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Table of content:
GIVING OAKS BACK TO THE ENVIRONMENT NEWS OF OAKS OF RUSSIA PROGRAM
Bringing together. Experts, local community and national culture
The first meeting of SEU Forest Campaign new program "The oaks of Russia"
aimed on oak grove restoration took place in Yaroslavl in June. Yaroslavl is
an old historic town - one of the sites of the so-called "Golden Ring".
This historic place was chosen as program principles are based on the
recognition of oak and oak grove cultural and historic, as well as
ecological values.
In many cases oak groves or odd trees are part of cultural and historical
landscape of the region.
One may remember the sacred groves of Marii-El or Chuvashia. Another, more
so to say down to earth example are the groves that were used by Peter the
Great for ship building - we still may find the remnants of those in
Novgorod Region, NW of Russia.
Speaking from environmental point of view, oak grove place in temperate zone
may be compared to that of the rainforests in the tropical zone - for their
richness in biodiversity and other ecosystem forming functions.
Unfortunately, the speed of oak grove degradation is comparable to the
rainforests elimination speed, while the oak grove number is significantly
lower than that of the rainforests. In fact, the situation is as bad as,
according to some estimations, oak groves may vanish completely by the year
2042. They have already lost their full capacity for self-restoration and
now human help is needed.
The disastrous situation has several causes - primarily, that the best tress
were cut for shipbuilding and other construction purposes, as well as in
many cases the oak forests were cut to free the land for agricultural
purposes.
The "Oaks of Russia" gathered different people - professional ecologists,
people who care what happens around their place, study its nature and
history, people working with children. It is remarkable that children and
youth organizations got involved actively in the program attracted very
specific and concrete activities like planting young trees and taking care
of them.
Representatives from Novgorod and region, Kostroma, Vologda region,
Marii-el, Yaroslavl and Yaroslavl region, Moscow discussed the situation and
shared ideas how to improve it.
It turned out that quite many people are eager to work on replanting the
oaks, but what is needed is a simple and comprehensive manual for oak
planting and caring. The oak specifics are that it is very vulnerable in its
first years - starting from acorns that are to be stored carefully and more
than for a year preserved from drying or being eaten by rodents. Oaks also
demand specific care for the first several years. By the way, this is
actually one of the reasons why foresters prefer to plant pine and spruce -
not to mention that in contemporary Russian forestry spruce and pine are
most popular species having highest commercial value. Currently SEU Forest
Campaign works on such manual, and meeting discussions added quite a lot to
it.
Participants also set up some strategies for the next step activities - like
work with different level officials. One of the problems in oak grove
conservation and restoration is to get officials to understand and recognize
the seriousness of the problem. Only then it will be much easier to solve
different problems connected to the land for oak planting and remaining oak
grove conservation. Regarding this issue meeting participants decided to
address Forest Department of the Ministry of Nature resources asking for oak
restoration activity support.
The meeting also agreed on constant information exchange, mutual
consultations, as well as on oak acorn exchange.
As one of the main meeting outcome we should note that the network of
organizations working on oak grove conservation and restoration has started
to form and to work.
More info
Vladimir Zakharov, forestru@online.ru, about the oak program:
http://oaks.forest.ru (In Russian only)
New oaks in Central Russia appeared
More than one thousand and half oak seeds were planted in May near the
village of Gorelets, Kostroma region. The action was organized by
Biodiversity Conservation Centre; the local priest and Moscow
schoolchildren - the participants of annual summer environmental school -
were the ones whose efforts helped to do this.
One part of oak seeds was planted in the forest nursery, the others - on a
river bank and forest dews.
Forests of Kostroma region are situated at the border of European and East
Siberian, their flora is known for the diversity. Local citizens used to
live on non-timber products, such as mushrooms. The villages used to be full
of people. But now the region, as many places in Russian province, is an
example of the civilization destruction. Forests were almost destroyed
because of logging; villages were collectivized, centralized and finally
also destroyed.
But the signs of the fat of the land still remained in some settlements. One
can still find oaks, fir-trees, larches, lime-trees there as there used to
be common inhabitants of the forest seized by pine and aspen.
Among the further plans are not only oaks planting. In cooperation with
schoolchildren and local priest greens will introduce ash-tree and elm to
the land which used "to host" them many years ago.
More info: Mikhail Karpachevsky, forest@bcc.seu.ru
REFORESTATION OR DEFORESTATION?
Natural resource committee Republic of Marii El (small region on Volga
River) publicized the results of forest units activity for the first
quarter of this year. The figures show that so called reforestation and
sanitary cutting were performed on 2,200 hectares (137.5% of planned area).
126.9% of planned quantity of timber were cut. The 92.4 thousand of cubic
meters of timber is stocked for sale, Regions.RU reported.
