124 Pan II: Environmentalism's Second Wave
with. In countries such as the United States, businessmen and industrialists have been the most hostile critics of the greens. In India and Malaysia they are joined by state officials and technocrats, with both private and public promoters of development attacking environmentalists as motivated by foreigners, as creating law-and-oi der problems, or as wishing only to keep tribals and rural people 'backward,' placed in a museum for themselves and their fellow romantics to gawk at. The most famous and powerful of these anti-environmentalists has been the Prime Minister of Malaysia, Mahathir bin Mohammed. In 1990, he announced that he and his government did not
intend to turn the Penan into human zoological specimens to be gawked at by tourists and studied by anthropologists while the rest of the world passes them by . . . It'sourpolicy to eventually bring all jungle dwellers into the mainstream . . . There is nothing romantic about these helpless, half-starved and disease-ridden people.
Two years later, in a document specially prepared for the F.arth Summit, Mahathir's government insisted that
The transition from cave and forest dwelling to village and urban living is a phenomenon that has marked the transformation of human societies from time immemorial. The environmental activists have no right to stand in the way of the Penans in this process of change and human development.
Not only with regard to the Penan, not just in Malaysia, it has been the signal contributions of environmental activists to speak truth to power, to ask of politicians and other rulers the uncomfortable questions: Development at what cost? Progress at whose expense?
7
Socialism and Environmentalism (or the Lack Thereof)
early soviet environmentalism
The affluent societies of the Europe and North America, along with Japan, Australia, and New Zealand, are collectively known as the 'First' World; the poorer nations of the South, located in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, as the 'Third' World. This book has highlighted think-ers and movements from the First and Third Worlds, but has thus far 'eft unmentioned the people and territories in between. It now arrives at the Second World, the
countries behind the Iron Curtain which are neither rich nor poor and were distinguished, before the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, by their commitment to the ideology of state socialism. The discussion shall focus on the Soviet Union, the erst-w-hi]e superpower that was the Big Brother of the Second World.
The previous chapter has spoken of the obsession of Brazilian and Indian politicians with catching up with the affluent societies. This obsession in fact manifested itself much earlier in the Soviet Union, soon after the First rather than the Second World War. The leaders of the Bolshevik Revolution of November 1917 hoped to catch up in military as well as economic terms, for they believed that only breakneck industrialization would save their beleaguered country from being overrun by the capitalist powers. As Joseph Stalin once lid, 'We are fifty to one hundred years behind the most advanced
126 PartII: Environmentalism's Second Wave
countries. We must close this gap in the span of ten years. Either we do that or they will sweep us away.' The worship of technology, the faith in industrial production as a means of solving social problems, the arrogant neglect of natural constraints, all helped shade the difference between Soviet communism and American capitalism. Writing in 1933, Aldo Leopold wrote insightfully of what worked to unite political systems apparently opposed to each other:
As nearly as I can see, all the new isms—Socialism, Communism, Fascism . . . outdo even Capitalism itself in their preoccupation with one thing: the distribution of more machine-made commodities to more people. Though they despise each other they are competitive apostles of a single creed: salvation by machinery.
Soviet programs of industrial reconstruction were buttressed by Marxism, an ideology which has an unshakeable faith in the powers of modern technology to tame and conquer nature. Marxists also believed that the abolition of private property leads automatically to a diminution of pollution, for the victory of communism would eliminate the capitalists who stoop to anything—putting untreated effluents into the water, for example—to protect their profits. In this view, any residual contamination of the environment would be taken care of by the all-seeing and all-knowing system of centralized planning.
With regard to philosophy and practice, then, Soviet Marxism was characterized, in the main, by a deep indifference to nature and natural limits. 'The proper goal of communism,' remarked Leon Trotsky in the early 1920s, 'is the domination of nature by technology, and the domination of technology by planning, so that the raw materials of nature will yield up to mankind all that it needs and more besides.' A decade later a Soviet scientist claimed that 'the history of humankind has been the road from -i-.1---1
—idier a Soviet scientist < me nistory oi
humankind has been the road from slavery and blind subjection to the elemental forces of nature to the struggle [and] conquest of her . . • In conditions of socialism . . . the natural resource base for the economy is not contracting, but has all of the ingredients for limitless development.'
