Soviet ideology held that nature was the servant of industrial and agricultural progress, and that humans should dominate nature on a grand scale. While this sentiment was common throughout much of the world at the time of the formation of the USSR, it does seem to have been taken further here than elsewhere. Joseph Stalin, leader of the USSR from 1922 to 1953 and a major architect of Soviet policy, is famous for having said, “We cannot expect charity from Nature. We must tear it from her.” During the Soviet years, huge dams, factories, and other industrial facilities were built without regard for their effect on the environment or on public health. Russia and the post-Soviet states now have some of the worst environmental problems in the world. By 2000, more than 35 million people in the region (15 percent of the population) were living in areas where the soil was poisoned and the air was dangerous to breathe (see Figure 5.6A–C).

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the region’s governments, beset with myriad problems, have been both reluctant to address environmental issues and incapable of doing so. As one Russian environmentalist put it, “When people become more involved with their stomachs, they forget about ecology.” Pollution controls are complicated by a lack of funds and by an official unwillingness to correct past environmental abuses. Figure 5.6 shows just a few examples of human impacts on the region’s environment, most of which are related to ongoing industrial pollution (as in Norilsk, in Figure 5.6A, B), nuclear contamination (as in Pripyat, Ukraine, in Figure 5.6C), or the extraction of fossil fuels. The sale of oil and gas on the global market is now a major source of income for Russia and several of the post-Soviet states, yet relatively little attention is being paid even today to the associated environmental impacts (see Figure 5.6D).

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Urban and industrial pollution was often ignored during Soviet times as cities expanded quickly—with workers flooding in from the countryside—to accommodate the new industries that often generated lethal levels of pollutants. Citizens’ concerns about pollution were suppressed and environmental movements such as those in North America and western Europe never developed.

It is often difficult to link urban pollution directly to health problems because the sources of contamination are multiple and difficult to trace. Such nonpoint sources of pollution include untreated automobile exhaust, raw sewage, and agricultural chemicals that drain from fields into water supplies. In all urban areas of the region, air pollution resulting from the burning of fossil fuels is skyrocketing as more people purchase cars and as the industrial and transport sectors of the economy continue to grow.

Some cities were built around industries that produce harmful by-products. The former chemical weapons–manufacturing center of Dzerzhinsk has been listed by the nonprofit Blacksmith Institute as one of the ten most polluted cities in the world. It is competing with the city of Norilsk, where much of the vegetation has been killed off around the city’s metal-smelting complex—the largest facility of its kind in the world (see Figure 5.6B). Norilsk is widely considered to be the most polluted city in Russia.

Russia and the post-Soviet states are also home to extensive nuclear pollution, the effects of which have spread globally. The world’s worst nuclear disaster occurred in Ukraine in 1986, when the Chernobyl nuclear power plant exploded. The explosion severely contaminated a vast area in northern Ukraine, southern Belarus, and Russia. It spread a cloud of radiation over much of Central Europe, Scandinavia, and eventually the entire planet. In the area surrounding Chernobyl, more than 300,000 people were evacuated from their homes, and Pripyat, which used to have a population of 50,000 people, has been an abandoned ghost town since the disaster (see Figure 5.6C). The ultimate health effects are impossible to assess exactly. The United Nations estimates that 6000 people developed cancer due to the accident, although many believe the number to be much higher. 278. SAFETY AT THE CENTER OF NUCLEAR POWER OPERATIONS WORLDWIDE

When the Soviet Union collapsed, many of the post-Soviet states inherited nuclear facilities and even nuclear weapons. One such country is Kazakhstan (see Figure 5.3). Remote areas of eastern Kazakhstan used to serve as a testing ground for Soviet nuclear devices. The residents were sparsely distributed and no one took the trouble to protect them from nuclear radiation. A museum in Kazakhstan now displays the preserved remains of hundreds of deformed human fetuses and newborns.

On the positive side, Kazakhstan’s government has disarmed the nuclear warheads that it inherited from the Soviet Union and has worked with U.S. authorities to safeguard its remaining nuclear weapons material. Kazakhstan plans to use its nuclear technology to become a global player in the nuclear energy sector. It is already the single biggest producer of uranium in the world, generating 35 percent of the global production total.

In addition to mining and exporting the raw material, Kazakhstan’s government wants to produce nuclear fuel both for global markets and domestic nuclear power plants and to develop commercial repositories for radioactive waste from other countries. However, the global appetite for nuclear expansion remains uncertain after the 2011 Fukushima accident in Japan, and no reliably safe system has yet been found for storing nuclear waste until it is no longer radioactive. Environmental and human rights NGOs have raised strong opposition, pointing to the region’s poor environmental track record. Kazakhstan’s population may also be suspicious of nuclear power because they have lived for so long with land poisoned by radioactive waste.

Russia and the post-Soviet states have considerable natural and mineral resources (see Figure 5.14). Russia itself has the world’s largest natural gas reserves, major oil deposits, and forests that stretch across the northern reaches of the continent. Russia also has major deposits of coal and industrial minerals such as iron ore and nickel. The Central Asian states share substantial deposits of oil and gas, which are centered on the Caspian Sea and extend east toward China. The value of all these resources is determined in the global marketplace, and their extraction affects the global environment.

