>From daemon Tue Mar 10 06:53:25 1992 Received: from CUBLDR.DECnet MAIL11D_V3 by spot.Colorado.EDU with SMTP id AA13784 (5.65c+/IDA-1.4.4/CNS-2.1 for ); Tue, 10 Mar 1992 06:53:17 -0700 Date: Tue, 10 Mar 1992 06:53:17 -0700 Message-Id: <199203101353.AA13784@spot.Colorado.EDU> From: gimenez_m@gold.colorado.edu (Martha E. Gimenez (303)492-7080) To: gimenez@spot.Colorado.EDU Status: OR This topic is allocated to material relevant to the environment in the USSR and to superpower relations around the environmental question. Technology Review Copyright (c) 1988 Information Access Company; Copyright (c) Alumni Assn. of M.I.T. 1987 April, 1987 The bear's view: Soviet environmentalism ONE year ago this month the world added a new word to its growing vocabulary of environmental disasters: Chernobyl. The Soviet Union's handling of that crisis reflected its conflicting values concerning the environmental effects of large-scale projects. In the months following the accident, they reported its causes and environmental results far more openly than they had in many previous situations. Yet the accident has not stopped the Soviets from finishing an even larger nuclear plant with the same design 300 miles away. While the nationdid decide last year to halt another potentially disastrous technological project--a 2,500-kilometer river-diversion plan--the country continues to pursueschemes that could cause major environmental problems. In the past 20 years, the Soviet Union has allowed some environmental debate. Experts can voice concern before projects are decided on and criticize the ways plans are implemented. Of course, the debate is far more limited than in the West. The Communist Party does not allow discussion of the country's fundamental economic structure, which influences its approach to the environment. In many ways the Soviet Union's philosophical perspective on the environment is similar to that of capitalist systems. Both mainstream Soviets and fiscal conservatives in the West believe that social conditions will improvethrough economic growth, and they therefore tend to minimize the environmental impact of development. In both the Soviet Union and the United States, there has been a tendency to be complacent about the environment because of each country's size and wealth of natural resources. And both societies believe in technological fixes for eliminating environmental problems. To understand the Soviet approach to the environment, it helps to examine the roots of Soviet Marxism. In the late nineteenth century, Russian Westernizers who rejected the country's pastoral backwardness sought to create anew order modeled in some fashion on Western Europe. They offered science, reason, and logic as answers to Russia's massive social problems. They were confident of their ability to control and transform the natural environment. Soviet Marxism fell solidly within this tradition. Marxists viewed economic growth as inherently progressive. In their view, technology was a critical factor in the historical progress toward social and political freedom. Technology could overcome the challenges to human existence posed by the naturalenvironment. Furthermore, socialist ownership was supposed to lead to the best use of natural resources, and so result in environmentally sound economic development. Under Party leadership, it was asserted, Soviet socialism would utilize science, technology, and planning to develop a "conscious" relationship to nature. Marxist "rationality" would supersede the "rapacious" consumer attitudetoward nature that exists under capitalism. But in truth, under Soviet socialism there are few real incentives to preserve natural resources. Many raw materials are provided free of charge or below cost by the state. The attitude encouraged by such practices is not, "This is social property to be preserved," but, "When everybody owns it, nobody owns it, so it's free for the taking." The situation is not so different from that in capitalist systems. The sheer physical size of the Soviet Union has reinforced this perspective. Soviet officials frequently make a fetish of the massive. Publications constantly stress the country's size. The world's largest nation, the Soviet Union covers one-sixth of the earth's terrestrial surface, spans 11time zones, and includes incredible climatic variations. No country has more natural resources than the Soviet Union. For many years, Soviet scientists and officials found it difficult to believe that these resources could be exhausted in the near future. This cavalier attitude is remarkably similar to the frontier mentality of nineteenth-century Americans who slaughtered millions of bisons and passenger pigeons in the mistaken belief that their numbers were inexhaustible. Such ignorance of environmental effects set the framework for Soviet environmental attitudes after 1917. As early as 1920, the Soviet Union emphasized a need to improve nature's handiwork through large-scale projects. This early Bolshevik commitment to modernization was illustrated by Lenin's statement, "Communism is Soviet power plus the electrification of the whole country." With the introduction of the first Five Year Plan in 1928, Joseph Stalin launched a massive drive to industrialize the Soviet Union regardless of the cost in resources, effort, and lives. The value of the natural environment was ignored in the campaign to transform the Soviet Union into a modern industrial society. Today tight water supplies, declining oil reserves, and the generally poor performance of the Soviet economy have forced a reexamination of its wasteful attitude. Even so, many Soviet writers contend that under socialism, science and technology can be harnessed to discover new stores of natural resources or substitutes. Technological advances are also supposed to enable the Soviet people to make more efficient use of resources without threatening the environment. Poll ution from industry and other human activities has often beenviewed as a temporary anomaly that will be resolved as socialism advances. Doubtful Benefits Given their complacent attitude, the Soviets' determination to transform the environment on a grand scale should not be surprising. Gigantic projects help reinforce the doctrine of Party commitment to remold the earth for the benefit of the masses. Sometimes such large-scale efforts to modify the environment do not yield results of much economic or social value. Consider the enormous White Sea--Baltic Sea Canal built in the early 1930s. At a cost of perhaps 250,000 lives, according to Soviet dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn, 140 miles of waterway were channeled through ice and rock in northern Russia. The stated goal was to transfer military and commercial ships from the Baltic to the White Sea, but Solzhenitsyn has said that the project was pursued simply because Stalin needed to "leave a great monument to his reign." Thus, the canal's central purpose was political--to impress the citizenry with Stalin's and the Party's ability to achieve "impossible" victories over nature. Any economic or strategic benefits were secondary. The canal was completed in only 20 months, substituting prison labor for machinery. By contrast, the 40-mile Panama Canal took seven years to build. (That project preceded the Soviet dam by 30 years, but the Panama Canal's builders used for superior equipment.) The White Sea--Baltic Sea Canal exemplifies the Soviet preoccupation with speed. Since Stalin's time, construction, industrial production, and even agriculture have been subjected tostrict timetables. Fulfilling quotas in the shortest possible time has become the essential criterion of success. All Soviet industry is organized around five-year, annual, and monthly plans. Failure to complete an assigned task on time usually means forfeiting bonuses, which may constitute one-third or more of an individual's income. One result of this system is "storming": producing at breakneck speed during a project's final phase. This phenomenon often results in waste, shoddy products,and neglect of environmental impacts. Another massive project whose value is partly offset by its potential damage to the environment is the 2,000-mile-long Baikal-Amur Mainline railroad. This eastern Siberian line, which stretches from the northern tip of Lake Baikal above Mongolia to the Soviet Union's coast, was built to aid in the delivery of strategic materiel to the far eastern region. It is also supposed to improvethe accessibility of natural resources such as iron ore, coal, and timber. The main railroad line was completed in 1984 after 10 years of construction. Auxiliary lines and housing settlements for railroad maintenance workers have yet to be built. (The mentality behind this project is reminiscent of the one that motivated the Alaska pipeline.) According to scientists' comments in the Soviet media, the potential for environmental disruption in the region is considerable. There is no evidence yet whether the problems are as bad as feared. But scientists have indicated that air pollution from construction and related settlements could become severe, since the mountains and valleys through which the railroad passes prevent pollutants from dispersing. Coal dust could also be a problem once strip mining begins. In addition, the area's cold rivers have few microorganisms to decompose pollutants, and hence are liable to become polluted.Clear-cutting tracts of timber to build the railroad could easily result in floods and erosion and destroy slow-maturing forests. Finally, scientists have noted that excavation and transportation related to the project could damage delicate permafrost landscapes. Scientists have been allowed to make such comments because the Communist Party has ordered that the project be completed with minimal ecological damage. These specialists have been able to criticize the fact that the railroad has been built without following the Party's order. Projects Rethought Fortunately, the Soviet government has not gone ahead with every construction project that has threatened significant environmental damage. Consider another grandiose Soviet attempt to improve on the environment--the Great Stalin Plan for the Transformation of Nature. Initiated in the late 1940s, this plan had a dual focus. Just the first part has been completed: massive windbreaks and shelter belts of trees have been planted in the steppe regions of European Russia. The plantings are considered a partial success since they enhance crop yields, but they tend to raise water consumption in summer months and interfere with proper snow cover in the winter. The Gorbachev administration has apparently put the second part of the project on hold after many years of contentious discussion. This aspect of the plan called for transferring part of the northerly flow of several major Siberian rivers southward to the arid regions of Central Asia and southern Russia. With construction of canals scheduled to begin in 1986, the project wassubject to prolonged debate in the media and scientific publications in