The signs were unpropitious, but as it happened in the first ten years of communist rule a fledgeling conservation movement was to take impressive strides. There already existed a rich pre-rcvolutionary tradition o! natural history and nature protection societies which had helped set aside endangered habitats. In the first week of November 1917, concurrent with the Bolshevik assumption of power, a Conservation Conference in Petrograd discussed a proposal 'On the Types
°f Sites where it is Necessary to Establish Zapovedniki on the Model of the American National Parks.' In fact the Russian understanding °f Zapovedniki, or protected areas, was more sophisticated than the American. National Parks in the U.S. had been established for cultural and nationalist reasons, whereas Soviet scientists were asking for sues °f virgin nature to be selected on ecological criteria, to act as a 'baseline from which to judge the suitabilitv of human intervention
Chapter 7: Socialism and Environmentalem
127
so to
say unprotected areas.
LEON TROTSKY ON THE SOCIALIST CONQUEST OF NATURE One of the architects of the Russian Revolution outlines his vision of socialist man's domination of nature.
e present distribution of mountains and rivers, of fields, of meadows, al StT'3es' °f forests and seashores, cannot be considered final. Man has leady made changes in the map of natur
'Hi
of air
.'"significan
re that are not few nor ut they are mere pupil's practice in comparison with what 1S coming. Faith merely promises to move mountains; but technology, *hich takes nothing 'on faith', is actually able to cut down mountains and jnove them. Up to now this was done for industrial purposes (mines) or for railways (tunnels); in the future this will be done on an immeasurably 'arger scale, according to a general industrial and artistic plan. Man will occupy himself with re-registeringmountainsand rivers, and will earnestly i  a"d repeatedly make improvements in nature. In the end, he will have rebuilt the earth, if not in his own image, at least according to his taste. We have not the slightest fear that this taste will be bad . . .
■ ■ . Throughthemachine.maninsocialistsocietywillcommandnature •n its entirety ... He will point out places for mountains and passes. He will change the course of the rivers, and he will lay down rules for the oceans. The idealist simpletons may say that this will be a bore, but that is why they are simpletons . . .
Source: Leon Trotsky, quoted in C. Wright Mills, The Marxists (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1963), pp. 27s-9.
Indeed, in the early years of Soviet rule both scientific research and university education flourished. The historian Douglas Weiner speaks of the 1920s as 'a golden age' for the teaching of biology in Russia. No longer subject to the 'shackles of the obscurantist Romanov censors, biology was free to introduce the most advanced notions into the classroom. An entire generation of geneticists, ecologists, and experimental biologists of world rank was in formation.'
128 Part II: Environmentalism's Second Wave
Some names might be offered here. Among biologists of world repute were N. I. Vavilov, the great student, collector and classifier of crop races; and G. F. Gauze, who pioneered the idea of the ecological niche' of a species. One must also mention V. I. Vernadskn, the scholar to whom we owe the terms 'biosphere' and 'geosphere: it was Vernadskii who, forty years before the publication of the Limits to Growth report of the Club of Rome, pointed out that natural productive forces 'have limits and that these limits are real; they are not imaginary and they are not theoretical. They may be ascertained by the scientific study of nature and represent for us an insuperable natural limit to our productive capacity.' A fourth scientist of note was the entomologist A. P. Semenov-tian-shanskii, who combined laboratory expertise with a romantic love of nature. Semenov-tian-shanskii was to will his collection of 700,000 insects to the Zoological Museum in Moscow; this included specimens of 900 species which he had discovered and first described himself. Little wonder that he thought nature to be the 'great book of the existence of all things,' a museum 'indispensable for our further enlightenment and mental development, a museum which, in the event of its destruction, cannot be reconstructed by the hand of man.' Society, believed Semenov-tian-shanskii, had 'a great moral obligation toward Nature,' yet industrial man was showing himself to be a 'geological parvenu . . . disrupting the harmony of nature,' determined to destroy 'that grand tableau which serves as the inspiration of the arts.'
