Crystalline Lake Baikal Has Cloudy Future
Scientist Mikhail Grachev spent a decade studying the natural wonders of Siberia’s Lake Baikal--so ancient and isolated, its water is acclaimed as among the purest in the world. Last year, riding Russia’s capitalist tide, he helped open a factory to bottle the lake and sell it.
For Grachev, the commercial venture is an attempt to merge Russia’s economic transformation with environmental preservation: to save the world’s oldest and deepest lake by making money from it. Although the shoreline bottling plant for drinking water is not yet a financial success, the scientist hopes that it will build momentum to safeguard the 400-mile-long lake from mounting man-made threats.
“The way to protect the lake is to build industry that depends on having clean water,” Grachev said. “We have to adapt science to a market economy.”
Lake Baikal, with 20% of the world’s supply of fresh water, was long protected by its remote location north of Mongolia. But today, its legendary purity and unique life forms are under assault from industrial pollution, illegal logging and untreated sewage. The most dramatic menace is a former military factory, now a pulp and paper mill, that pumps 140,000 tons of waste water--containing deadly dioxin--into the lake every day.
Cherished by Russians as the “Jewel of Siberia,” Lake Baikal is often likened to the much smaller Lake Tahoe because of its beauty and clarity. But Baikal is more like an inland sea, with the world’s only species of freshwater seals, a complex system of self-purification and hot water vents that nurture life in the deep.
The 25-million-year-old lake has been designated a World Heritage Site by UNESCO, the U.N. cultural agency. A natural laboratory of creation and evolution, it is studied by scientists from around the world as a key to understanding global climate change. The diversity of Baikal’s plant and animal life makes the lake as valuable for modern-day scientists as the Galapagos Islands were for Charles Darwin more than a century ago, scientists say.
In recent months, U.S. officials, businesses and environmentalists have gotten involved, looking for ways to protect the lake--including halting pollution from the mill--but with little success. A landmark bill pushed through parliament by Russian conservationists would have banned industrial development around Baikal, but it was vetoed last year by President Boris N. Yeltsin because of concerns that it would give regional governments too much authority.
Preservation efforts at Lake Baikal came up briefly during high-level talks in the United States earlier this month between Vice President Al Gore and Russian Prime Minister Viktor S. Chernomyrdin. Advocates say they hope that the talks will lead to a Baikal visit by the two officials this summer and, eventually, a U.S.-Russian program to safeguard the lake.
“For us to just ignore Baikal, a World Heritage Site, is unacceptable,” said Gary Waxmonsky, an Environmental Protection Agency advisor to Gore. “Vice President Gore knows the subject, he wants to see the lake, and presumably he can motivate his own government to work with Russia to produce a change.”
Balancing Economic, Environment Concerns
For Russia--arguably the world’s most polluted country--the debate over Lake Baikal calls into question how the emerging capitalist nation can solve its environmental problems at a time when its economy is in disarray.
Despite Lake Baikal’s daily dose of industrial waste, scientists and environmentalists agree that it is in better condition than many of the country’s ecologically sensitive sites. But they worry that its ecosystem may not be able to survive the chemical onslaught for many more years.
“No one is sure how much longer the lake can take this pressure,” said Tatyana Markova of Baikal Ecological Wave, an environmental group in nearby Irkutsk.
For those who live around the lake--many of them descended from czarist- and Soviet-era exiles--Baikal is a sacred place. They speak of it with reverence and believe in its mystical healing powers.
“Baikal is our life,” said Galina Fefelova, 57, a longtime resident of the lakeside village of Bolshiye Koty. “It’s our air, our water. It’s everything for us.”
It is no coincidence that Lake Baikal is the birthplace of Russia’s environmental movement. It is a place of incredible beauty: In summer, the water’s surface can be as smooth as glass, reflecting the snowcapped mountains and taiga forest that ring the lake. In places, the water is clear enough to see 100 feet deep. During a storm, the lake can be as rough as the ocean, with waves big enough to capsize a large boat. In the whiteness of winter, Baikal’s frozen surface forms a natural highway that residents drive across.