the early 1980s. Critics included geographers, economists, and nationalistic novelists of the "village school" genre, which glorifies the traditional values of Russian culture. They raised serious questions about climatic effects, increased soil salinity, evaporation from the canals, shrinking of the polar icecap owing to the diversion of a large volume of water southward, and the plan's cost-effectiveness. Soviet literary figures lamented the flooding of areas that include priceless historical monuments such as churches. Proponents of the diversion scheme, which included Central Asian officials and scientists at institutes and ministries in charge of the project, appeared to gain the upper hand shortly after Brezhnev's death. Moscow decided to go ahead with the project in 1983, possibly because with Brezhnev gone a major source of opposition to the scheme was eliminated, or because Andropov wanted tobuild support in the Muslim republics. However, after Chernenko's death in 1985, Gorbachev imposed a moratorium on discussions of the project. A senior Soviet official pronounced the plan deadfollowing the Twenty-Seventh Party Congress last year. And a joint resolution passed in August 1986 by the Central Committee and the Council of Ministers stopped design and preparatory work, citing ecological and economic questions. Is Gorbachev a confirmed environmentalist? His speech to the most recent party congress expressed strong support for domestic efforts to protect the environment. But it is more likely that Gorbachev is unwilling to invest the massive amount of capital necessary to complete the project. He may also have asoft spot for the Russian nationalists who ardently oppose the plan because it would mean massive investment in Central Asia. In the Soviet system, as in Western democracies, decision making that should be based on science frequently yields to politics. The Soviet government did alter at least one large-scale project specifically because of widely publicized environmental concerns. In the mid-1960s, articles about the threat that two paper mills posed to Lake Baikal--the world's largest freshwater body--mushroomed in Soviet publications. One important reason that the debate emerged in the controlled press was that Lake Baikal was viewed as a unique national treasure, with deep emotional attachment for Soviet citizens. A diverse group of scientists, writers, and government officials expressed concern. Writing in the Party newspaper Pravda, Iurii Danilov, the Soviet Union's chief sanitary physician and deputy minister of public health, condemned the "barbarous attitude toward nature" exemplified by the projects. Members of the Academy of Sciences urged the government to relocate the plants or develop better pollution controls. TheMinistry of Timber, Paper, and Woodworking responded by stating that the purification equipment being installed in the plants would neutralize all harmful effluents. That view was supported by a number of bureaucratic allies, including the Ministry of Defense, which apparently wanted the plants to manufacture special cellulose cord for military aircraft tires. The government and Party eventually responded to the calls for antipollution measures in the Baikal area by passing two resolutions to protect the lake. Oneimposed stringent requirements that the paper mills purify wastewater, while theother declared the area a protected zone, restricting the exploitation of water,timber, and other natural resources. The ultimate impact of these resolutions is difficult to ascertain. Pollution has abated somewhat, but industrial activity continues to threaten thelake. In fact, Valentin Rasputin, a leading Russian author, recently accused the government of relaxing effluent standards to give the impression that environmental progress was being made. Nevertheless, the fact that public furor over Baikal led to a response at the highest levels of the Soviet systemis significant. The Extent of Soviet Environmental Debate In the two decades following the Lake Baikal controversy, Soviet mass mediahave begun to present diverse perceptions of the natural environment. Economists, philosophers, and scientists are permitted to supply information to policymakers and advocate contrasting approaches toward environmental protection. The discussions are either initiated or encouraged by government elites, and experts are not allowed to criticize a government decision to go ahead with a project. Still, they can comment on whether departments are conducting work in accord with the Party's decision. While censorship ensures that comments adhere to the framework of Marxism-Leninism, a sophisticated critique of how a project should be carried out may make Party leaders rethink the utility of the undertaking. Ordinary Soviet citizens have little opportunity to take part in the debates and cannot organize independently. Neverthe less, discussion of environmental policy has greatly increased in the quarter century since Stalin'sdeath. In the Stalin era, unity and support at all stages of the policy processwere deemed necessary to maintain the myth of Party infallibility. "The will to transform [develop] was coupled with a vehement denial that there was anything arbitrary, subjective, risky, or unpredictable about the various schemes for transformation that the regime put forward," says Princeton University political scientist Robert C. Tucker. Today's process of environmental policymaking is not pluralist in the Westernsense. In a pluralist society like the United States, responsibility for the environment is diffused throughout the system. The many independent interest groups constitute a broad source of information on environmental problems. These groups often sound the alarm over environmental threats long before polluters and government officials recognize them, and the organizations may pursue their agendas if they are not pleased with decisions. Independent organizations or individuals may also suggest structural economic and societal changes that challenge basic assumptions, such as the value of growth. Considerthe effect of E.F. Schumacher's book Small Is Beautiful. In the Soviet Union, environmentalists cannot challenge basic assumptions such as central planning, Communist Party control over natural resources, or thedesirability of economic growth. Thus, despite the increased tolerance of environmental debate, the state's role in recognizing problems, placing issues on the public agenda, and adjusting policies has not changed. Glossing over Failures Since the Soviet Communist Party retains its position as supreme arbiter ofpublic policy, it receives both praise for accomplishments in transforming nature for the betterment of society and blame for environmental disasters. So the party suppresses information about such failures or glosses over them by blaming them on lower-level officials or the bureaucratic phenomenon of "departmentalism." A strong environmental committee would threaten the prerogatives of important officials. Departmentalism refers to the pursuit of narrow, segmented interests by the various ministries and institutes in the Soviet Union. The bureaucracies function as such organizations do in the United States and everywhere else: theypursue parochial priorities and seldom want to take responsibility for the broader impact of their actions. A case in point is the 1980 damming of Kara-Bogaz, a large gulf in the cast of the Caspian Sea. The decision to dam was made because the Caspian had been losing five to six cubic kilometers of water per year to the gulf. Sealing off the Kara-Bogaz was supposed to make more water from the Caspian's feeder rivers available for irrigation while slowing the overall decline in the sea level. After the dam was built, water levels in the Kara-Bogaz dropped far faster than expected, and by 1983 the gulf had disappeared. Once the inflow of brine from the Caspian ceased, the gulf lost much of its usefulness as a giant evaporation basin for sodium sulfate, bischofite (a magnesium chloride), and epsom salts. Local industries that had collected and sold them minerals were hurt. Scientists warned that winds would blow remaining salt deposits from the dried-out gulf onto neighboring agricultural lands. The bureaucracies involved--the Ministry of Land Reclamation and Water Resources and the Ministry of Chemical Industry--blamed each other for the gulf's disappearance. Neither wanted to assume the responsibility for and cost of constructing an aqueduct to allow some water to flow from the Caspian into the Kara-Bogaz. A case like this one typically goes unresolved. But apparentlythe matter was important enough that the State Planning Committee, the major planning organization within the national Council of Ministers, ordered the Chief Administration for Hydraulic Engineering Construction to build a temporary sluice. That group is part of the Ministry of Land Reclamation and Water Resources. Many Soviet environmental writers have stressed the need for a super-ministerial agency similar to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to override the decisions of production ministries. In the Brezhnev era, policymakers were unwilling to incur the political costs associated with making such institutional changes. A strong, centralized environmental protection committee would threaten the prerogatives of important ministry officials. However, Gorbachev has begun to consolidate highly specialized, functionally similar ministries into super-ministries to mitigate the ills of departmentalism. There is a distinct possibility that the powers of the State Committee for Hydrometeorology and the Environment (known as GIDROMET) could expand in the future. Most of its responsibilities now focus on meteorology, although it also handles some environmental matters. Concerned about blame in the event of environmental disaster, the Soviet government has traditionally used official secretiveness to whitewash environmental degradation. In The Destruction of Nature in the Soviet Union--a tract smuggled from the Soviet Union and published in West Germany in1978--the pseudonymous Boris Komarov discusses the country's pervasive secrecy concerning environmental matters. Apparently amounts of data are collected by various research organizations but are not available to the public. Komarov mentions a bulletin on massive pollution violations that circulates among specialists and ministry employees but is not released for public consumption. And he recounts instances of conservation violations by high Party and government figures that have been ignored or suppressed. Stories in the controlled media occasionally reveal evidence of official censorship about environmental pollution. For example, Iurii Izrael, chairman of GIDROMET, said in 1979 that his organization monitors air pollution in more than 350 cities. The same committee also studies the chemical composition of surface water in more than 1,000 bodies of water. Yet this information is not available in published handbooks of statistics. Instead the information is