This efflorescence of scientific research was accompanied by the creation and consolidation of conservation societies. These included the Central Bureau for the Study of Local Lore (TsBK, in its Russian acronym), which worked for the protection of natural as well as cultural heritage; a regional body, the All-Ukranian Society for the Defense of Animals and Plants (ZhIVRAS); and the All-Russian Society for Conservation (VOOP), which drew into its fold some of the most distinguished Soviet scientists. By the late twenties TsBK boasted of 2000 branches and 60,000 members; the Ukranian society claimed a membership of 9000; VOOP had only 1400 paid-up members, but it brought out the influential journal Okbranaprirody, an illustrated bi-monthly with a circulation in excess of 3000.
Scientists and their societies were encouraged by the Soviet dictator Vladimir Illyich Lenin, who was the brother of a biologist and a trekker and nature lover himself. It was Lenin who signed in September 1921, a new decree for the 'Protection of Monuments of Nature, Gardens and Parks,' which prohibited hunting and fishing in existing
^ ^haPter 7: Socialism and Environmentalist. J 29
thenwe!^?6 encouraged the establishment of new ones. Bv 1929 4 million h Zap°Vedmkl ™ the USSR< covering an area dose to governed b^p^ W°ods fa",ng outside these protected areas were tfus promo YA °/eSt Code wn,cn was signed into law in Julv 1923: bit,r>g clea reforestation and sustained-yieJd logging while prohi-cenr nf »l r"Cuttlng ln districts where forest cover was less than 8 per
"j0f the land area, scienc etlW SpeCt     '^s aPPear to have been a golden age for Soviet "ation* Soviet environmentaJism as well 'Ecological conser-
tragicaM Ij"OIT";nt >n the Soviet sun,' remarks Weiner ruefully, 'was of Gandn' " ^ere Seem to be uncanny parallels between the defeat USSR g ^ ^nd,a and the retreat of environmentalism in the °y the streams, after promising beginnings, were vanquished
t]j nse to power of a philosophy of state-led industrialization ,'an Wou^d not recognize natural constraints. But where the Gandh-Were?ler^'>' went back to their ashrams, their Russian counterparts Gau S tunate- ^ermdskii, for example, spent many years in exile; °f al^S Pro^1D'ted from designing new experiments; most tragic ■       Was tne end of Vavilov, who, having crossed swords with the
^Tt.t0r ^ro^lm Lysenko—Stalin's pet biologist—died in prison, p.    he demise of Soviet environmentalism was signalled by the first IT)IVe" ^ear Plan of 1929-34, which sought to radically alter production in6 'n aSricu^ture and industry. The plan mandated an increase
timber production from 178 to 280 million cubic metres; other rgets were equally far-reaching. There was now relentless pressure °n ecologies to show 'results,' to make their research lead directly to fe economic exploitation of natural resources. The collectivization ° agn'culture destroyed numerous protected areas on the steppes, converting natural biological communities into fields. Mining and ioSSmg were allowed in other wild areas. Where zapovedniki once covered 12.5 million hectares, by the early '50s this had declined to a
mere 1.5 million hectares.
servationists were on the defensive, in a profes-The attacks on them and their
Ecologists and cons sional as much as psychological sense, work were unforgiving. Commissars and communis th
ind con—ts thundered that saccharine-sentimental'approach ere was no place any more for a saccnaiwhich had, they
L"ere was no place any mo-c     - „r;nnism' which haa, wcy
to nature, fofthe 'naked idea of P«~*£3 ocialism. The TsBK thought, inhibited the further developmen ot»   . w.Vtv was mocked as a 'Society for the Preservat.o for Protection/™* the Revolution. Scien pared to zapovedniki where protected protes
130 Part II: Enviromnenlalism's Second Wave
the societies, it was said, was to 'save nature from the Five-Year Plan. Respected scholars known for their conservationist views were dismissed as un-Marxist or anti-revolutionary, even as 'agents of the world bourgeoisie.'