“Many people say Baikal is polluted, Baikal is lost, but it’s not so,” Grachev said. “We see there is no dramatic change in the ecosystem of Lake Baikal. On the other hand, we see the evidence of pollution.”
In volume, Baikal is the planet’s largest lake. More than 330 rivers empty into it, but only one, the Angara, flows out. Shaped like a banana, Baikal is the size of Belgium, and its catchment area is as big as France. If it were superimposed over California, it would stretch from Los Angeles to San Francisco.
Ancient Lake With Modern Problems
Scientists believe that Baikal has existed for at least 25 million years, perhaps even 50 million. Lake Tanganyika in Africa, the world’s second-oldest lake, is 2 million years old. Lake Tahoe is a mere 10,000. Most lakes fill with sediment in about 20,000 years, but Baikal has survived because it is on a geological rift that grows nearly an inch a year--enough to accommodate the silt and animal remains that drift to the bottom.
The lake is more than a mile deep, and scientists estimate that its sediment extends four more miles beneath the lake floor. The accumulated deposits are a treasure trove for scientists, who hope that they will provide a detailed picture of climatic and evolutionary change over the millennia.
Among the two dozen scientific expeditions to the lake each year, a team of American, Russian and Japanese experts has begun taking core samples from the lake bottom. When the lake freezes over during the subzero winter, they drill from a barge frozen in the ice. An earlier 650-foot-long sample provided a geological record dating back more than 2.5 million years. This winter, they hope to extract sediment going back more than 5 million years.
Grachev, director of the Limnological Institute in Irkutsk, said the samples are especially important because they provide the only continental record to compare with ocean-floor data.
Scientists can also study the pace of evolution and compare it with climatic change. Lake Baikal supports more than 2,500 species--including 960 kinds of animals and 400 plants found only here. Among them are the nerpa, a freshwater seal that migrated from the Arctic a million years ago. One of the main reasons for the lake’s purity is the tiny but abundant ephisura, a crustacean that ingests algae and bacteria.
“We can study speciation in the context of global change,” Grachev said. “The sediments provide an uninterrupted record of the past. We can find out how fast the climate changed. We can study the molecular clock and changes in DNA.”
Scientists also can study the effect of pollution on an ecosystem that was largely untouched until the industrialization arrived in the 1930s. Today, Lake Baikal faces a variety of threats:
* Industrial pollution produced as far away as Mongolia flows down the Selenga River, the lake’s largest tributary. Some say the factories on the Selenga are Baikal’s biggest source of chemical waste.
* A hydroelectric dam built by the Soviets on the Angara River in Irkutsk has raised the lake’s level by as much as 10 feet, causing erosion and wiping out beaches and shoreline trails. The higher water level has impaired the ability of the vast Selenga delta to filter pollution entering the lake.
* Hazardous pollutants from coal-burning factories drift dozens of miles through the air, permeating Baikal and its watershed.
* The sewage of about 50,000 people is dumped untreated into the lake. Many villagers say they now boil the drinking water they draw from the lake’s edge, something unheard of a decade ago.
* Illegal and uncontrolled logging is causing erosion that chokes tributaries with silt, harms aquatic life and increases sedimentation of the lake.
* Even in remote areas, trash litters the shore as Russians--including many who say they love the lake--throw garbage on the ground or in the water.
Pulp and Paper Mill Is Lake’s No. 1 Enemy
The most visible symbol of Baikal’s degradation stands on its southern shore: the Baikalsk Pulp & Paper Mill.
Although the mill, a former military factory, filters the tons of waste water it pours into Baikal every day, enough toxic chemicals reach the lake to kill creatures in a contaminated zone more than a mile square. Despite the mill’s treatment facility, environmentalists estimate that it dumps 300 pounds of dioxin a year into the lake. Mill officials concede that the plant discharges dioxin into the lake, but they put the amount at less than half a pound a year.
Day in and day out, brown smoke pours from the mill’s giant smokestacks, creating a haze that hangs over the nearby mountains and turns the trees brown. Officials acknowledge that the plant pumps more than 23 tons of pollutants into the atmosphere daily. The mill also produces 2 tons of solid waste every day. It smells like rotten eggs--even after it is buried. Mill officials try to downplay the danger to the environment, with little success.