published piecemeal, hindering systematic comparison. In the journal Soviet Sociology, Izrael presented exact figures for the tons of pollutants discharged into the atmosphere and water in the United States, but in referring to the Soviet Union he stated only that "gross discharges in the USSR are a fraction of this but also reach a considerable magnitude." The secrecy and distortion make accurate comparisons with other political systems virtually impossible. Such secrecy can hinder environmental protection and damage scientific studies both within and outside the Soviet Union. The Response to Chernobyl The Soviets' initial reaction to the nuclear accident at Chernobyl in Aprilof 1986 illustrated their traditional penchant for secrecy. Gorbachev made his first public address on Chernobyl 18 days after the explosion, when it was reasonably certain that a full-scale catastrophe has been averted. In the subsequent months Soviet reporting on the accident expanded dramatically. This sort of coverage unprecedented in Soviet history, partly resulted from world outrage. Gorbachev also seems more willing than his predecessors to acknowledge problems. Since Chernobyl, he was allowed more coverage of disasters such as the nuclear sub that sank last October, 1,200 miles east of New York. He apparently believes that the costs from covering up both national and international incidents are higher than those from admitting problems quickly. Gorbachev probably faces much opposition from conservatives who think the system should preserve its traditional, secretive ways. Still, he has begun to permit dissemination of more statistics. For example, data on Soviet infant mortality have recently been published for the first time since 1974. However, these changes have been modest, and we have yet to see how significant they willbe. The Chernobyl accident also illustrated the Soviet tendency to blame individuals--typically lower-level bureaucrats--for blunders. The director and chief engineer of the Chernobyl power station were fired for their "inefficiency, irresponsibility, and lact of discipline," according to Pravda. Several trade union secretaries and deputy directors of the plant, as well as the local Communist youth organization--an important political group composed ofpersons aged 15 to 27--were criticized. And the minister in charge of power andelectrification was severely reprimanded in the press. The Soviet propensity to sacrifice public safety and environmental quality in the interest of cutting short-term costs did not change after the accident. The Soviet Union has a total of 14 water-cooled, graphite-moderated nuclear reactors--like the one at Chernobyl--which generate 5 percent of the country's electricity. These reactors lack a number of safety features that are found in water-cooled and moderated reactors built in the United States, including comparable containment systems to prevent the escape of radioactivity. In the past, the Soviets confidently asserted that containment facilities were unnecessary. The Chernobyl accident changelled this complacent attitude. The Politburo resolved the problem in typical Soviet fashion--by ordering the relevant ministries and departments to devise and implement "additional measures" for the safe operation of plants. This is reminiscent of cases in which the Party has called for "further perfection"--a phrase suggesting, between the lines, that no safeguards were previously taken and nothing substantive will change in the future. Gorbachev did admit that nuclear energy had gone out of control at Chernobyl,but he rejected suggestions that the accident would slow the Soviet nuclear power program. Construction of a nuclear plant--with the same design as at Chernobyl and 50 percent larger, at 1,500 megawatts--continues only 300 miles from the disaster. By Soviet estimates, the nuclear industry is expected to generate one-fifth of the country's electricity in the year 2000. Chernobyl serves as a prime example of the conflicting Soviet perspectives regarding the environment. While the Soviets initially suppressed informationabout the accident, they eventually acknowledged its extent. Nevertheless, the disaster does not appear to have shaken Soviet confidence in the ability of socialist science to conquer the limits of nature. Copyright (c) 1988 The Bureau of National Affairs, Inc.; Daily Report For Executives February 29, 1988, LENGTH: 1297 words ENVIRONMENT, UNITED STATES, RUSSIA AGREE TO EXPAND COOPERATION ON PROTECTION OF ENVIRONMENT An agreement to expand cooperative activities during 1988 under the 1972 bilateral agreement between Russia and the United States to jointly protect the environment was approved by delegations from both nations at a meeting in MoscowFeb. 1-5, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee M. Thomas told BNA in an interview. The meeting-the first under the 1972 agreement since December 1986-was conducted by Co-Chairmen Yuriy A. Israel, who heads the USSR State Committee forHydrometeorology, and Thomas. It included a review of the status of the projectsagreed to in 1986 under the joint agreement and many discussions on projects forthe following 12 months. The new action plan will go into effect in March, Thomas said. ''The atmosphere was a whole lot different this time around,'' Thomas told BNA. ``When we met over two years ago, we were negotiating something new and there was much more tension. This time, we were building from the joint communique that came from the summit meeting between General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev and President Ronald Reagan. This time, there was much more openness on the part of the Soviets in talking about their environmental problems and their compliance problems. They feel they've got to address them though.'' The Soviets are going through a restructuring of their environmental agency, Thomas said. ``They have a commission looking at the subject. They've got problems with controls, compliance, and bad pollution. Their existing agencies have not assured compliance on either air or water standards.'' Thomas said the commission has reviewed ``all of that'' and has proposed a new State Committee for Nature Protection. While Thomas was in Moscow, he met for an hour with Commission Chairman Vsevolod Murakhovsky, who is also head of the State Committee for Agriculture-Industrial Complex, as well as deputy prime minister. They talked about the new agency, Thomas said, ``and it seems to be patterned after EPA. They are pulling pieces out of the different agencies. They will have responsibility for standard setting and enforcement, both the central and the decentralized operations.'' The decentralized operations will function somewhat like EPA's regional offices,he said. Currently, they have more of a compliance and inspection responsibility that rests with the individual ministries, Thomas said. The new agency will have a more independent role in inspecting industry and agriculture to ensure compliance, Thomas said. ''They are talking about putting that new committee in place over the next year,'' he said. The plan raises the status of the environmental agency, he said, for the state committee is higher than a ministry level. Hydrometerology will continue to be responsible for the weather service and for issues like climate change and ozone, and will continue to have overall monitoring responsibility. ''Other functions will all go into this new agency,'' Thomas said. ``They have not named the individual who will be chairman.'' A 'Tremendous Challenge' How much of ``what we hear will actually take place will have to be seen,'' he said. ``The bureaucracy is anxious about how all this is going to occur. For onething, there is such a major change going on in the Soviet Union. They say they are going to restructure for environmental protection and better compliance. However, at the same time, they are giving more responsibility to plant managers, so there will be conflicts between environmental protection and economic policy. It will be interesting to see how these things are resolved. Itis going to be a tremendous challenge.'' Nevertheless, he said, ''There is a growing environmental concern at the grass roots level within the Soviet Union.'' Thomas said the United States has an environmental agreement with Poland, ''and the USSR told me when I was there that they are working with Poland, as well.'' He met for an hour or so with Evgeni Velikhov, vice president of the USSR Academy of Sciences. ``He was over [to the United States] with Gorbachev in December, and I met him then. Our meeting in Moscow was a general discussion on how we work with the [National] Academy of Science [in Washington, D.C.].'' The potential for work with the USSR Academy of Sciences was discussed. ''Overall, it was a good five days,'' Thomas said. ``The end result is I got a much better feeling for what they are doing. They also want our general agreement to continue. The new agency will coordinate the new agreement.'' Thomas said he feels good about the following items in the agreement: * ``We established a far stronger section on climate change and stratospheric ozone depletion; * ``We expanded in the Arctic as well as in the Antarctic joint work on climate change; * ``The beginning of work in the coming year on analyzing the impact of climate change and analyzing an alternative response; * ``We re-established Arctic research as a joint effort by the two countries; * ``We expanded significantly the amount of work in the natural wildlife area; * ``There will be extensive exchanges in the coming year by scientists on both sides on earthquake prediction; * ``A good agreement with the Soviet Merchant Marine on oil spill cleanup; and * ``A program of environmental education.'' Thomas said there are close to 200 scientists who will spend time in each other's countries. CFC INFORMATION EXCHANGE ''We talked about controlling CFC [chlorofluorocarbon] emissions,'' Thomas said.''We didn't get into detail, but we agreed to exchange information on legal and administrative aspects of control.'' He was referring to the controls on consumption and production of five chlorofluorocarbons and three halons under the so-called Montreal protocol on protecting the ozone layer. By Feb. 26, the protocol to the 1985 Vienna Convention to Protect the Ozone Layer had been signed by 32 nations. Before it goes into effect, it must be ratified by the governments of 11 nations accounting for two-thirds of worldwide consumption of five targeted CFCs. Thomas said that Mostafa K. Tolba, executive director of the United Nations Environment Program, ``is jointly sponsoring with the United States a meeting inColorado in May.'' At the meeting, scientists will present papers from the expedition to the Antarctic from South America to observe the seasonal phenomenon of the so-called ozone hole over Antarctica. ''From that meeting, the intent is for a smaller group to to see if they can determine what the consequences are of the Antarctic expedition.'' The second issue to be addressed by the world