Soviet conservation in its first and most fruitful phase had room for three distinct varieties of environmentalism: for ecologists who favored the protection of undisturbed wilderness; for those who combined careful science with rural romanticism; and for practitioners of sustained-yield management. By the late '30s the first two orientations had disappeared into near-oblivion. The third strand, of scientific conservation, still existed, but in an uneasy coalition with state-planned industrialization. A scientist who found himself on the winning side wrote that it was
evident that the old theory of conservation of nature for nature's sake— a proposition that reeks of ancient cults of Nature's deification—stands in such sharp opposition to both our economic and our scientific interests that there is no place for it in our land of socialism-in-thc-making . . • Not the preservation, come what may, of the existing state of nature, but the rational intervention, study, mastery, and regulation of natural productive forces—that is what should be emblazoned on thebanners of our society.
When assessing the fate of Soviet environmentalism, the political climate in which it lived and died must never be overlooked. For the Russia of the 1930s and 1940s was the most totalitarian of societies, a place in which intellectual or political dissent was impermissible. N. I. Vavilov was one of an estimated 1,500,000 scholars, writers and revolutionaries who perished in the death camps for putting forward, however mildly, opinions that departed from the party line. Quite aside from the pressures of economics, then, there were very real constraints to the expression of environmentalist views that lay outside the narrow range of what was considered acceptable in Soviet Russia.
the three gorges project: a protest that wasnt ltm
In 1956, the all-powerful Chairman of China', r i a swim in the great Yangtze river; coming ou Tmmumst ^ forward to more spectacular demonstratio    V   W3ter' he '°° nature: ot man's P™ers over
Chapter 7: Socialism and Environmentalism
Swimming
by Mao Zedong
Great plans are being made; A bridge will fly to join the north and south, A deep chasm will become a thoroughfare; Walls of stone will stand upstream to the west To hold back Wushan's clouds and rain,
131
Till
a smooth lake rises in the narrow gorges.
1 |?e mountain goddess, if she is still there Will marvel at a world so changed.
[translated by John Gittings] weat plans had first been made, in fact, in the 1920s, when the nation-i.lst le»der Sun Yat-Sen suggested the building of a dam across the *hree Gorges, on the river's upper reaches. The idea was revived by Mao in the '50s, but it took another thirty years for it to move from j-ne politician's poems to the engineer's sketches. As now proposed bY China's planners, the Three Gorges Dam will be 185 metres (620 eet) high, generate 17,000 megawatts of electricity, take twenty years to build, and cost a staggering 50 billion U.S. dollars (224 billion y^n). It will be a feat of 'engineering giganticism,' the last defiant symbol of state planning, the last of the heroic projects, comparable ln the country's history only to the Great Wall itself.
Communist China treats dissent with the same arrogance as did Soviet Russia, but in early 1989 a group of brave journalists and schol-ars came together to publish a book, Yangtze! Yangtze!, which took a c°ld and critical look at the Three Gorges project. Printed in February, the book was at first widely and sympathetically covered in the media. " formed part of the 'Peking Thaw,' the wider pro-democracy movement that reached its peak with the students' peaceful capture of the c"y's Tiannenmen Square. After the military fired on the demonstrators in June, the movement collapsed, and the state came down heavily on the opponents of the dam. Several were jailed; Yangtze. y«ngtze/ was banned soon after the bloodbath, its remaining copies recalled from stores and pulped. , The contributors to Yangtze! Yangtze! included some of China , most respected hydrologists, physicists, ecologists and planners, neir eriticisms of the Three Gorges project focused on its techno-econo-mic unviability. These scientists argued that the massive-borrowing of funds would generate unacceptably high levels o■into that the project's promoters had grossly over-estimated benefits and
132 Pan II: Environmentalhm's Second Wave
under-estimated costs; that the dam would not help control flu^s' that it would seriously impede ship traffic on the Yangtze, V presently carried goods and passengers equivalent to fourteen rail 7 lines; that it would increase sedimentation, leading to the decline o an important port, Chongquing; and that it would direct funds awa) from small-scale projects that were more practicable, less destructive and would produce quicker results.
