Russian conservation: Green tears over black gold

Date: 19/07/03

Russia's natural jewel is at the mercy of oil money

“THEY do it because foreign governments pay them,” says Vyacheslav Maximov, a marine biologist living on the shore of Lake Baikal, of the environmentalists campaigning against pollution. “They're just interfering. You can't damage Baikal.”

As the world's biggest single body of fresh water, Baikal has always stirred passions. Its annual freezing and thawing drive thermal mixing all the way down to its bottom, 1,637 metres (5,371 feet) deep, bringing oxygen to a rich mix of plants and animals, keeping the lake water so clean you can drink it, and inspiring almost religious beliefs in its powers. Perhaps not everyone is as zealous as Mr Maximov, who stands on his head several times a day to replicate that mixing in his own body and is convinced that he will live for 200 years. But his distrust of outsiders, as the environmentalists tend to be, is widely shared.

Baikal Environmental Wave, led by Jenny Sutton, a British three-decade resident of nearby Irkutsk, argued against a pulp-and-paper mill that pumps effluent into the lake, damaging the environment nearby and, she says, killing some of the freshwater seals unique to Baikal. The security services raided her office, looking for “classified maps”; articles about “green spies” popped up in the local press.

But the mill is, at long last, being cleaned up. And scientists disagree about the long-term damage, thanks partly to the post-Soviet shortage of funding for the huge task of monitoring the lake. “There are some saying there's been an impact of pollution, and others that it's increased no more than the background level in other regions, like the Arctic,” says Anson Mackay, a Baikal researcher at University College, London. Many feel the lake is big enough to take the impact of letting the local economy grow, at least quite a bit.

But now there is a new threat. In April the government said it would let Yukos, an oil company, build a pipeline from the oilfields near Angarsk, said to be as big as Kuwait's, to Daqing in China. The pipeline would curve around the southern end of Baikal, cutting across 59 of its tributaries. In a highly seismic region - 141 years ago, 200 square kilometres (77 square miles) of lakeshore sank under water in an earthquake - that is risky.

Yukos's own impact study acknowledges that there is a “quite real” possibility of the pipeline rupturing and oil reaching the lake. Despite this, according to a critique of the study written by Rick Steiner, a conservation specialist at the University of Alaska, it includes no contingency plan for oil spills. But the pipeline would have to go through Mongolia to be outside the lake's watershed. And though Japan's government is urging Russia to take a more expensive route northwards and to Nakhodka, Russia's closest big port to Japan, this would run similar risks.

Baikal is listed as a “world heritage site” by UNESCO, and Russia has strong environmental laws, including a special one protecting the lake itself. But, says Greenpeace, the laws are frequently flouted: all the proposed versions of the China pipeline, for instance, run through national parks, which is supposedly illegal. It could be made fairly safe but environmental lobbying multiplied the cost of a pipeline across similar terrain in Alaska to nearly nine times the original estimate. Russia's greens do not have such clout.

Russia's natural jewel, Lake Baikal, is at the mercy of oil money.