The Committee considers these figures very optimistic as they show that more
timber is logged and will be sold.
Despite the continuing reorganization of forest management system (after the
abolishment of national Forest Service one year ago) the practice of forest
use still remains the same. Forest units, as in the past, are guided by the
basic idea - to cut as much timber as possible and it is often done under
wraps of "reforestation" cutting. The figures show that forest units don't
even try to hide the fact that timber logging is the main purpose of their
existence.
Being concerned with harvesting timber instead forest use control, forest
units got unable to protect their territories from fire and illegal
logging. It resulted in increasing number of cases of illegal logging and
getting more hectares of forest burnt to ashes.
KUCHMA DESTROYS THE DNIESTER WETLANDS
As it is reported by the Socio-Ecological union of Odessa an illegal
project of construction of a high-speed Odessa Ismail motorway started at
the end of April is still NOT rejected, but paused. The construction is
carried out at personal order of the Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma in
the Dniester delta, the unique water reserve. The construction was started
without any land section allotting, with no economic and technological
substantiation, in the absence of geological and hydrological prospecting,
any esteem of the possible environmental effects, an expert ecological
appraisal and even without a project. The arable land has already been
destroyed and the ground pour out has already started in the territory
defended by the Ramseur Convention (as it is inhabited by rare waterfowl),
in addition it must be said that the work is being carried out in the Odessa
water supply area. It is taking place when spawning and mass migration of
birds has already begun and the season of silence has been declared.
Ecologists from Ukraine and Moldova (both radical ones and concerned
scientists) voice their protests holding direct actions, addressing the
authorities with letters and telegrams in the attempt to prevent the
destruction.
According to the project the motorway is to be laid through three times
preserve areas - "The Dniester quick ground" reserve which is under the
protection of the 1971 Ramseur Convention, "The Lower Dniester national
park" which is being planned at present .
Alla Shevtchuk of Odessa Social-Ecological Union says that out of 19 swampy
soils reserve areas protected by the Ramseur Convention in Ukraine 11 are in
the Odessa region. It may be called the gold reserve of Europe.
The Dniester quick ground is the only ecosystem of such a type in Europe.
Part of it, the Caragole bay, has been included into an ichthyologic
preserve since 1965 and fishing is forbidden there all year round. Ukrainian
public has been waging struggle for the preservation of the quick grounds
since mid 80-s. The Green have managed to stop the construction of fishery
ponds and to prevent the quick grounds from getting rotten. In 1994 they had
to take a radical step and risking their lives they blocked the ways to the
Caragole Bay as all the ways of addressing the authorities in writing had
been exhausted by that time.
The Dniester flood lands constitute one of the major migration ways through
the territory of Ukraine as well as the place of concentration of rare kinds
of birds. It is also planed as a river and valley landscape corridor, a
constituency for the European system of the nature heritage protection.
The most striking feature of the story is that only the construction firm
will profit by it. Ukraine will spend hundreds of millions of dollars in
vain and will worsen the situation with the quick land. As for the village
of Palanka it will stay aside from the motorway. The chairman of the
"BIOTICA" council writes in his address to the authorities of Moldova, "It
is surprising neither the inhabitants and nor the local authorities of the
village understand it".
The ecologists see their aim in stopping the construction till all the
procedure issues concerning the project preparation have been completed. The
main task is to provide the public esteem of the project, as the official
appraising will be subject to heavy pressure.
More info:
Alla Shevtchuk, Chairman of the Odessa Branch of the International
Social-Ecological Union,
Odessa tel/fax (0482) 268 275, alla@eco.odessa.ua
Ivan Rusev, The Nature Heritage Fund
Tel/fax: +38(0482) 52-28-05. E-mail: wildlife@paco.odessa.ua
GAZPROM CONTINUES WITH ITS ILLEGAL ACTIVITES
It seems like Gazprom getting more and more power in Russia. After the
capturing NTV channel Gazprom continues with seizing new territories. One of
its recent acquisitions is a specially protected natural area near Gelenjic
resort on the Black Sea coast. Gazprom is planning to construct a gas
pipeline there within the Russian-Turkish project known as Blue Stream.
Russian government authorities abolished a protected area by the special
decree. De jure there is no unique nature any more, but de facto there are
Crimean pine and other national Red Book listings planned to be cut.
It is not a first case of changing protection status of the natural areas,
several years ago a part of the area of Utrish (also black Sea) sanctuary
got unprotected because Caspian Pipe-line Consortium constructed its
pipe-line there.
But greens are not going to give up. They plan to bring a case against the
Government and prove that its decree was completely illegal.
More info:
Andrey Rudomakha, Independent Ecological Service of Northern Caucasus,
e-mail: ies@mail.ru
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