EMOTIONS are running high in the towns and villages around Lake Baikal. Here, at the heart of Siberia, a 30-year battle has raged to protect the purity of Baikal’s waters, and the extraordinary creatures that live in them. The struggle is between industry and bureaucracy on one side and scientific and public opinion on the other. Such is the popular Russian feeling for the ‘Pearl of Siberia’ that the Soviet Union’s first and greatest environmental campaign – predating even the first glimmer of perestroika – was, and still is, to save Baikal from industrial pollution.
Until this century, Baikal remained virtually untouched, spared the heavy development that blights North America’s Great Lakes. The Trans-Siberian railway may run around its southern shore and the new BAM railway touch its northern point, but only half a dozen small towns and a few villages are scattered along its coastline. The lake is famous for its breathtaking scenery, its strange animal inhabitants and the omul, a fish regarded as a great delicacy.
Despite being revered as a sacred spot, agriculture and industry have brought what one Russian has called ‘the barbaric exploitation of Baikal’. The purity of Lake Baikal’s water depends on the state of the forests around the lake, according to the leading local geographer, Vladimir Vorobyov. But the timber industry has been a leading culprit in Baikal’s exploitation. Over many years, loggers have cleared large areas of the seemingly inexhaustible taiga. This cold, northern forest is slow to regenerate, however, and the result has been erosion and landslides, which have carried vast quantities of silt into the region’s rivers, eventually ending up in Baikal itself. Much of the timber rafted down the rivers and along the lake sank. Between 1958 and 1968, 1.5 million cubic metres of logs ended up at the bottom, clogging many rivers. As the logs decayed, bacteria depleted the water of oxygen. Some rivers had become 3 to 4 metres deep in logs. Some 130 streams and springs had disappeared through excessive felling of timber, and local fish, including the omul, could no longer spawn in 50 tributaries.
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There were some attempts to remedy the damage done. The 1970s saw programmes of tree planting and the widespread erection of fencing on slopes to prevent erosion. Baikal’s tributaries were cleared of sunken trees and loggers were banned from letting their timber float loose down inflowing rivers and on the lake itself. A thousand kilometres of new roads were built for transporting logs. From 1988, all felling was banned in a belt along the coast and provisions for fire prevention were improved. But it may be at least another 5 years, 20 years later than envisaged, until ships finally replace the present towed rafts of bound logs, called ‘cigars’, on Baikal. Autumn storms often smash the rafts, wasting the timber and adding to the problem of sunken wood.
The worst problem, greater than any caused by logging, has been one of effluent. Despite many years of debate and resolutions, last year more than 100 factories and plants on Baikal’s shores still had no purification facilities. Every year, these industries dump millions of tonnes of waste water into the lake, carrying with it heavy metals such as mercury, zinc, tungsten and molybdenum. Almost 700 agricultural units on the lake’s tributaries add fertilisers, slurry and pesticides.
The effluents enter Baikal directly at the far north and south of the lake and from rivers, in particular the Selenga, the lake’s largest tributary. The Selenga’s pollutants come mainly from Ulan-Ude, the capital of the Buryat Autonomous Republic, more than 100 kilometres upriver. Partially treated sewage and effluent from around 50 factories in Ulan-Ude are carried downstream to Baikal. In 1988, Ulan-Ude’s sewage contributed 500 of the 700 tonnes of nitrates entering the lake. Last year, about a quarter of the region’s 97 water purification plants were putting sewage into ground dumps; water seeping from the dumps eventually reaches the lake.
Of all the sources of pollution, the most notorious are two pulp and cellulose mills, one on the southern shore at Baikalsk, and a smaller one on the Selenga River at Selenginsk. Ironically, the Baikalsk mill was built on the lakeside because it was designed to produce high-quality cord for aircraft tyres, and the process required a plentiful supply of pure water, as only Baikal can provide.
At one stage, a whole series of plants were planned for Baikal. Fortunately, they were never built. Baikalsk got the go-ahead despite opposition, thanks to the timber ministry’s cunning, particularly in underestimating the cost of building the 390-million-rouble (Pounds sterling 390 million at the official rate of exchange) plant by 22 million roubles. The mills were subject to a resolution in 1960, which allowed them to operate provided their effluent was harmless.