is global warming, Thomas said. ''This is far more difficult than the ozone layer issue,'' he said. ''After a meeting in Paris organized by the International Chamber of Commerce and UNEP, I had a separate meeting with Tolba,'' Thomas said. ``There is a tentative meeting [on CFC alternatives] in the autumn. The Netherlands is pushing for a technology conference on stratospheric ozone, following on the onewe had in Washington.'' The European Community ``has got almost all of their members to sign the protocol,'' Thomas said. They are moving on the ratification process. Tolba said they have pretty well worked out their regulations.'' Thomas said Japan has finished its regulatory work in connection with the Montreal protocol, ``and they hope to ratify it in March. All of us are working on finishing up the ratification and regulations by June. In the United States, we're running ahead of schedule on the ratification. It looks as if we may be finished with the ratification within 30 days.'' Copyright (c) 1988 McGraw-Hill, Inc.; Chemical Week April 6, 1988 LENGTH: 1599 words How long a farewell to CFC production? When Congress was considering ratification of the Montreal Protocol on cutting production of chlorofluorocarbons (CFC) last month, Du Pont made it clear that it was backing the protocol and cooperating with the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) on a CFC phasedown. But pressure was being applied on the company to cease making the compounds completely (CW, Mar. 16, p. 18), and Chairman Richard Heckert said that such a move would be "unwarranted and counterproductive." Two weeks later, Du Pont did an about-face. The company is now urging that the 50% cut in CFC consumption agreed to in the September 1987 Montreal agreement be extended eventually to 100%. "Du Pont," says Joseph M. Steed, environmental manager of the company's Freon Products Div., "sets as its goal anorderly transition to the total phaseout of CFC production." The reason for the change in position is new evidence that the earth's ozone layer is being eroded up to four times more rapidly than had been previously thought and that chlorine-based chemicals are probably responsible. On Mar. 15,an ozone trends panel coordinated by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) reported that between 1978 and 1985, total levels of ozonedecreased by an average of 2.5%. The decreases were greatest in the winter at levels up to 6.2%, depending on latitude. And Steed notes that, for every 1% change in ozone, an additional 2% of ultraviolet radiation, which can cause skincancer, is allowed to penetrate the earth's atmosphere. In a letter to Senator Max Baucus (D., Mont.) and Senator David Durenberger (R., Minn.) on the phaseout, Heckert says, "We believe the short-term risk to health and the environment from CFC is negligible." The senators introduced legislation (S. 570) to cut CFC emissions by 95% in eight years. Tough cuts Steed, however, says it would be tough to achieve the bill's cuts in eight years. He says that substitutes for CFC -- used in refrigeration units, air conditioners, the production of foam insulation and the cleaning of electronic equipment -- are still at least five years away. That's the minimum time needed to perform toxicity testing. Steed says Du Pont's timing of the phaseout "will be determined primarily by the trade-offs society is willing to make in return for a lack of alternatives to CFC." Severe CFC cuts before alternatives are available could threaten human health, he warns. For example, restrictions on refrigeration would make food preservation difficult. Airtight buildings would have to be redesigned if air-conditioning is curtailed. Conversion Du Pont's decision is winning plaudits. EPA Administrator Lee M. Thomas saysthat it sends "an unmistakable signal that alternatives and substitutes to CFC can be made readily available in the near future." The Natural Resources DefenseCouncil (NRDC) welcomed the action, saying, "a late conversion is better than noconversion at all." But NRDC attorney David D. Doniger urged Du Pont to commit to a 6-8 year phaseout. Doniger says that Du Pont has a chance to encourage ratification of the Montreal Protocol "by exerting its influence in Europe and Japan, where ratification still meets resistance. Cleared by the U.S. Senate, the protocol calls for a freeze on consumption of CFC at 1986 levels by 1989, a 20% cut in 1994 and another 30% reduction in 1999. But of the 31 signatories, only Mexico and the U.S. have taken action. And the treaty isn't quite so strong as it sounds. An EPA staffer says provisions exempting the Soviet Union and allowing for continued growth of CFCfor 10 years in developing countries means the agreement, as now negotiated, will result in a 40% -- rather than a 50% -- cut by 1999. Du Pont notes that the protocol now allows a nearly 100% increase in chlorineemissions by 2050. The company says that tightening the protocol to require a 95% cut by 2003 would decrease chlorine levels by 75%, though it does not yet advocate such a move. But because CFC remain in the atmosphere for 70 to 100 years, it points out that speeding the reductions up would result in only "marginal improvement." Thanks in large measure to the NASA report, which interprets data broken downby latitude and time periods, researchers believe they now have a better grasp on the ozone depletion problem. "We now have a clear statement that without man-made chemicals, there would be no Antarctic ozone hole," says F. Sherwood Rowland, a professor of chemistry at the University of California, Irvine. Rowland and fellow researcher Mario J. Molina, a senior research scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, proposed an ozone depletion theory in 1974. Drop Scientists believe the yearly drop in ozone levels in the Antarctic is causedby very low temperatures that permit the chemical release of chlorine on the surface of polar stratospheric clouds, allowing the chlorine to attack ozone molecules. Rowland believes the ozone loss is especially alarming because his and later predictive models did not foresee the Antartic ozone effect, so predictions remain risky. Kevin Fay, executive director of the CFC Alliance, which represents producersof CFC, says the report shows that the scientific models remain unreliable. So he argues that it is not clear whether faster cuts in ozone consumption will have a significant effect. Fay says it now appears that the models underestimate the problem in the far northern and southern latitudes and overestimate it at high altitudes, where they were though to be most accurate. Pointing to the persistence of chlorine, Molina says, "What we're now doing to the atmosphere commits it to a level of depletion for a century." And Rowlandsays that only known way to repair the damage done to the ozone layer is to enact "a total ban on CFC emissions and wait 200 years," the time needed to replenish the ozone layer. An EPA staffer observes that trapping CFC before they are released during theservicing of air conditioners and refrigerators could cut emissions by up to 30%, and at relatively low cost. But so far, EPA is encouraging, not requiring,conservation. The CFC industry is working on possible replacements. There are high hopes that HCFC 123 and HCFC 141b, which have properties similar to those of CFC 11, will be safe replacements in foam products and that HFC 134a will prove a suitable substitute for CFC 12 in air-conditioning and heating equipment. Du Pont has started making large quantities of the products in pilot plants in its Chambers Works (Deepwater, N.J.) for toxicity testing. Du Pont and Allied-Signal, the second-largest U.S. producer of CFC, sponsored toxicology tests on CFC 113 that required 88,000 lb of the substance. Allied has produced 10,000 lb of HCFC 123 for testing by end-users and is planning to provide a similar amount of HCFC 141b and HFC 134a. Du Pont has introduced two quick-fix substitutes that may provide short-term relief. One, Formacel-S, can be used as a blowing agent and replacement for CFC12 in food packaging. Because of the media attention given to the issue of fast-food packaging, sales of the substitute are expected to be brisk. The other, a Freon SMT agent that contains 30% less CFC 113, can be used as a substitute in cleaning. Problems Two of the big problems in developing replacements are the time required for toxicology testing and the costs of any substitutes. A consortium of 14 international companies has agreed to do joint toxicology testing that will takeat least five years. Making the substitutes will require several extra steps toadd a hydrogen atom to fluorine and chlorine atoms, says Allied spokesman Charles M. Coe. And the products, he estimates, are likely to cost from two to five times more than existing CFC. So-so subs Allied and other manufacturers have examined 60-70 compounds, and only a few alternatives offer much promise, says Coe. other solutions involve developing blends using HCFC 22, which has 95% less ozone-depleting potential than CFC 12 and can serve as a substitute in some heating and cooling systems. ICI, however, says it is sufficiently concerned about toxicology data on HCFC 22 to withhold supplies of it as an aerosol propellant. Allied also has agreed with Atochem (Paris) to carry out joint research and development on CFC substitutes. Atochem makes about 190,000 metric tons/year ofCFC at plants in France, Spain, Venezuela and Australia and says it is Europe's biggest producer. Joint research by the two will initially concentrate on three products: HCFC 123, HFC 134a and HCFC 141b. The companies say that Atochem's strength in gas-phase manufacturing processes will complement Allied-Signal's strengths in liquid-phase processes. Pennwalt, the third largest U.S. producer, has already developed an HCFC 142b/22 blend as a propellant in perfume; the product has been successfully tested as a refrigerant, according to spokesman Lawrence Woodward. However, it is not certain whether appliance makers will buy it for refrigerators because factories would have to be retooled and product lines changed. One group that feels itself pinched hard is the Assn. of Home Appliance Manufacturers. The proposed 1989 freeze will mean a 15% shortage of CFC 11 and 12 with no substitutes available before 1992 at the earliest, says association spokeswoman Marian Stamos. At the same time, the organization must meet Dept. of Energy efficiency rules, which means increasing the CFC content ofnew products in 1990. Technology Review Copyright (c) 1988 Information Access Company; Copyright (c) Alumni Assn. of M.I.T. 1988 May, 1988 LENGTH: 861 words Saving the Earth's ozone Last September, the United States and 23 other countries decided to protect the earth's ozone layer, which blocks most of the sun's ultraviolet rays. With the signing of the Montreal Protocol, the nations vowed to reduce emissions of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCS) and their less-known chemical cousins, halons. Seven more countries have signed on since then, including