The St. Petersburg Times, May 23, 2000
State Environment Body Goes Way of Dodo
In what environmentalists called "a step away from the civilized
world," President Vladimir Putin last week abolished the federal committee
that monitored most of the country's environmental issues.
Last Wednesday, Putin signed a decree abolishing the State Committee
for the Environment, the main government body responsible for monitoring
and analyzing all facets of the environment except those related to nuclear
issues. According to the decree, the committee's monitoring functions
will be transferred to the Nature Resources Ministry.
In an interview Monday, committee head Viktor Danilov-Danilyan called
the decree "absurd."
"Environmental testing and environmental control must be carried out
by an independent body. Meanwhile, the Nature Resources Ministry itself exerts
a major negative impact on the environment, and all of its numerous projects
are objects of [our] monitoring," Danilov-Danilyan said.
"The ministry ... will certainly kill all environmental activities," he
said, adding that if the ministry is entrusted with ecological control,
"the environmental activities will begin to degrade rapidly."
According to the decree, the committee's specialists will not be
automatically transferred to the ministry, and it is unclear how the
ministry will fulfill its new monitoring duties. Abolishing the committee,
however, is a lengthy process that may take up to three months,
Danilov-Danilyan said, adding that he hoped the country's green lobby
would put enough pressure on the government to result in a reversal
of the decision to liquidate the committee - which he said should be deemed
a government "mistake."
Environmentalists have repeatedly criticized Danilov-Danilyan for his
halfway policies. Last fall, for example, the environmental chief publicly
supported a project to import spent nuclear fuel to Russia for long-term
storage, calling the plan profitable. The project is lobbied by the
Nuclear Ministry and is sharply criticized by both Russian and
international activists.
On Monday, however, independent environmentalists unanimously supported
Danilov-Danilyan, and called the decree a conscious step by a government
that does not care about the environmental situation in the country.
"Even the presence of a shabby State Committee for the Environment is
better than no environmental monitoring body whatsoever," said Greenpeace
Russia spokesman Alexander Shuvalov.
In a news release distributed last week, Greenpeace Russia called the
liquidation of the committee "a step away from the civilized world."
"From now on, Russia is absolutely helpless against the army of
industrial and commercial moguls who shamelessly steal its natural resources,"
the news release said.
"This [liquidation] is a step towards de-environmentalization of the
state," said Vladimir Slivyak, coordinator of nuclear programs for
the Moscow-based Ecodefense group.
"Maybe the next to go will be the State Nuclear Inspection Agency [or
Gosatomnadzor]," a body that monitors and analyzes all civilian nuclear
facilities in the country, Slivyak said.
Alexander Nikitin, the renowned environmental activist who heads the
Russian branch of the Norwegian environmental group Bellona, said the
committee was eliminated because it was "an inconvenient body."
"If the government had a chance to abolish the rest of the green
organizations, it would have done exactly that," Nikitin said.
Nikitin spent over 10 months in a Federal Security Service jail and
four years under constant surveillance on charges of high treason and espionage
for co-authoring a report with Bellona on the environmental hazards
posed by Russia's Northern Fleet. A recipient of several international awards
for his environmental activities, Nikitin was finally acquitted by
the Supreme Court last month.
While Russia has drawn international criticism for punishing its
environmental activists, it pays remarkably little attention to ecological
problems. According to Danilov-Danilyan, in 1999, the country allocated
only 0.2 percent of its budget to support environmental work.
At the same time, the environmental chief said earlier this year that
61 million Russians - almost half of the country's population - live under
environmentally dangerous conditions, noting, for instance, that the
air in 120 Russian cities is five times more toxic than acceptable levels.
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