In 1961, the then director of the Limnological Institute, Grigory Ivanovich Galazy, for many years the lake’s leading champion, warned publicly that the two plants would destroy for ever the delicate ecological balance of the lake. Galazy suggested that the plants should be transferred to Bratsk, 600 kilometres down the Angara River, where the water was almost as good and a paper plant was already under construction. That plant could easily be expanded and the huge hydroelectric plant being built there would provide ample power, he said. His words went unheeded, to the detriment of Baikal and at astronomical cost to the economy.
Twenty-four years of protest
A long and public debate followed between the timber ministry and the environmental protection agencies, which were backed by a growing number of distinguished scientists, writers and intellectuals. In a letter to the press in 1966 more than 30 of them demanded that the government should take steps to save Baikal.
The plant at Baikalsk began operating in the same year, before the substandard purification facilities were properly installed or the staff trained. For the first three or four years, black and slimy waste steadily overflowed from storage pools into the lake. In the first 18 months of operation, almost 400 tonnes of toxic material entered Baikal. The wastes created islands of alkaline sludge, one of them almost 30 kilometres long and which remained for months. Because Baikalsk uses so much water, 14 million litres an hour in 1972, and discharges the same amount of effluent (comparable to the discharge from a city the size of Los Angeles), the plant was soon pumping in its own befouled water. Enormously expensive equipment had to be installed to purify the incoming water.
The main reason for building the plant at Baikalsk no longer applied. Added to this, when the plant was only half complete, the timber ministry decided to downgrade part of the plant’s production to paper, which does not need such pure water as the high-quality cord. So it looked as if the mill need not have been built on Baikal at all. Had it been a pretence all along? The final irony was that ‘super, super cellulose’, which the North Americans had been making perfectly well without water as pure as Baikal’s, was superseded by nylon cord.
Three years later, in 1968, the newspaper Literaturnaya Gazeta alleged that there were at least 14 major defects in the cleansing process at Baikalsk. In the face of mounting pressure to either purify its wastes properly or cease operations, Baikalsk won a ‘temporary’ lowering of the standards for discharges until it could install better equipment.
Two successive state decrees in 1969 and 1971 to improve matters at Baikal were virtually ignored. The pollution grew worse, for despite huge expenditure on cleansing equipment and high running costs, purification was still not adequate. In 1977, a third decree by the USSR Council of Ministers and the Central Committee demanded stricter protection of the lake. The decree laid out for the first time an overall approach to both the environmental and economic problems in the region. It allowed for industrial expansion, but with strict environmental controls. Things began to improve.
With tighter controls on pollution, the already massive costs of purification escalated. By 1976, the cost of Baikalsk’s purification system had already reached 40 million roubles. This figure is around a quarter of the cost of the factory. Western specialists were impressed by the huge computerised treatment works at Baikalsk: ‘as good as, if not better than Western counterparts,’ they said. The Limnological Institute claimed that Baikalsk had the best purification system in the world. ‘But still not good enough,’ it said. ‘We want an inflow (to the lake) of natural water only.’
By now, after some 23 years or so, Baikalsk has poured more than 1.5 billion cubic metres of industrial waste into the lake. Every day it ejects 230 000 cubic metres of waste water into the lake and uses more than 400 000 cubic metres of Baikal water. Galazy calculates that 15 000 cubic kilometres of water – more than half the total in the lake – has now been through the plant and is no longer in its natural condition.
Mikhail Grachev, the new director of the Limnological Institute and the driving force behind the international centre for environmental studies, BICER, calls the lakeside position of Baikalsk ‘as unsuitable as a horse in a church’. But closing it down would destroy the livelihood of 30 000 people in the town that has grown around the plant.
Three years ago, in a more effective resolution, the Central Committee and the Council of Ministers decided to phase out the factory’s harmful operations by 1993, expanding instead a pulp-paper combine at Ust-Ilimsk, northwest of Baikal. The future of Baikalsk is still under discussion and six options have already been rejected on environmental grounds. Meanwhile, not only has the expansion at Ust-Ilimsk been slow to get off the ground, but the paper and cellulose ministry has tried a series of ruses to stay put at Baikalsk. First it proposed diverting the plant’s waste water to a nearby river rather than discharging it into the lake . When that failed, writes Valeryan Vikulov, vice president of the Buryat branch of the Siberian Academy of Sciences, the ministry tried another ploy: the installation of expensive foreign equipment, ostensibly for the five years until the end of operations. ‘By fair means or foul, the ministry wants to keep the plant on Baikal,’ Vikulov writes.