the Soviet Union. The ink on the treaty was barely dry when an Antarctic expedition brought the news that the "ozone hole" was larger than ever. Thus, Sherwood Rowland, the chemist from the University of California at Irvine who first suggested the CFC threat, believes the accord will set a precedent, and CFC use will decline even faster than the protocol mandates. "People are scared to death. The damage is sufficient enough and is going fast enough that people are going to push beyond this," he thinks. CFCs have contributed a lot since General Motors chemists created the first ones 60 years ago. They've cooled houses and cars, kept fast food hot, and cleaned sensitive electronic components. But in 1974 Rowland and postdoctoral associate Mario Molina warned that these compounds might be destroying ozone in the stratosphere. The protocol is intended to drastically reduce CFC production. Developed countries must roll back use to 1986 levels almost immediately and halve it before the year 2000. Although halons destroy ozone more efficiently than CFCs, their use is only capped, because applications are limited mainly to fire extinguishers. The treaty goes into effect New Year's Day if 11 countries representing two-thirds of global CFC consumption ratify it. Mexico was the first to do so, and the U.S. Senate followed suitin March. As many as 28 other countries could ratify in 1988, easily satisfying the requirements. The protocol contains several exemptions intended to meet the needs of different countries. In the few developing countries to sign the document, business as usual has been allowed to continue until 1999. Because of this graceperiod, economic growth tied to refrigeration and other CFC-dependent technologies won't be stymied during the search for substitutes. A second exemption lets developed nations proceed with CFC production in plants under construction or already contracted for. Thus, the Soviet Union can increase its consumption almost 70 percent. This clause was added to accommodate long-term Soviet plans. Strengthening the Protocol Several unknowns--especially who the signatories willbe--make it difficult to predict the treaty's impact. According to the U.S. Office of Technology Assessment (OTA), global CFC consumption would drop 40 to 45 percent by 2009 if the whole world followed the protocol. With no treaty, CFC use would more than double. Unfortunately, many nations are holding back. China, India, and South Korea have the potential for major increases in CFC consumption, and without these and several other key nations on board, the OTA estimates that CFC levels would fall only 15 to 30 percent. David Wirth, a senior attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council, adds that even with the treaty, 2 percent of global ozone will be lost by 2050. d Wirth calls the protocol "a good first cut," but says his organization would like talks to be reopened as soon as possible. "The science that was relied on by the protocol negotiators is now out of date," he believes. Indeed, after its October hearings to consider the data from the latest Antarctic expedition, the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee asked the Egyptian scientist Mostafa Tolba--head of the U.N. Environment Programme, which sponsored the Montreal negotiations--to call emergency meetings. Barring emergency meetings, the first scheduled conference to examine the protocol's impact is set for 1990. One issue that may be resolved then is whether developing countries can export goods made with CFCs. If not, South Korea--and some other nations--may not join. South Korea uses CFCs to clean computer chips and to make upholstery, dashboards, and air conditioners for Hyundais. Buying CFCs from countries that don't adopt the protocol is taboo, butthe guidelines for buying products manufactured with CFCs or containing them have yet to be established. Another issue to be addressed is handling violators. According to Rowland, there is still money to be made in the restructured CFC industry, and entrepreneurs don't appear discouraged. He says that during his recent trip to South America, Argentinians talked about building plants with German and Japanese money. Germany and Japan have signed the treaty, but Argentina hasn't. Ironically, U.S. CFC manufacturers could become unofficial watchdogs, says Kevin Fay, who is executive director of the Alliance for Responsible CFC Policy,a coalition of users and producers. "I don't think the major companies that are trying to do the good thing are going to sit idly by while others try to get around the rules," he points out. Copyright (c) 1988 The Telegraph Agency of the Soviet Union; TASS July 16, 1988, LENGTH: 1366 words ARMS RACE, ECOLOGICAL SECURITY -- DOCUMENT FOLLOWS THE FULL TEXT OF THE DOCUMENT "CONSEQUENCES OF THE ARMS RACE FOR THE ENVIRONMENT AND OTHER ASPECTS OF ECOLOGICAL SECURITY" ADOPTED BY THE WARSAW TREATY POLITICAL CONSULTATIVE COMMITTEE AT A MEETING WHICH CLOSED IN WARSAW TODAY: THE WARSAW TREATY MEMBER COUNTRIES STATE THEIR PROFOUND CONCERN OVER THE STEADILY WORSENING STATE OF THE ENVIRONMENT. DISRUPTIONS IN THE NATURAL BALANCE ARE ATTAINING DIMENSIONS THAT MAY HAVE UNPREDICTABLE CONSEQUENSES CAPABLE OF UNDERMINING THE MATERIAL BASIS OF MANKIND'S SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT AND JEOPARDISING ITS VERY EXISTENCE. DEEPLY CONVINCED THAT THE ARMS RACE, ABOVE ALL THE NUCLEAR ARMS RACE, REPRESENTS ONE OF THE MOST DANGEROUS SOURCES OF THE WORSENING OF THE ENVIRONMENT, THE WARSAW TREATY MEMBER COUNTRIES BELIEVE THAT THE SOLUTION OF ECOLOGICAL PROBLEMS IS CLOSELY CONNECTED WITH THE CONSOLIDATION OF PEACE, INTERNATIONAL SECURITY AND DISARMAMENT. PREVENTING NUCLEAR WAR WHICH WOULD INEVITABLY LEAD TO AN ALL-OUT ECOLOGICAL CATASTROPHE HAS BEEN AND REMAINS THE PRINCIPAL DIRECTION IN THE EFFORTS TO PRESERVE THE ENVIRONMENT. ANY ARMED CONFLICTS INFLICT HEAVY DAMAGE TO THE ENVIRONMENT. IT IS BEING STEADILY DESTROYED ON A GROWING SCALE BY THE ARMS RACE WHICH RUNS COUNTER TO THE EFFORTS TO PROTECT THE ENVIRONMENT AND HINDERS THE SOLUTION OF THE NOBLE TASK OF CREATING ON EARTH A HARMONIOUS EQUILIBRIUM OF SOCIETY, TECHNOLOGY AND NATURE. THE PRODUCTION, STOCKPILING AND TRANSPORTATION OF VARIOUS TYPES OF WEAPONS, CONSTRUCTION OF MILITARY FACILITIES AND HOLDING OF MILITARY EXERCISES HAVE A DIRECT NEGATIVE EFFECT ON THE ENVIRONMENT. THE WARSAW TREATY MEMBER COUNTRIES DRAW SPECIAL ATTENTION TO THE DANGER POSEDTO THE ENVIRONMENT AND TO VERY LIFE ON EARTH BY THE ACCUMULATED NUCLEAR WEAPONS HARBOURING A THREAT OF GLOBAL DEVASTATION, EITHER AS A RESULT OF PREMEDITATED USE, MISCALCULATION OR ACCIDENT. THE CONTINUATION OF NUCLEAR TESTING, LARGE STOCKPILES OF CHEMICAL WEAPONS AND THEIR CONTINUED PRODUCTION ANDDEVELOPMENT OF WEAPONRY SYSTEMS BASED ON NEW PRINCIPLES MAY HAVE UNPREDICTABLE AND DETRIMENTAL ECOLOGICAL CONSEQUENCES. THE SPREAD OF THE ARMS RACE INTO OUTER SPACE WOULD UNDERMINE THE POSSIBILITIES OF ITS PEACEFUL RATIONAL USE. THE WASTEFUL CONSUMPTION FOR MILITARY PURPOSES OF NON-RENEWABLE RESOURCES RESTS AS AHEAVY BURDEN ON THE EARTH'S ENVIRONMENT. THE ATTEMPTS TO INFLUENCE IT FOR MILITARY OR OTHER HOSTILE PURPOSES WOULD DO MOST SERIOUS HARM TO THE ENVIRONMENT. WELCOMING THE POSITIVE TRENDS THAT HAVE BECOME TANGIBLE OF LATE IN INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS, THE WARSAW TREATY MEMBER COUNTRIES BELIEVE THAT CURBING THE ARMS RACE AND EFFECTIVE DISARMAMENT MEASURES WOULD HELP STRENGTHEN PEACE AND SECURITY AS A DECISIVE CONDITION FOR THE DEVELOPMENT OF INTERNATIONAL COOPERATION IN DIVERSE SPHERES, INCLUDING IN PROTECTING AND IMPROVING THE QUALITY OF THE ENVIRONMENT. THIS WOULD BE FACILITATED BY THE IMPLEMENTATION OF THEIR JOINT AND INDIVIDUAL INITIATIVES IN THE FIELD OF DISARMAMENT, CONFIDENCE-BUILDING AND SECURITY MEASURES. IT IS NECESSARY TO TAKE ADVANTAGE OF THE STARTED ADVANCEMENT IN THE FIELD OF DISARMAMENT FOR INVIGORATING EFFORTS RELATED TO ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION. STEPS IN THE FIELD OF DISARMAMENT SHOULD BE ACCOMPANIED BY SPECIFIC NATURE-CONSERVATION MEASURES. DISARMAMENT WOULD RELEASE HUGE FINANCIAL, NATURAL AND HUMAN RESOURCES FOR IMPROVING THE ECOLOGICAL SITUATION ON THE REGIONAL AND GLOBAL SCALE. THE WORSENING OF THE STATE OF THE ENVIRONMENT AS A RESULT OF MAN'S PEACEFUL ACTIVITY GIVES RISE TO MOUNTING ALARM. ECONOMIC ACTIVITY, CARRIED OUT WITHOUT REGARD FOR ECOLOGICAL FACTORS, CAUSES POLLUTION OF THE WORLD OCEAN AND THE ATMOSPHERE, TRANS-BOUNDARY TRANSFER OF POLLUTANTS, DEGRADATION OF SOIL, DESERTIFICATION AND DEFORESTATION, TRANSFORMATION OF THE CLIMATE, DISAPPEARANCE OF WHOLE BIOLOGICAL SPECIES, ACCUMULATION OF HARMFUL SUBSTANCES IN THE BIOSPHERE AND MANY OTHER NEGATIVE PHENOMENA DESTROYING MAN'S HABITAT. THE EXISTING THREAT OF NUCLEAR CATASTROPHE, FREQUENT ECOLOGICAL DISASTERS AND DISRUPTIONS OF BALANCE IN NATURE CONFIRM THE GROWING ECOLOGICAL INTER-DEPENDENCE OF ALL STATES AROUND THE WORLD. LIFE ITSELF PERSISTENTLY DEMANDS THE POOLING OF EFFORTS BY THE INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY IN THE INTERESTS OFTHE CONCERTED EFFECTIVE SOLUTION OF ENVIRONMENTAL PROBLEMS. THE ELABORATION AND CONSISTENT IMPLEMENTATION OF THE CONCEPT OF INTERNATIONAL ECOLOGICAL SECURITY ON THE BASIS OF THE BROADEST AND OPEN INTERNATIONAL COOPERATION OFFER A WAY OUT OF THE PRESENT SITUATION. INTERNATIONAL ECOLOGICAL SECURITY, CALLED UPON TO FACILITATE THE STEADY AND SAFE DEVELOPMENT OF ALL STATES AND CREATION OF FAVOURABLE CONDITIONS FOR THE LIFE OF EVERY NATION AND EVERY INDIVIDUAL, PRESUPPOSES A STATE OF INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS THAT SECURES THE PRESERVATION, RATIONAL USE, REPRODUCTION AND IMPROVEMENT IN THE QUALITY OF THE ENVIRONMENT. WITH THESE AIMS IN VIEW, THE WARSAW TREATY MEMBER COUNTRIES COME OUT IN FAVOUR OF THE CREATIVE USE AND ACCUMULATION OF ALL THINGS POSITIVE ACCOMPLISHED BY THE INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY IN THE FIELD OF ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION . THEY HIGHLY ASSESS THE ACTIVITY OF THE UNITED NATIONS, ESPECIALLY ITS SPECIALISED BODY, THE U.N. ENVIRONMENT PROGRAM, AND THE WORK OF THE INTERNATIONAL COMMISSION FOR THE ENVIRONMENT AND DEVELOPMENT WHICH SUGGESTED CONSIDERING ECOLOGICAL PROBLEMS IN THEIR INTERRELATIONSHIP WITH PROBLEMS OF WAR AND PEACE, DISARMAMENT AND DEVELOPMENT, ERADICATION OF BACKWARDNESS AND POVERTY, ENSURING OF ADEQUATE, HEALTHY AND SAFE LIFE ON EARTH. ENSURING INTERNATIONAL ECOLOGICAL SECURITY DEMANDS THE ADOPTION OF BINDING PRINCIPLES AND STANDARDS OF BEHAVIOUR OF STATES AND THE DEFINITION OF MAJOR DIRECTIONS IN INTERNATIONAL COOPERATION IN THE ECOLOGICAL SPHERE. THESE PRINCIPLES, STANDARDS AND DIRECTIONS SHOULD BE JOINTLY ELABORATED ON THE BASIS OF EXTENSIVE AND CONSTRUCTIVE INTERNATIONAL DIALOGUE. A CORRESPONDING INTERNATIONAL LEGAL DOCUMENT COULD BE ADOPTED IN 1992 TO MARK THE 20TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE U.N. CONFERENCE ON THE ENVIRONMENT. THE WARSAW TREATY MEMBER STATES ARE PREPARED TO START WITHOUT DELAY WORK ON DRAFTING SUCH A TREATY. BEING PART OF EUROPE