Despite obvious environmental problems, cities like Norilsk (see Figure 5.6A), which sits on huge mineral deposits, continue to attract investment crucial to the new Russian economy. The area is rich in nickel—used in steel and other industrial products—and other minerals, such as copper. Norilsk Nickel, a company that was privatized at the end of communism and is now the largest producer of nickel in the world, dominates the city. With an extensive base of mineral resources, and unconstrained by meaningful environmental regulations, Russian-controlled Norilsk Nickel has used its enormous profits to become a global player in the mining industry. Despite its poor environmental record, it has purchased mining operations in Australia, Botswana, Finland, the United States, and South Africa and now employs more than 80,000 people worldwide.

Rivers, Irrigation, and the Loss of the Aral Sea To the south of Russia in the Central Asian states, the landlocked Aral Sea, once the fourth-largest lake in the world, was fed by the Syr Darya and Amu Darya rivers for millions of years. These rivers, which bring water from melting glaciers and snow in the mountains of Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Afghanistan, have been used to irrigate agriculture for thousands of years.

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In the 1960s, the Soviet leadership ordered that the two rivers be diverted to irrigate millions of acres of cotton in naturally arid Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. So much water was consumed by these projects that within a few years, the Aral Sea had shrunk measurably (Figure 5.7A). By the early 1980s, no water at all from the two rivers was reaching the Aral Sea, and by 2001, the sea had lost 75 percent of its volume and had shrunk into three smaller lakes. The region’s huge fishing industry, which accounted for one-sixth of the fish catch in the entire USSR, died out because of the salinity of the water. Once-active port cities were marooned many kilometers from the water. The decline and disappearance of the Aral Sea has been described as the largest human-made ecological disaster in history.

The shrinkage of the Aral Sea has caused many human health problems. Winds that sweep across the newly exposed seabed pick up salt and chemical residues, creating poisonous dust storms. At the southern end of the Aral Sea in Uzbekistan, 69 percent of the people report chronic illnesses caused by air pollution, a lack of clean water, and underdeveloped sanitation.

Efforts to increase water flows to the Aral Sea have been hampered by politics because the now-independent countries of Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan share the sea. Uzbekistan, in particular, wants to continue its massive irrigation programs, which have made it the world’s seventh-largest cotton grower. Nevertheless, some restorative actions have been taken. Kazakhstan, which relies on oil more than cotton for income, built a dam in 2005 to keep fresh water in the northern Aral Sea. By the following year, the water had risen 10 feet, and the fish catch was improving. Kazakh fishers note that there is now more open public debate about what to do next regarding the Aral Sea. In the southern Aral Sea, however, water levels remain very low (see Figure 5.7B, C). In Uzbekistan, for instance, where 44 percent of the workforce is employed in agriculture, the limitation of irrigation has forced economic diversification, and cotton production now makes up just 11 percent of the country’s exports, far less than the 45 percent it represented in 1990. 107. DYING SEA MAKES COMEBACK

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Climate change is an issue in this region for many reasons. Although high levels of CO₂ and other greenhouse gases are produced here, Russia’s forests play a major role in absorbing global CO₂. And while portions of the region are only somewhat vulnerable to the negative effects of a changing climate (shown on the map in Figure 5.8), Central Asia, which is prone to drought and water scarcity, has high to extreme levels of vulnerability.

Even though its CO₂ and other greenhouse gas emissions have declined since the Soviet era, Russia still has the fifth-highest rate of greenhouse gas emissions in the world. This is due in part to Russia’s use of energy-inefficient technologies and practices such as burning off or “flaring” of natural gas that comes to the surface when oil wells are drilled. While Russia has higher greenhouse gas emissions per capita than European countries, its levels are not as high as those in the United States.

Russia has shown some willingness to limit its own emissions by, for example, signing international treaties, such as the Kyoto Protocol and the Copenhagen Accord, to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Such treaties, however, use 1990 as a baseline for emissions. Russia’s compliance with international targets to reduce greenhouse emissions is largely an outcome of the country’s post-1990 economic decline after the end of communism. Lower levels of industrial output have meant lower emissions.

Central Asia is particularly vulnerable to the impacts of climate change because of its dependence on water from rivers that are fed by glaciers in the Pamirs and other mountains in Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan (see Figure 5.8). In recent decades, the glaciers have shrunk because of more extreme temperature ranges and decreases in rain and snowfall. In this area, most precipitation falls in the mountains in the winter and spring. The glaciers act as water-storage systems, supplying melted ice flow to the rivers during the summer, when irrigation is most needed for growing crops. If current trends continue, the glaciers will melt earlier in the year, resulting in lower river flows in the summer. Central Asia’s agricultural systems would either have to adapt to a spring growing season (winters are too cold), or farmers would have to store water for use in the summer. Either proposition would demand complex and expensive changes on a massive scale.