Improvements are also scheduled for the smaller plant at Selenginsk. Plans include the installation next year of a ‘closed cycle’ system that recirculates lake water, but there are already doubts about it, partly because it will cost up to 200 million roubles, much more than the factory itself.
The factory at Baikalsk pollutes more than Baikal’s waters. The grey pall of smoke that hangs over the site endangers the rare mountain flora in the nearby nature reserve. But Baikalsk is only one offender here, and atmospheric pollution in the Baikal basin is probably now a bigger problem than water pollution.
In 1985, industries in the Irkutsk region emitted 1.2 million tonnes of air pollutants and the Buryat region 204 000 tonnes. Prevailing westerly winds carry pollutants from the big Irkutsk-Cheremkhovo industrial area (straddling five towns) over Baikal. In some areas of the Baikal basin, vegetation is disappearing, and in others it is under stress. In winter, snow traps pollutants and locks them up until the thaw. When the snow melts, pollutants flood into the lake.
A government resolution has called for measures to clean the air in the basin. These include fitting scrubbers to the smokestacks of local coal-fired power stations, setting maximum discharges for the plants at Baikalsk and Selenginsk – and enforcing them – and converting the entire Irkutsk-Cheremkhovo industrial district to natural gas.
What effect has all this had on Baikal? The visitor still finds apparently unspoilt beauty – except for the distant smoke of Baikalsk – but regular monitoring has shown that over 30 or so square kilometres around the Baikalsk discharge the chemical composition of the water has changed. In a smaller area, some 16 square kilometres within that zone, the lake’s microbial flora is altered. Around the Selenga delta, where pollution flows in from the river, and around ports and the new town of Severobaikalsk, the lake ecosystem is unstable.
The lakeside Intourist hotel, some 70 kilometres from Baikalsk, no longer serves its guests water straight from the lake. More to the point, large numbers of the small crayfish (epishura) that filter lake water and help to purify it, are dying. By January 1989, the omul had stopped spawning naturally and now its population is maintained artificially. Other fish are also under stress. Their growth rate has slowed and they are less fertile than before. The average size of fish has almost halved. The largest population of fish spawns in the Selenga River, mostly below Ulan-Ude. The fish now produce a tiny fraction of the eggs they used to. Pesticides are a serious threat to life in the lake. All but one of the test species of fish used in monitoring contained traces of DDT, PCBs and hexachlorocyclohexane – all banned, but still produced, in the Soviet Union.
The freshwater seal endemic to Baikal has also suffered. Since 1987 thousands of seals have died. Seals are at the top of Baikal’s food chain and consume toxic pollutants that have accumulated in the fish they eat. Pollution may have compromised their immunity to disease, leaving them vulnerable to epidemics. Some biologists suspect that the virus that killed many thousands of seals in the North Sea in 1988 originated in Lake Baikal. Whatever the actual cause of death, the massive mortality of Baikal seals is seen as a sign of a serious disruption in the lake’s ecosystem.
Species that live only in Baikal are beginning to disappear and their places are being taken by species found elsewhere. ‘In a word, we are near the point where the process of negative changes becomes irreversible,’ writes Galazy. According to Vorobyov, ‘the measures adopted (to protect Baikal) have turned out to be inadequate. The progressive pollution of the waters and the air of the lake and adjoining area continues.’
Vorobyov gives reasons why pollution continues: the need to meet centrally planned production targets as quickly and cheaply as possible; the resignation of organisations that monitor the environment to the fact that the rules are broken; and laggardly research to forecast and evaluate the effects of industry and agriculture on Baikal. Now the profit motive is adding to these problems.
One research biologist complained a year ago in the newspaper Izvestiya: ‘No substantial changes are yet apparent. The ministries, as before, are doing everything possible to drag out the implementation of the (1987) resolution and are essentially sabotaging this important document.’ No wonder, then, that a local scientist said last autumn: ‘The great lake is in great peril.’
While at least something was being done about industrial pollution, a new threat appeared. BAM, the new Trans-Siberian railway, arrived at the north end of the lake. Construction requires fuel, and in just one year 40 000 tonnes of fuel were shipped the length of the lake from the old Trans-Siberian railway in the south. Miraculously, there have not been any major oil spills, despite Baikal’s fogs, storms and hurricanes.