WHICH FEELS ESPECIALLY KEENLY THE CONSEQUENCES OF ENVIRONMENT -DAMAGING ACTIVITY, THE WARSAW TREATY MEMBER STATES DEEM IT IS VITALLY IMPORTANT TO ADOPT IMMEDIATE MEASURES WHICH WOULD ENABLE THE CONTINENT TO BECOME A MODEL IN ECOLOGICAL COOPERATION. CONCERN FOR THE ECOLOGICAL SITUATION, FOR THE HEALTH OF PEOPLE, FOR CLEAN AIR AND CLEAN WATER WOULD BECOME A COMMON CAUSE OF ALL EUROPEAN COUNTRIES AND HOLD A PROPER PLACE IN THE ALL-EUROPEAN PROCESS. THIS WOULD MEET AS FULLY AS POSSIBLE THE IDEA OF THE UNITED EUROPE OF PEACE AND COOPERATION, AN "ALL-EUROPEAN HOME." WITHIN THIS CONTEXT, THE WARSAW TREATY MEMBER COUNTRIES REGARD AS HIGHLY TOPICAL THE PROPOSALS AIMED AT PROTECTING THE ENVIRONMENT IN EUROPE AND ITS INDIVIDUAL REGIONS. THEY COME OUT IN FAVOUR OF THE BROADEST EXCHANGE OF INFORMATION ON ECOLOGICAL ISSUES, MUTUAL UNRESTRICTED ACCESS TO ADVANCED TECHNOLOGIES PRESERVING THE ENVIRONMENT, ESTABLISHING AN ORDER OF STRICT ACCOUNTABILITY OF STATES FOR THEIR NATURE-CONSERVATION ACTIVITY AND ECOLOGICAL INCIDENTS THAT HAVE OCCURRED OR HAVE BEEN PREVENTED ON THEIR TERRITORIES. WITH A VIEW TO EXPANDING AND DEEPENING DYNAMICALLY THE ECOLOGICAL COOPERATION, THEY PROPOSE CONVENING AN ALL-EUROPEAN CONFERENCE OF MINISTERS RESPONSIBLE FOR ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION AND ELABORATING AT IT A PROGRAMME OF CONCERTED ACTIONS. THE WARSAW TREATY MEMBER COUNTRIES DECLARE THEIR INTENTION ACTIVELY TO FACILITATE THE SOLUTION OF URGENT PROBLEMS OF PRESERVING THE ENVIRONMENT, PROTECTING IT AGAINST WARS AND CONSEQUENCES OF THE ARMS RACE. THEY APPEAL TO ALL STATES AND PEOPLES TO POOL THEIR EFFORTS TO PROTECT AND IMPROVE THE ENVIRONMENT IN THE NAME OF SECURING OUR PRESENT AND FUTURE. MANKIND, WITH AN IMMENSE CONSTRUCTIVE AND CREATIVE POTENTIAL, IS CAPABLE OF HALTING THE PROCESS OF THE WORSENING OF THE ENVIRONMENT. INTERNATIONAL COOPERATION ON A MULTILATERAL AND BILATERAL BASIS IN THE CONSERVATION OF NATURE, THE SOURCE AND KEEPER OF LIFE, CONSTITUTES A DUTY OF ALL STATES BEFORE THE LIVING AND SUCCEEDING GENERATIONS. Copyright (c) 1988 The New York Times Company; The New York Times December 12, 1988, LENGTH: 1121 words WASHINGTON TALK: THE ENVIRONMENT; U.S. and Soviet Groups Joining for Quality of Life Following Mikhail S. Gorbachev's call for international cooperation in solving global environmental problems, American conservation groups have let it be known here that they are ready to assist on environmental projects in the Soviet Union. Many of this country's environmental organizations, which normally spend muchof their time and money seeking to influence environmental decisions in Washington, are already taking advantage of the new Soviet openness inaugurated by Mr. Gorbachev to carry their mission to Moscow and beyond. In his address at the United Nations last week, the Soviet leader spoke of the ``frightening'' state of the environment in some regions of the world and called for international teams of experts and even space laboratory monitors to work in areas with a ``badly deteriorating environment. `` Rafe Pomerance, a senior associate of the World Resources Institute, a Washington-based environmental research and policy group, said he welcomed Mr. Gorbachev's ``very positive rhetoric'' but cautioned that the ``true test of environmental protection within the Soviet Union remains.'' That test, Mr. Pomerance said, would be the Soviet Union's commitment to solving internal environmental problems and working with the United States andother countries to reduce the buildup of carbon dioxide and other industrial gases that are causing the earth to warm. Hurdling the Bureaucracies Environmentalists here say that despite the recent easing of tensions between the superpowers and substantial agreements reached between Moscow and Washingtonon environmental matters, private undertakings between the two countries are still easier than overcoming bureaucratic obstacles. American environmental groups' assistance in the Soviet Union now ranges fromhelping to monitor agreements on nuclear testing to arranging exchanges of fishing trips. Judging by plans being developed, that involvement will increase markedly in the coming months. ``There clearly is a lot of interest in the environment in the Soviet Union right now,'' said Jacob Scherr, a senior attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council, the first United States private environmental group to station its own representative in Moscow. The council recently shipped $1 million worth of computer equipment to the Soviet Union to help in verifying nuclear testing limits, Mr. Scherr said, but he added that his group was also working with the Soviet Union to find ways to use energy more efficiently as one answer to the expected warming of the earth. Working Together on Fishing Trout Unlimited, another United States conservation group, is working with the All-Russian Union of Hunters and Fishermen, which was convened in September as a private scientific council in Moscow on fishery preservation. The two groups are also holding ``angler exchanges'' in which groups of fishermen travel to each other's country each year, said Stephen Lundy, president of Trout Unlimited. ``You don't get into any problems if you fish together,'' he said of the exchange. Mr. Lundy, who has made five trips to the Soviet Union in the last few years,said there were definite signs that Russians concerned about the environment were taking advantage of the opportunities created by the policy of glasnost in Soviet society. He spoke of a high Soviet fisheries minister making a speech about what the Government was doing to protect fish. After the speech a member of the group pulled out a picture of dead fish on a polluted lake and saying: ``You say you are protecting fish? How do you explain this?'' Seeded by Pollution Issues Many environmental groups are springing up around specific pollution issues or other threats to the environment in the Soviet Union, said Francis U. Macy,coordinator of the ecology program of the Center for U.S.-U.S.S.R. Initiatives. In Volgograd, there is a strong local movement against pollution of the Volga from a chemical plant, he said, adding that citizens in Latvia and Lithuania hadorganized to oppose expansion of a nuclear power plant near their mutual border. Mr. Macy's group plans to send a delegation of 25 to 30 representatives of environmentalists to the Soviet Union next March to meet with officials and unofficial environmental groups, he said. He said the trip would be ``an attempt to connect environmental activists in the Soviet Union and the United States.'' He added: ``There is a burgeoning movement for environmental protection, restoration and a more broadly ecological consciousness in the Soviet Union. This is a major outcome of the new acceptability of pluralism in the U.S.S.R.'' Saying It With Music The militant conservation group Greenpeace is taking a new tack in dealing with the Russians. In the past, the group sent its ship, Rainbow Warrior, to interfere with Soviet whalers, and another ship, the Sirius, into Leningrad harbor to protest nuclear testing. Greenpeace is now planning, with Soviet permission, to send its environmental message to the Russians along with a record of rock music. Peter Bahouth, executive director of Greenpeace-U.S.A., said a 16-page pamphlet about environmental issues would be enclosed in 4.5 million record albums to be released in the Soviet Union in January. The album, with selections from major rock groups, will be also be sold in the United States. Proceeds of the sale in the Soviet Union would help pay for a permanent Greenpeace environmental campaign in the Soviet Union, Mr. Bahouth said. He said little was known about overall environmental conditions in the SovietUnion. ``Certainly there are environmental problems from what I read, and they could be pretty severe,'' he said. ``Whether they are worse than they are here I can't say.'' It's Not a One-Way Street The flow of environmentalists will not be in one direction. Brent Blackwelder, vice president of the Washington-based Environmental Policy Institute, said his group had organized an exchange that will bring a group of Soviet environmental experts to this country in February to study urban environmental problems and large construction projects that harm the environment. The Soviet group will visit Washington and then will examine the Cross-Florida Canal as an example of what Mr. Blackwelder called ``a bad project for the environment. `` Later, an American delegation will visit Moscow and construction projects in the Soviet Union, Mr. Blackwelder said. He said his group had also been working with the Soviet authorities to set up a joint project to help developing countries protect their tropical forests. The idea has attracted wide support in Congress and in the Soviet Union, Mr. Blackwelder said. Copyright (c) 1989 The Telegraph Agency of the Soviet Union; TASS May 11, 1989 LENGTH: 740 words USSR-US: COOPERATION IN ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION ALONGSIDE DISARMAMENT AND SETTLEMENT OF REGIONAL CONFLICTS, ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION IS NOW VIEWED OBJECTIVELY AS ONE OF PRIORITY INTERNATIONAL PROBLEMS. ACCORDING TO ALL FORECASTS AND APPRAISALS, THE GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL STATE IS STEADILY DETERIORATING. THE CLIMATE IS CHANGING, AREAS UNDER FORESTS ARE DWINDLING, DESERTIFICATION INCREASES, THE OZONE LAYER IS BEING DEPLETED, THE ATMOSPHERE AND THE WORLD OCEAN ARE BEING POLLUTED. SUCH AN UNFAVOURABLE ECOLOGICAL ATMOSPHERE NECESSITATES URGENT MEASURES TO SAVE HUMAN ENVIRONMENT. TASKS OF ECOLOGICAL REVIVAL TRANSCEND FRONTIERS. THEY CAN BE SOLVED ONLY BY EFFORTS OF THE ENTIRE INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY. THERE IS NO ROOM IN THIS FOR DISTRUST, FOR THE STRIVING TO GAIN ADVANTAGE AT THE EXPENSE OF A NEIGHBOUR OR TO CONCEAL SOME ACHIEVEMENT WHICH MIGHT OFFER A CARDINAL SOLUTION. ECOLOGY BECOMES AN INDICATOR OF A LEVEL OF CIVILIZED CONSCIOUSNESS IN SOME OR OTHER COUNTRY, ITS ABILITY TO THINK ON A GLOBAL SCALE. THE POOLING OF EFFORTS OF THE USSR AND THE USA, OF THEIR SCIENTIFIC, MATERIAL AND INTELLECTUAL POTENTIALS BECOMES AN EXTREMELY IMPORTANT FACTOR IN TACKLING GLOBAL PROBLEMS. THE AGREEMENT BETWEEN THE GOVERNMENTS OF THE USSR AND THE USA ON COOPERATION IN FIGHTING POLLUTION EMERGENCIES IN THE BERING AND CHUKCHI SEAS, SIGNED BY USSR FOREIGN MINISTER EDUARD SHEVARDNADZE AND U.S. SECRETARY OF STATE JAMES BAKER ON MAY 11, 1989 IS AMONG INTER-GOVERNMENTAL AGREEMENTS WHOSE TIMELINESS AND IMPORTANCE IS APPARENT. THE NEW SOVIET-AMERICAN INTER-GOVERNMENTAL COMPRISES QUESTIONS OF JOINT OPERATIONS TO FIGHT POLLUTION EMERGENCIES AND OF NOTIFICATION OF EACH OTHER OF INCIDENTS THAT ARE CAUSING OR MIGHT CAUSE LARGE SPILLS OF OIL AND OTHER POLLUTANTS. IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE AGREEMENT THE SIDES PLEDGED THEMSELVES TO EXCHANGE APPROPRIATE INFORMATION, TO ENGAGE IN SCIENTIFIC AND TECHNOLOGICAL COOPERATION IN THE AREA OF DEVELOPING MEANS AND METHODS OF COMBATTING ACCIDENTS