmentalists with professional qualifications (rather than the simple desire to protect Baikal) that has had a dramatic effect in recent years. BEW has brought a stop to several illegal logging operations through its photographic and other documentation. Environmentalists have also made good use of a new law allowing citizens to demand public interest environmental impact assessments for development projects. Assessments helped stop plans for a uranium mine south of Baikal and a pipeline through the southern Baikal watershed (plans for a pipeline through the northern watershed are still active).

International support is crucial in the success of many of these efforts. In an exciting development in the four-decade battle against the Baikal Paper and Pulp Mill, the World Bank has reportedly agreed to finance the mill’s conversion to a closed-water system, on the condition that the local administration build a water-treatment facility for the town. Marina Vasilieva, Senior External Affairs Officer of the World Bank Russia Country Office, confirmed that there are plans to convert the mill to a closed-water system, “among other measures,” but would not confirm World Bank involvement.

NGOs, because of their permanence, also put much of their resources into education. BEW runs environmental education programs for children, maintains a large library and translates documents currently unavailable into Russian. Greenpeace, Rebirth of Siberian Land, the Great Baikal Trail Association and others are trying to educate locals about the impact of trash, to convince them to throw trash in garbage cans rather than on the street or into the lake, something that does not come naturally to many locals (the crew on a tourist ship on Lake Baikal encouraged the author to toss a bottle of vodka into the lake; “It’s traditional,” said workers who make their living off of Baikal’s beauty). In one of the most interesting educational projects, volunteers from Rebirth of Siberian Land collected garbage along a stretch of road on Olkhon Island and piled it into a single heap, to show drivers how much trash was being tossed from car windows.

The NGOs are also trying to educate local businesses, supporting industrial alternatives and increased ecological efficiency. Cook explained: “There is persistent mistrust of environmentalists, particularly among some in the general public. [Such people believe] that eco-groups are simply against economic development of any kind... That is why I think many local eco-groups have taken up programs promoting ecotourism and other ‘positive alternatives.’” Baikal Watch has consulted with mining concerns to help them improve their extraction and cleanup methods. Similarly, while combating the proposed oil and gas pipelines, Baikal Watch and its partners sought to show locals that “there may be other, more sustainable ways of making a living.”

Direct Action

Baikal environmental organizations are also tackling the problems they face with direct action. Green Express, the eco-tourism firm, insists that its tour guides not only bring back their own trash, but also collect litter left by other tourists. Baikal Complex sponsors vacations to Moscow for schoolchildren who participate in trash cleanups. REAP International runs an annual “Green Walk,” in which people from around the world march through the southern Baikal Watershed, participating in various projects along the way, including erosion-control projects.

One of the largest and best-known direct action projects involves saving Yarki Island, a long, narrow sandbar cutting across upper Baikal. The island protects what is left of the northern spawning and nesting grounds from Baikal’s battering waves. Like the rest of the islands, Yarki was devastated by the earthquake early last century and the opening of the Irkutsk dam. Yarki’s dunes once topped 18 meters. Now, the largest rise just six meters. Each year, the island shrinks.

Loss of vegetation on the island is the most pressing problem. One local, in his 80s, recalls getting lost in the island’s forest as a child. Today, most of the island is bare sand and the trees are gone. With no plant roots to hold the sand in place, the island is washing away. According to Lyutskaya, a teacher whose school has taken on Yarki as an ongoing conservation project, “Scientific studies have shown that at the present rate of destruction, the island simply will not exist in 20 or 30 years.”

Every summer since 1999, Lyutskaya and other teachers have taken students to plant willows and other vegetation on the island. At the location of the oldest willow plantings, now three years old, the sand is noticeably higher than in the surrounding area and the grass has begun to grow again.