BAM also brought a new town, Severobaikalsk, to the northern end of the lake. Last year 26 of the town’s boilerhouses had no filters or scrubbers to clean their emissions. Sulphur dioxide and other noxious pollutants built up in the atmosphere and acid rain fell on the town. Yet there are plans to increase the size of the town, to a population of 140 000, and add two new engineering works.
On the positive side, the 1987 resolution has brought some real improvements. Several important officials were punished as an example. The party and government set up an interministerial commission on Baikal, with real power to act on complaints. The resolution also introduced strict control over the economic activities in the Baikal basin, with quotas for fishing and seal trapping. It introduced a system of ‘ecological passports’, or permits, for factories in the region, which have to reach certain goals in reducing their pollution.
Seventeen ministries with enterprises in the Baikal basin, plus other state organisations and the Russian republic’s government were also charged with improving sewage treatment and controls on air pollution, and a range of other objectives, by 1995. The resolution includes many ‘green’ measures: for instance, industrial renovation, better technology and new processes that generate less waste, and a programme to prevent erosion in the Baikal basin. Many ministries and scientific institutions are jointly studying how to develop the area’s resources without damaging the environment. Even given the will, foreign currency is often not available to buy purification processes from abroad.
In April, the important Comprehensive Territorial Environmental Protection Plan came into being. This establishes three zones with varying degrees of protection: the first is a coastal belt around the lake where virtually all industrial activity is banned. Here there are already three nature reserves, or zapovedniki, and Siberia’s first two national parks. The second zone embraces tributary valleys, and the third the remainder of the Baikal basin; develop ment is allowed here under strict environmental control.
All very positive in theory. However, at Baikalsk the Institute of Ecological Toxicity, which monitors the effects of pollution on fish and invertebrates, is suspect locally. The institute is financed by the same ministry as the cellulose plant. ‘People are overreacting,’ says one scientist from the institute. ‘Baikal is not as unique as it’s said to be. As a biologist, I don’t think Baikal’s pollution has reached significant proportions . . . I don’t think we have a problem here despite what other people maintain.’
Finally, there is the question of tourism. Today, there is little accommodation around the lake: only one Intourist hotel, for instance, and a few other tourist bases. Much of the western coastline is inaccessible by road. Even so, the Baikal area attracts almost a million holiday-makers each year. About 700 000 of them camp independently, mostly along the east coast, where they are responsible for forest fires, litter and other damage.
Local scientists and environmentalists see this unorganised tourism as a threat to Baikal. The answer, they say, is to develop proper facilities for tourists, with restrictions on their numbers and certain areas out of bounds. But more tourists could bring bigger problems, such as that of sewage disposal. Nonetheless, there have been plans to build one of the largest recreational, health and tourist centres in the Soviet Union there.
Grachev and others believe that the lake’s ultimate salvation may lie in its adoption as a World Heritage Site by UNESCO. A delegation from UNESCO visited Baikal last month and compared Baikal with the Galapagos, already a World Heritage Site, because of its large number of endemic species. The delegation advised postponing Baikal’s designation until the environmental problems there are solved. This enforced delay should add great weight to the pressure for change. The Russians already know that, once designated as a place of global significance, protection of the site lies in their hands.
Earlier this month, 30 or so Land Rovers set off on an international endurance event over 1600 kilometres, organised by an American tobacco company. The route followed primitive tracks from Bratsk to Irkutsk – cutting through the national park on Baikal’s west coast. The event may have done little damage compared with Baikal’s other problems, but the fact that the vehicles were allowed through the park does not augur well for local standards of protection.
Despite perestroika, many local people are now afraid to speak out about Baikal for fear of losing their jobs. The Russians have battled long and hard for their lake. It is time for the rest of the world to lend them some support.
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The growing campaign to clean up Baikal
WELL before President Gorbachov appeared on the scene, people in Russia, and particularly in Siberia, had begun to voice their concern about what was happening to their revered lake. Since then an active green movement has developed.
In 1987, a plan was approved to keep the Baikalsk mill operating. The plan stipulated that a pipeline costing around 200 million roubles would divert the noxious effluent away from the lake and into the Irkut river, a tributary of the Angara.