AT SEA, TO TRAIN PERSONNEL AND CONDUCT JOINT TRAINING SESSIONS. THE GOVERNMENTS OF THE USSR AND THE USA ALSO AGREED TO FACILITATE THE ACCESS TO NATIONAL FORCES AND MEANS OF THEIR COUNTRIES FOR FIGHTING POLLUTION TO EACH OTHER'S TERRITORIAL WATERS AND ESTABLISHED THE PROCEDURE FOR THE COMPENSATION FOR THE EXPENDITURES ON CONDUCTING JOINT OPERATIONS TO COMBAT SEA POLLUTION. AN INSEPARABLE PART OF THE AGREEMENT IS THE ADOPTED PLAN FOR JOINT ACTIONS IN A POLLUTION EMERGENCY WHICH ENVISAGES SPECIFIC MEASURES TO BE TAKEN BY APPROPRIATE SERVICES OF THE TWO COUNTRIES IN THE EVENT OF AN ACCIDENT IN THE BERING OR THE CHUKCHI SEAS. THE PARTICIPATION OF THE SOVIET VESSEL VAIDAGUBSKY IN THE EFFORT TO CLEAN UP THE OIL SPILLED BY THE U.S. TANKER EXXON VALDEZ OFF ALASKA ATTESTS TO A VAST PRACTICAL IMPORTANCE OF INTERNATIONAL AND, SPECIFICALLY, OF SOVIET- AMERICAN COOPERATION IN FIGHTING ECOLOGICAL DISASTERS. PRACTICE SHOWS THAT ACCIDENTS AT SEA LEAD QUITE OFTEN TO LARGE SPILLS OF POLLUTANTS, WHICH AFFECTS THE INTERESTS OF LITTORAL STATES. THE EXISTING SYSTEM OF REACTING IN THE USA PROVED INSUFFICIENT FOR EFFECTIVE AND PROMPT ELIMINATION OF THE CONSEQUENCES OF AN ACCIDENT OF SUCH A SCOPE. SOVIET EXPERTS ESTIMATED THAT A SIMILAR ACCIDENT OFF THE COASTS OF THE USSR WOULD HAVE ALSO POSED LARGE DIFFICULTIES FOR THE ELIMINATION OF ITS CONSEQUENCES. AS A RULE, TAKING EFFECTIVE MEASURES IN EMERGENCIES REQUIRES INTERACTION OF SEVERAL COUNTRIES IN THE REGION AFFECTED BY A DISASTER. THE AGREEMENT SIGNED WIDENS THE SCOPE OF SOVIET- AMERICAN COOPERATION IN ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION AND IS ALSO A PATENT EXAMPLE OF HOW SCIENTIFIC AND TECHNOLOGICAL COOPERATION OF THE USSR AND THE USA BEGINS TO TRANSCEND THE BOUNDARIES OF BILATERAL INTERESTS AND IS AIMED AT THE SOLUTION OF GLOBAL PROBLEMS. DURING THE TALKS BETWEEN THE FOREIGN MINISTERS OF THE USSR AND THE USA HELD ON MAY 10-11 IN MOSCOW, MUCH ATTENTION WAS GIVEN TO THE DISCUSSION OF TRANSNATIONAL PROBLEMS WHICH, BY MUTUAL ARRANGEMENT, FEATURE PERMANENTLY IN THE FRAMEWORK OF THE SOVIET-AMERICAN DIALOGUE. THE MAIN RESULT OF THESE DEBATES IS THE CONSENSUS THAT COOPERATION IN THE GIVEN AREA IS WHOLLY IN KEEPING WITH THE INTERESTS OF BOTH COUNTRIES AND SHOULD BE DEEPENED AND EXPANDED TO THE UTMOST. IN THIS CONNECTION THE CONCLUSION OF THE AGREEMENT ON COOPERATION IN FIGHTING POLLUTION EMERGENCIES IN THE BERING AND CHUKCHI SEAS IS A SPECIFIC RESULT OF THE SOVIET-AMERICAN DIALOGUE ON PROBLEMS OF IMPORTANCE TO ENTIRE HUMANKIND. Copyright (c) 1989 Federal Information Systems Corporation; Federal News Service JULY 6, 1989, THURSDAY LENGTH: 7320 words ENVIRONMENTAL ISSUES AT THE ECONOMIC SUMMIT MR. SPETH: My name is Gus Speth and I'm the president of WRI and I want to thank all of you for coming and joining us this afternoon. Our purpose is to try to give you a briefing on a range of issues that we expect to be on the agenda at the economic summit of the Group of Seven meeting in Paris July l5th. For those of you who don't know WRI, we are a policy research group specializing in energy, environmental, and development issues of international concern. And many of the issues that we expect to come up at the summit and to be addressed in the summit communique are issues that we've been studying and talking about and commenting on for several years. So we hope we can provide you with some background information and also some perspective on some of the issues that will be coming up. We'll have very brief presentations from several of the people up here on the panel, and then we'll have some questions and answers for as long as you'd like to stay. Let me begin by commenting just a bit on the general context in which all of this is coming up. For the first time the general area of environmental concern is, has reached the summit, and will be a major theme at the economic summit in Paris. It's no longer strictly speaking an economic summit. President Mitterrand commented recently that he expects this will be the first green summit and I think there's every reason to believe that environmental issues of the type that will be addressed in Paris will also continue on as major themes in future summits. We expect the heads of state that will be in Paris to give extensive attention to two critical environmental issues: the problem of global warming, sometimes referred to as the greenhouse effect, and the problem with deforestation in the tropics, and there will be other issues on the docket as well. One question that comes up is why now? I mean, why at this point are these issues -- environmental issues -- surfacing in such a prominent way in such a prominent international forum? And I think there are really four reasons. I'll list them for you briefly: two from the economic sphere and two from the political sphere. From the economic sphere the fact is that the level of economic activity on a global scale has reached the point where it's beginning to affect in a major way the global environment. Human activities on the planet are beginning to approximate the natural systems and cycles of the planet. And the result of this is that no nation acting alone can any longer protect its own environment. The line between domestic environmental issues and international environmental issues is collapsing. To give you but one example, urban smog - - ozone smog that we have in our cities --is also a greenhouse gas and therefore, of great concern for the global climate.And we'll talk about that a little later. The nitrogen oxide pollutants that give rise to this smog also give rise to transboundary acid rain and to global greenhouse gases. So we're seeing a merger of domestic environmental concerns and international environmental concerns. And henceforth, the environmental policies of the United States are going to be set increasingly in concert with other countries. We've never had that before in the US. In Europe, environmental policy for a decade or more has been set in concert with other European countries. In the US, we've had the luxury of setting our own -- pretty much at our own pace -- but that is fast fading. The second reason is that economic and environmental concerns are beginning to merge. If the leaders at the summit do their work properly, we will see the environmental portion of the communique discussing the economic issues and integrating economic concerns with environmental concerns. We will see, for example, discussions of energy policy, technology transfer and technology policy, economic incentives and debt and aid and other traditional economic issues. The two factors from politics are familiar to us all. The first is that the public here and the public in Europe and the public in Japan is aroused and concerned about the state of the environment and increasingly, the state of the global environment. And the G7 leaders at Paris are politicians and they have sensed this concern and are responding to it in part. And the last issue is that there has emerged in recent months a healthy international competition for leadership on global environmental issues. This particularly has taken a somewhat of an East-West dimension, and President Gorbachev and others have been speaking out on the global environmental issues and -- as have leaders in the West. Well, that's sort of a bit of the background to why this is happening. I think there are three reasons why it's important. The first is that the global environment is in deep trouble and the G-7 countries are a big part of the problem. Let me give you some statistics. The G-7 countries are 12 percent of the world's population; but they're 41 percent of the CO2 coming from fossil fuels; 60 percent of the chlorofluorocarbons, which are depleting the earth's ozone layer; and two thirds of the tropical hardwood imports. So what these countries do together and within their own boundaries is extremely important. Beyond that, though, their leadership, their example, is extremely important for the rest of the world. Their actions can validate the seriousness of international environmental problems. And without their actions it's unlikely that other countries will respond effectively. And, lastly, the G-7 countries can provide the resources that are desperately needed to create the incentives for North- South and East-West cooperation on these issues. Without G-7 leadership to provide those incentives for North-South and East-West cooperation, it's unlikely to occur. I'm talking about things like access to technologies that can help solve these problems, debt reduction, increase foreign assistance and other things. Two thirds of the overseas development assistance is given by these seven countries. And how that money is used and how the debt is managed and other things can make a tremendous difference in the way global environmental problems are solved or not solved. So, that's a bit of the background of why this is happening and why we think it's important. Let me ask Bill Moomaw to comment in a little more depth about the problem of the greenhouse effect and global warming. MR. MOOMAW: Okay, thank you, Gus. MR. SPETH: Bill is our program director in climate energy and pollution. MR. MOOMAW: Thank you. The global climate change issue -- a little closer (aside). The global climate change issue is, of course, rocketed to the forefront within the past year in terms of public perception. Let me just recount briefly what it is due to and why it is appearing as a leading topic at the economic summit. The cause of the global warming is the accumulation in the atmosphere of certain gases that are released by industrial practices, primarily the burning of fossil fuels. That is coal and oil and natural gas, very crucial economic activities for industrial societies. By the release of chlorofluorocarbons, which are the same chemicals which are responsible for depleting the ozone layer, and from the release -- by the release of methane and other gases through agricultural practices and -- both methane and carbon dioxide are actually released in deforestation, a topic of some considerable concern in its own right. So that the global climate change issue is tied in to a whole raft of additional environmental issues. As Gus mentioned, even urban air pollution and the strategies that we are taking in the Clean Air Act within the United States, which Mr. Bush announced a few weeks ago, will affect the global climate change problem. The principal control strategies that are possible for addressing this involve improving the efficiency with which we use fossil fuel energy in -- among the G-7 nations, and that's an area in which the United States lags substantially behind the other countries just in terms of the amount of energy it takes to produce a dollar of gross national product, it takes twice as much energy in the United States as it does in any of the Western European countries or Japan. So,there's an area where the US has a long ways to go, and yet, there's still room for the other countries as well. In the longer term, it will be necessary to gradually replace fossil fuels if we are