Ecologists fear for Lake Baikal as Putin saves factory
BAIKALSK, Russia (Reuters) – On the shores of Lake Baikal, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin is held up as a savior and cursed as a scourge after allowing a Soviet-era paper mill to reopen beside the world’s largest freshwater lake. Ecologists have branded Russia’s most powerful man as the killer of Baikal, a 25-million-year-old lake believed by local tribes to be sacred, and have mustered thousands of people at protests calling for his resignation. Putin’s opponents say he has misjudged the public mood and is risking Baikal to save 1,470 jobs at the Baikalsk Pulp and Paper Mill, which was mothballed in late 2008 amid a pollution row. … “Hundreds of incompetent decisions are made in the Kremlin and White House (government headquarters) … in precisely this ‘noiseless’ fashion without public discussion or criticism,” liberal politician Vladimir Ryzhkov wrote in The Moscow Times. Environmentalists say the mill threatens the world’s deepest lake, which contains 20 percent of the world’s fresh water, and its 1,500 species of plants and animals, including a unique type of freshwater seal. Environmental watchdog Greenpeace says before it was mothballed, the mill daily discharged some 120,000 cubic meters of waste water into the lake, containing high concentrations of toxic substances. “Over the past decades the Baikalsk Pulp and Paper Mill has inflicted huge damage to the lake,” Greenpeace said in an appeal urging the closure of the plant. Though some activists have been angered by the way Putin’s opponents have sought to use the issue to damage him, they say locals would do better to find jobs in industries that rely on Baikal retaining its pristine reputation — such as tourism. “With one stroke of the pen, this chance has been missed,” said Andrei Petrov, a campaign coordinator at Greenpeace. “Yet again, people are now chained to this ill-famed plant which has fouled everything around it.” …