Testing Mettle

In November 2002, the FSB raided the offices of Baikal Environmental Wave. All the computers were seized. The ostensible cause of the raid was to search for a top-secret map, which, BEW’s Sutton said, was widely known to be in the group’s possession. (Sutton said she feels the true cause of the raid was the group’s vocal opposition to the proposed Yukos pipeline.) BEW willingly handed over all maps requested, Sutton said. But the raid was only the beginning. The local press published several articles attacking both the organization and Sutton (who has lived in Russia since 1974) personally. Her car was stolen and her apartment robbed. Only after these events received media attention, did the FSB back down and return her organization their computers.

While this was an isolated incident, recent government actions have been a cause for worry amongst NGOs, especially those that do not support the Kremlin line. In 2002, laws on the registration of NGOs were reformulated. According to Natalya Lapina, of Rebirth of Siberian Land, which runs an NGO support service, many NGOs were unable to cope with the new legal and accounting documents and ceased to function as official organizations. Then, in May 2004, President Putin attacked NGOs in a speech as agents of “dubious and commercial interests,” working for the good of foreign funders rather than for the Russian people. There followed a state-sponsored symposium for NGOs. Only those that closely supported the government were invited, including, groups never before heard of in the NGO sphere. Similarly, The Moscow Times in July reported that the Kremlin has submitted legislation that would require all grants from foreign sources to be registered with a special commission. Grants from unapproved sources would be subject to a special 24% tax.

No Baikal groups queried have reported any problems since Putin’s speech, but many remain cautious, especially those headquartered overseas. “Of course we are worried,” said Tony Brunello of the Tahoe-Baikal Institute.

A Third Route?

The idea behind sustainable development is to base an economy on renewable resources and not use those resources any faster than they can be replenished. A sustainable lumber business, for instance, cuts just enough trees so that the forest stays the same size from year to year. Many environmental organizations at Baikal try to encourage sustainable projects as much as to discourage unsustainable projects.

Some see ecotourism as the most likely sustainable alternative to massive logging, pipelines, and other extraction-based activities. Baikal Watch’s Gary Cook said that ecotourism is far more likely to economically benefit the average Baikal resident than will a pipeline or a mine: “It is, after all, very difficult to set up a monopoly or somehow control ecotourism in a large area like Baikal. While oil and other companies want to come in and dominate, ecotourism will let the region rely instead on the growth of numerous smaller businesses, where local people can often benefit the most.”

Various organizations are trying to help locals cash in on ecotourism. Many of the loans from the Irkutsk Rotary Club’s microcredit program go to help start or expand tourism-related businesses, said Tatyana Klepikova, the program’s director.“Microcredit, environmentalism – it’s all related.” Baikal Watch and Baikal Environmental Wave are also working to set up microcredit programs.

A developed ecotourism economy will also create economic incentives for conservation, argue advocates. Since poachers and illegal loggers tend to flee areas frequented by tourists, tourism could drive out illegal behavior. But there is another possibility, said Ariadna Reida, of the Great Baikal Trail Association: “If poachers see they can make money by bringing people to take pictures of nerpa instead of shooting them, they will do that instead.”

Of course, ecotourism is not without its problems, and many locals oppose it. After a recent Irkutsk Rotary club meeting, in which the club discussed supporting trail-building projects, one Rotarian said, “I don’t see why we should help build trails. Rotary should do good deeds. This won’t help villagers. I know what villagers will say: ‘God save us from crowds of tourists!’”

Realistic Optimism

“I don’t think that Putin or anyone else can crack down and really have a long-lasting effect on the emerging social movements [in Baikal], or on the public-interest NGOs that spearhead those movements,” said Cook. “The latter are just too strong to fight [against] on a broad front.”

Tom Umbreit of Germany’s BaikalPlan shares Cook’s optimism, based on his “own history in Eastern Germany, the people we know in the Baikal region, and the breathtaking beauty of Lake Baikal.” And BEW’s Sutton is even optimistic that the Baikalsk Pulp and Paper Mill will eventually close. “I think there is now an understanding that this cannot continue forever.”

Unlike Baikal itself.      RL