“When we try to convince young people the factory is harmless, it is practically impossible,” conceded Raisa M. Zaikova, the mill’s deputy chief engineer in charge of environmental protection.
Mill Outlasted Soviet Government
Driven by Cold War competition with the United States, the government built the mill in the early 1960s to produce high-quality cellulose for military aircraft tires. Despite unusually vocal protests from residents, the Soviets chose Baikal because its pure water would make the best cellulose.
By 1986, the high level of pollution had become apparent even to Moscow, and the Soviets ordered the mill to shut down. Instead, the government went out of business and the plant continued operating.
Now, with the collapse of the Communist industrial system, the mill has been partially privatized and makes pulp for low-quality paper rather than cellulose. It has managed to stay afloat and pay its workers on time. But if required to cough up the hundreds of thousands of dollars it owes for environmental damage, it most likely would go bankrupt.
“From time to time, we pay symbolic fines of 500 to 1,000 rubles [$85 to $170],” Zaikova said. “If we had to pay a hefty fine, I doubt we could afford it. We simply don’t have the money.”
The mill, with its 30-year-old equipment, is nearing the end of its life span. No money has been invested in a decade, but its managers and workers are eager to keep the mill open so they can continue living in Baikalsk.
“There is a town of 17,000 people whose lives depend on the mill,” said Baikalsk Deputy Mayor Yevgeny Y. Starostenko. “Any option of relocating the mill is completely unattractive.”
In Soviet times, the company town was an oasis of privilege, with high salaries and well-stocked stores. Its climate is unusually mild for Siberia, and locals like to call it “subtropical.” They can grow strawberries in the summer, ski in the winter and enjoy the lake--assuming they can ignore the smoke, the smell and the reports of health problems caused by toxic waste.
In an attempt to save both the mill and the lake, the U.S. Agency for International Development paid the American firm CH2MHill and Grachev’s institute to draft a plan for rebuilding the factory. Under the proposal, the mill would switch to a non-chlorine manufacturing process--eliminating dioxin, waste water and the burning of coal--and begin making newsprint, paper towels and sanitary napkins, mainly for export to China.
The biggest drawback of the project is its $600-million price tag, an exorbitant amount in poverty-stricken Russia. The government is considering whether to back the plan, which would be a first step in attracting U.S. investors. Without federal support for the proposal, Zaikova warned, the rundown mill will be forced to close.
“It’s like using a car for 10 years without changing the oil,” she said. “Right now we are working on the verge of zero profitability. If the plan is not approved, we surely will get no investment, and the plant will collapse by the end of this year.”
Some environmentalists argue that letting the mill go out of business is the best alternative. There is no longer any justification, they say, for keeping a factory on the shore of the lake.
“Even if the mill becomes the best possible mill in the world,” Markova said, “it doesn’t belong at Lake Baikal.”
A $600-Million Dream Rescue Package
Experts agree that in the long run, the best way to protect the lake and provide jobs is to develop ecologically sensitive tourism. If Russia and foreign investors had the same $600 million to spend, they could create a world-class tourist center with new roads, lake-shore hotels, docks and ski resorts.
“Six hundred million dollars could build paradise on Earth,” said Peter B. Abramenok, director of the struggling Pribaikalsky National Park across the lake from the mill.
But Russian and U.S. officials say it will probably be many years before anyone comes forward with money to develop such facilities.
Even the small-scale Baikal water-bottling plant is struggling for lack of investment. Grachev helped find the cleanest water in the lake--1,300 feet deep and far from the mill--and devised a system for pumping it to the plant. But the company is producing only a fraction of its potential 20 million liters a year because it cannot afford to market its product.
With the troubled Russian economy, Grachev predicts that change will come slowly to Lake Baikal.
“Of course, it was a very great mistake that the Baikalsk Pulp & Paper Mill was built on Lake Baikal,” Grachev said. “The final solution would be to move the town of Baikalsk. In Stalin’s time, it would have been no problem: a few dogs, a little barbed wire, a few soldiers and people would go peacefully. But this is not Stalin’s time, and we have to take care of the people.”