These technical criticisms -were accompanied by social, environ mental and aesthetic ones. The dam would, when built, displace as many as 1.3 million people. Yet, as one scholar pointed out, for this 'massive population relocation' the planners offered a 'resettlement plan [which] is ridiculous.' The region, noted another expert, is already an overpopulated area where food is insufficient and the land depleted. To resettle a population as large as that of a small European country will certainly exceed the local environmental capacity of this mountainous region.' Most eloquent of all was the lament of the veteran botanist Hou Xueyu:
Apart from irreparable damage to the soil, the natural beauty and cultural heritage of the area would be permanently damaged as well. I think the Three Gorges is the most beautiful of all the world's gorges. The surrounding areas have many national treasures, some more than 5,000 years old. These include the famous ruins of the ancient Daxi culture, and tombs from the Warring States period, the Eastern Han and the Ming and Qing dynasties . . . Further, the Three Gorges has unique geological features that provide very important physical data f or research. All this would be inundated if the reservoir were built, and tourism would suffer incalculable economic losses.
All over the world, large dams are being challenged as 'outdated monuments to an immodest era,' symbols of a centralizing, capital-intensive and environment-insensitive form of development that is no longer acceptable. The Chinese critics of the Three Gorges project are aware of, and take heart from, this world-wide movement. They grimly note that the construction of the Itaipu hydro-electric project_the grandest anywhere—was one of several such schemes that massively increased the Brazilian public debt, leading to an inflation rate of 365 per cent. They look hopefully across at the Silent Valley in south India and at the Franklin river m Australia, two instances where projected dams were called off after popular protest.
Tragically, the prospects of open and collective protest in China are close to zero. Elsewhere, in Brazil and India for example, people threatened with displacement have organized large processions, defiantly uprooted reservoir markers, marched on provincial and national
Chapter 7: Socialism and Environmentalist
133 rats.
«p.tals and burnt effigies of offending politicians and technQC } hese protests have not always been successful in stopping the dam; but« least they happen. In China, on the other hand, the million and ni°re victims of the Three Gorges project must silently suffer as It is be|ng built: criticisms being offered only by courageous scientists «*° ^ere themselves swiftly silenced. In April 1992, a committee of *he Communist Party finally voted to give the go-ahead to rhe dam. fl« next January, a Three Gorges Project Development Corporation Was «t up to oversee construction. An array of foreign firms, includ-ln8 Nlppon and Merrj] 1™,^ lined up to bid for contracts.
The conflict between environmental protection and authoritarian : «n only sharpen in China, a country which has liberalized its economic regime while remaining a one-party state. The industrai bo°rn of the last decade has generated enormous amounts ot po iu-;'°n. but citizens are gravely inhibited from doing anything about it. In August 1993, villagers in Gansu Province protested against he examination of their water by a chemical plant, leading to deaths °f fjsh and livestock and an increase in respiratory Jesses. When factory's managers, themselves well connected to the Communis Pa"- J' . ■......c       to the streets. Kiot
po
'thers before restoring 'order.'
rule
"factory s managers, themselves well conned" *- Rjot Pa<"ty, disregarded their complaints, peasants took to.the_««< ■ Police were called in; they killed two protesters and mjureo
at'On of se §overnment, indeed, will not even permit the form-
Lian C 3 n"n"P0''t,ca'grouP°f nature-lovers. A celebrated historian, 'fricnd0'1g'Ie. applied in 1993 to register a society to be culled the »b0lIt ■* Nature,' which would 'work to educate China's populace no[ I e "nportance of environmental conservation.' Permission was by off'USe^ WaS n0t gfanted" either, the application being ignored even lu's' ^e editor of Yangtze.' Yangtze/, Dai Qing, notes rhat onl ugb Liang Congjie says "I'm not interested in politics; I hj_ >Want to help the environment," the government doesn't believe
DEMOCRACY AND ENV1RONMV.NTALISM, AND THE TIES THAT BIND THEM