The plan was approved, despite heated discussions and opposition both from the public and from the Academy of Sciences. Opponents of the plan pointed out that below the confluence of the Irkut and the Angara rivers lies the water supply for the city of Irkutsk. The area is also popular with holiday-makers, who foresaw a badly polluted river and all that brings. However, even before the plan received final approval, workers from west of the Urals arrived unpublicised by helicopter and felled a strip of taiga 18 kilometres long ready for the pipeline.
When work started on the pipeline, the new Baikal Movement, the first of Baikal’s green movements, organised a demonstration which attracted workers from Baikalsk and students from Irkutsk. Some lay in the path of the bulldozers. Five scientists were arrested. They were later released after protests from the Baikal Movement, which then organised public meetings and collected 107 000 signatures in a petition against the pipeline. The plan was eventually scrapped.
The Baikal Movement has now been joined by the Baikal National Front, the Society for the Defence of Baikal and the Centre for the Ecological Defence of the Baikal Region. Another group, Baikal Eco-World, has organised an international conference, ‘Man at Baikal and his Habitat’, in Buryatia this autumn. The most important local green organisation is the Baikal Fund: its chairman is Gennady Filshin, a forceful and outspoken delegate to the Council of People’s Deputies. ‘As long as the system doesn’t change,’ he says, ‘the situation of Baikal can’t be improved. And the dual monopoly of (Communist) party and administrative departments has not changed its substance or its methods.’
In the region west of the lake, Maria Nikolaevna Khamarkhanova runs the Baikal Fund almost single-handed. A Buryat and an ecologist, she is a passionate activist for Baikal. Labelled an extremist, she has to contend with opposition from, among others, the local education authorities, who accuse her of involving children in politics. To this she replies that children must be given an ecological upbringing. Many people see education as the ultimate answer for the Soviet Union’s environmental problems.
‘Our objectives are to close the Baikalsk and Selenginsk plants,’ says Khamarkhanova. ‘Why wait for 1993? They don’t want to close and they’re trying to sit it out with lies, but they must be shut down urgently . . . We aim to raise the funds to pay unemployment money to the workers.’
She details the dangerous pollutants coming from Baikalsk, including dioxins and methylmercaptan from furnaces burning waste lignin. ‘Tens of millions of tonnes of waste lignin have accumulated at Baikalsk for the past 25 years. And medical staff do not analyse illnesses connected with pollution. And at Selenginsk, they’re pumping a million cubic metres of waste water underground into natural cavities, which is poisoning the village wells. Mercury has been found in the snow around Baikal. No one keeps to the permitted norms. Baikal is not just our sacred site but the whole world’s and its plight should be dealt with by the whole world.’
Another prominent member of the Baikal Fund is Valentin Rasputin, Siberia’s best known writer. Last October, he declared to the Supreme Soviet that pollution of Baikal had increased by 60 per cent in the previous 18 months. Chosen recently as a member of Gorbachov’s presidential council, he has spoken at length to Gorbachov about the lake. As a result, the president sent a commission to Baikal last December. According to Gundula Bahro, a West German environmentalist at Baikalsk at the time, ‘the chimneys ceased to fume, the clouds of methylmercaptan disappeared for three days and the waste water reservoirs were filled with fresh water from the lake. The director of the factory did not hesitate to present his fantastically clean waste water for a drinking test.’
The Baikal Fund has now raised nearly 600 000 roubles from individuals and organisations, although they turn down the offers of donations from polluting industries as ‘dirty money’. The fund has organised protests against logging, produced one issue of its own newspaper, Our Baikal, and has supported a strike by schoolchildren against a new factory. It wants to set up independent laboratories to monitor the state of the lake and hopes to convert Baikalsk into a tourist area.
Last autumn the Baikal Fund also backed what was possibly the Soviet Union’s first hunger strike on behalf of the environment, by the teacher Anatoly Vasilevich Limarenko. For five days he went without food, in a tent in the main square at Ulan-Ude, urging the population to fight for the closure of the two cellulose plants. When he was removed for medical examination, others continued his strike in the tent. Limarenko was fined 250 roubles and lost his job but a collection raised 10 000 roubles for him and his family.
Donations payable to the Baikal Fund can be sent to account 70000714 with the Bank for Foreign Economic Affairs of the USSR at 37 Plyushchikha Street, Moscow 119121, USSR.
John Massey Stewart is a freelance writer specialising in Siberia. He is working on a book on Siberian natural history, geography and environmental problems.