The president of the Chinese Banking Association, Qiao Peixin, remarked that in the 'debate over the Three Gorges project, I am afraid that there has not been enough democracy; the affirmative voices are allowed to be heard but the negative voices are often suppressed.' The woman journalist who edited Yangtze! Yangtze/ likewise observed, after the book was banned, that
daring to hope, hoping to dare
From an untitled poem by Bei Duo, translated by Geremie Barme, and quoted at the very end of a book that presented the case against the mammoth Three Gorges dam project: I do not believe that the Chinese will forever
refuse to think for themselves; I do not believe that the Chinese will never speak out thro.--1
I A-
— .v. cnat the ru
weare;„     ln3t>n an-^Wan,,^ _
__ ___J
If in China protests against the Three Gorges dam surfaced in the brief thaw of 1988-89, elsewhere in the communist world environmental movements came to form part of a wider struggle for democracy. In Poland, where the trade union Solidarity led the opposition to Communism, it was also Solidarity which, through its local chapters, began studying and publicizing incidents of environmental abuse. All over Eastern Europe, as the struggle against totalitarianism gathered force in the 1980s, environmental groups began holding the state
I
to
acc°unt for ;
apter 7: Socialism and Environmentalem
135
crimes against nature.' These crimes spoke for
"ad reduced lif" '" °knd tJle contamination of the environment ?lov*ki* more e"Pe«ancy between 1970 and 1985; that in Czecho-
5? ac,d rain■ tha[V P"°f the forest area had been imaged m Romany an independent study identified a massive
°° enters of **ri "a",a an '"dependent study identified a massive Vas dyme a «1 ,S P°"ut'°"; that in Russia the great Lake Baikal
PrevioUs,   T a"d pam{ul death d^ t° eutrophication. tn,s> a staS ^ ? a'.     kgen '1£t^ opportunity to speak out against viet Jead- w-i l     remed,ed °y    rise to power, in 1985, of the
°Pennes/C "^khad GorDachev. Gorbachev's polices of glasnost,
st«es. People Sf> °Ver fr°m the Soviet Union to its S3tc!ite n)and c/ean nowaJfowed W breathe more freely, indeed to de-
k°m a van ^ "jt ^C lmPetU5 f°r fhe new environmentalism came Po/and; fr      sources: from Solidarity and the Catholic Church ,'n Hungary   ™ *;vangelJca' cfergy in East Germany; from scientists ^"'garia ^"d „   ecr,os'ovak,a>' from plain old-fashioned democrats Nikolai Ceu an,a~nome, respectively, to Todor Zhivkov and
!n these ■    Ceascu' tne most tyrannical of the Communist tyrants. 'n the revo°Untr'eS env,ronmenraiists played a not unimportant role ^n the e/   Utlonso'r 1989 that consigned one-party states to oblivion. ary repre5ctl°ns wnich followed, Green parties found parliament-*~Zecho / e"tatJOn 'n Rumania, Bulgaria and Slovenia, while in Civic F0   Va    environmen tahsts allied themselves to the victorious
In h,riJm      ^ t'le Sreen-minded playwright, Vaclav Havel. an envi *        '3nC' Gorbachev's agenda also resonated nicely with ^r°rn air°n,r>enta' constituency that had been making itself visible waves   °ut a decade before his arrival. One might speak here of two Wod  * environmentalism, interrupted of course by a long
his '        totah'tarian rule. Although Joseph Stalin died in 1953 and t°ok,erS°naJlt->' CU'r'Was dramatically disavowed three years later, it j„    a"other twenty years for environmentalist writings to start find-rnicf3      e ln tne newspapers and literary magazines. But from the lin    ^ Writers a"d scientists began gently criticizing the foul-smel-8 residues of unchecked industrialization. These criticisms became "re strident in the mid '80s, following Gorbachev's ascent to power a the near-simultaneous accident at the Chernobyl nuclear plant, j ,s the biggest disaster in a disaster-ridden history of 'planned' deve-°Prnent. Numerous groups and societies began banding together— °rie such was the Ecology and Peace Association, whose President, * P- Zalygin, offered the stirring motto, 'Only the Public can save Nature.' This public now bestirred itself to save beloved and beleaguered water bodies: which included the rivers Volga and Don, eyed
'36 Part II: Environmentalisrn's Second Wave
by destructive dam-builders, and Lake Baikal, choked by the effluents of one of the world's biggest paper mills. Away from the great rivers and lakes, citizens came together to challenge polluting industries, forcing them to pay fines, to change over to cleaner processes, or to shut down altogether. By accident or design, many of the more dangerous factories had been sited outside Russia, in the subordinated republics of Estonia, Armenia, and Latvia. Here environmentalists allied themselves to nationalists, associating the offending factories with a Greater Russian Chauvinism, which they accused of craftily exporting polluting units to non-Russian areas But as 7-'»..
But aVZe'ev Wolf " non'K^n areas." " "«ional history has ^ ^ '™m^ of «=°logy ™*
«0 ereen mm„_./°,^h»»ctenStic of 'a portion of Russia's 'nere Soviet nn«j:... l j ., ,
-----—; nas also been characteristic of 'a portion of Russia
[own] green movement.' Where Soviet novelists had once extolleu steel mills and collective farms, there came to prominence, in the 70s and "80s, a school of writers which looked back lovingly to the peasants of the pre-revolutionary past. The best-known of these 'village' novelists, Valentin Rasputin, wrote a famous fictional defense of a rural community made to make way for a hydro-electric project. He also wrote feelingly of the threatened landscapes of his native Siberia and of Lake Baikal, near whose shores he lived. For Rasputin, as for his contemporary Vasiliy Belov, the village is 'the wellspring of morality, religious meaning, and harmony with the natural environment, and, moreover, the only reliable medium through which these values can be transmitted to future generations.' Or as Yuriy Bondarev put it,
If we do not stop the destruction of architectural monuments, if we do not stop the violence to the earth and rivers, if there does not take place a moral explosion in science and criticism, then one fine morning, which will be our last and that of our funeral, we, with our inexhaustible optimism, will wake up and realize that the national culture of great Russia-its spirit, its love for the paternal land, its beauty, its great literature, painting, and philosophy—has been effaced, has disappeared forever, murdered, destroyed forever, and we, naked and impoverished, will sit on the ashes, trying to remember the native alphabet which is so dear to our hearts, and we won't be able to remember, for thought, and feeling, and happiness, and historical memory will have disappeared.
[translated from the Russian by Robert G. Darst, Jr.] This was spoken in 1986 at the annual Congress of the USSR Union of Writers, a body which would not have allowed, in 1966 or in 1946» such a forthright refutation of the economic ideology of communism, an ideology marked by disdain for the past and reverence for the
Chapter 7: Socialism and Environmentalist!
137
Zty ^ of the ™dem. But dissent is the life-blood of demo-Ce *** " is not only in communist states that "™me.D™ " cce PUuS,hed b-k the Lit. of what has been considersponacaly CCeP^ble. Thus in the Indonesian island province of Bather
... ....    fl. .11-»«  trrreriS WHO Op
'"ighty
c
fa
acce;
—«s. inus in the Indonesian island piu""— - , Pose 7 Pr°teSts be met with a hail of bullets g««"*?£
Jo   ^tructive development projects have shrewd),-use pent ons.
S y readin§s- p™y-in      and cartoons w
on K   Wsu« had become a vehicle for the expression
env-rr0ader SOcial a«d PM °°ZerZ -
"^"mental reforn/and    lltical reform more ge«n,zatlon.
*ade manifest in a 1990 manifesto of a Bulgarian green °^
c
strat th
rc the state and party are one, it observed, « (J]e s Md unprivileged consumers.' And since tW    ^ w hce SS'c decisions are not the same people as tno deci_ he ^sequences,' the 'degree of an individual s caused ;on-mak,ng is in inverse proportion to the actual suffer, g [to\ him by environmental pollution.' nich bears
This Bulgarian group is called EcogLsnost. a name win
I Ecogmsnw, - environ.
mony to°the insepa«ble link betWeen ^the rise of green "^•"alism. For authoritarian states cannot permi ^
testi
and 1980s'c COnVerse'ygreen movement5 m'§"c"—35 ,n '970sBrazl tatOrsfjiD ' a"ern Europe—help move communist or military dic-f|es. lt ls ,n tne direction of multi-party, so to say more open socie-'n the So U accic'ent that one of the more robust green movements ''fry-two " C° be ^ou"d m India, a democracy for all but two of its is nio . ^ears as an independent republic; or that environmentalism theCoH '"""entiai in the United States and Western Europe, where nl. . °mm'tment to political democracy runs deeper than in any other '- t..man history.
Place or at any other time in