to stop the build-up of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which is the principal greenhouse gas. That has enormous implications in terms of new technologies, not only for the G-7 nations, but for the developing countries as they develop their energy infrastructure, and also in term of East-West relationships, because most of the innovations in those areas are taking place in Western Europe, Japan and the United States. One only has to think of new technologies such as solar technology where Japan and the US are in the lead to see the implications for international markets if, indeed, these nations, the G-7 nations decide to do something about global climate change. Halting deforestation and increasing tree planting can play an important mitigating role in terms of reducing the build up of carbon dioxide both by reducing a source of carbon dioxide, that is the burning and clearing of trees, and also in the planting of additional trees the ability to absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Let me just state that action in and of itself, however, cannot solve the problem without improved energy efficiency in the use of fossil fuels or the replacement of fossil fuels themselves because eventually you've planted all the land you can plant and you have no place to grow anymore. And so that -- it's an interim strategy. It's very helpful. It's very important but it can't not solve the problem itself. Finally, eliminating chlorofluorocarbon use -- which is a process that's already underway in order to protect the stratospheric ozone layer and there's now negotiations going on internationally to phase chlorofluorocarbon use out by the end of the century. Let me just comment on some related technologies that you might be hearing about at the summit. Clean coal technology is often talked about but it's important to remember that clean coal technology focuses really on the acid rain problem and the regional air pollution problem to some extent and plays virtually no role in reducing carbon dioxide emissions. Only by burning coal more efficiently will we make any dent in that particular problem. Another area that will be, I think, emphasized will be the scientific research because the G7 nations have in their -- not only the economic power to develop these technologies but they also have the scientific expertise and the engineering expertise both to develop these technologies to understand the issue and to make these technologies available to other countries. And it looks like there will probably be a big push to have a joint effort on scientific research building on things such as the US Mission to Planet Earth and other programs which are being pushed in this country. So I think I'll turn this over now to Ray Pomerance MR. SPETH: Bob Repetto, our senior economist will comment briefly on the tropical forestry dimensions that we expect to come up at the summit and also the relationship between those and the questions of international debt and economic issues. MR. REPETTO: Well, the context is that deforestation is apparently accelerating -- getting worse. The figures for the late '70s were around 10 million hectares per year and the most recent figures imply deforestation rates twice that, about 20 million hectares a year and the rates in Brazil alone have gone up to 8. So there seems to have been a marked acceleration of deforestation in the 1980s. And that's bad news for us in the G-7 countries, of course, I mean partly because, as Bill says, that contributes to the greenhouse problem, approximately 20 percent of CO2 or carbon emissions are attributed to deforestation, but another important effect is the mass extinction of species that is likely to result. A recent study has identified just 10 regions throughout the tropics that together account for only 3 or 4 percent of the total tropical forest area, but are extremely rich in endemic species of -- species that are found nowhere else.And the way things are going, 90 percent of those forests will be gone by the end of the century and as many as 17,000 plant species may, as a consequence become extinct, and substantially more animal species, up to 350,000 animal species, just in those 10 relatively small areas. So there's a threat to us of mass extinctions. But the deforestation is bad news also for the tropical countries. For one thing, a tremendous wastage of valuable timber is taking place, partly in concessions, timber harvesting concessions, which are often given to political figures and are almost always exploited just for short-term profit. Estimates are that less than one percent of natural forest in tropical countries is managed for a sustained yield at the moment. But also, in conversions from forest to agricultural uses much of the timber on the land is just burned. One reason is that in many countries there are provisions in the land tenure codes saying that title to forest land can be obtained by clearing it. And speculators and ranchers and farmers often just burn valuable timber on the spot. Secondly, in these countries the land is being put to unsustainable and uneconomic uses. A number of studies have shown that the cattle ranches in Central and Latin America, which replaced the tropical forests in millions of hectares, are oftentimes viable only with heavy government subsidies and are much less viable -- economically viable over a period of time than other land uses, such as rubber harvesting, which can go on indefinitely without damaging the land, whereas the pasture quickly deteriorates. And then, of course, the tropical countries are suffering from other ecological damages, such as increased erosion and local changes in microclimates as a result of deforestation. So, why is this happening? One important reason, which you might expect to see come up at the summit, is the linkage to the decade-long recession or depression in many of the tropical countries that are heavily burdened with debt. In the 1980s is the first time in the post-World War II period that the labor forces in these countries have been growing more rapidly than the economies. In this decade, in Latin America, the labor force has probably increased 30 percent. In many of the countries burdened with debt, job opportunities have not increased at all and more and more people, consequently, are heading for the frontier or heading for upper watersheds to try to carve out subsistence holdings or reverting to slash-and-burn agriculture. So, the economic stagnation consequent to the debt crisis has aggravated the pace of deforestation -- also exploitation. The resources in tropical forest areas have been used for short-term gain, often times supported by MDB activities and supported by multinational corporations. There was a recent article in the Sunday Times you might have seen that Barclay's Bank of England has a very large cattle ranch in the Amazon, for example, through its Brazilian subsidiary. And much of this is really depletion of economic assets which, once gone, are irreplaceable. So, what one might look for at the summit meeting is a linkage between debt reduction and environmental protection. Part of this will have to do with the policies of the multinational development banks and the IMF. As you know, they've announced their participation in debt reduction schemes linked to structural adjustment -- policy adjustment in the developing countries. Will this policy adjustment, which is supposed to set the basis for resumed sound economic growth, look at these underlying trends in resource deterioration? Secondly, a number of bilateral governments have become involved in facilitating, and even financing, debt for nature -- swaps and debt-for-nature exchanges. The US government, through its aid program, is considering these kind of exchanges. Some of the European governments have already begun using aid funds in that way. Will there be a discussion of a substantial expansion of these kinds of programs, both in the lowest income countries, mainly in Africa where debt relief is -- the need for debt relief is acknowledged and natural resources are under extreme stress from population pressure, and also in the countries which have extensive tropical forests, which tend, in fact, also to be the same countries which have most of the outstanding foreign debt. And thirdly, the possibility of even broader linkages of financing for reforestation, energy programs, and other strategies to deal with global climate change as part of a broader North-South package, involving debt restructuring, debt relief and increased capital flows. I mean, these would be significant initiatives if they are presented at the summit meeting. MR. SPETH: Thank you, Bob. The last speaker is our vice president, Jessica Mathews, who's going to talk about the environmental problems of Eastern Europe.We expect these issues will come up, perhaps more importantly in what President Bush does than in the summit itself, though that remains to be seen. MS. MATHEWS: I think that environment on the Poland-Hungary leg of President Bush's trip will figure as prominently perhaps as it will -- as the global environmental issues will at the summit itself. The issues, however, are the more familiar, the more conventional pollution issues, by and large, of air and water and soil pollution. And one might be almost tempted to say that Poland and Hungary and the other Eastern European nations are about where the United States was in the late '60s as we just began to develop the laws and regulations in institutional infrastructure to grapple with these issues, except that the background level -- the actual levels of pollution that these governments are facing are so much higher than they were in the US. Indeed, in the words of the government in Poland, itself, in the recent opposition government joint statement, the environmental situation in Poland is a "crisis situation," in their words and poses the gravest risk to human health. I tried to summarize for you in this purple fact sheet that's in your press kit, a few of the salient facts. It's obviously too big a subject to do more than give you a sketch. But I think it serves to illustrate in a very dramatic way the size of the task that these governments are facing. Obviously, democratization is the number one issue on Bush's mind as he visits these two countries, but the process of democratization, its progress, will depend very heavily on economic success over the coming decade, and what I think you see in these facts is that economic success and indeed, the very prospect for economic growth, is going to depend very heavily on being able to reverse some of the current trends in air and water pollution. You see here, just to give you a few examples, perhaps a quarter of Poland's soil may be too contaminated for safe farming for human consumption. Hungary's Environment Ministry, recently created, a very young, but important step, estimates that one in 17 deaths in the nation is due to air pollution, and I should say that Poland's air pollution is much, much worse. Forest death is extremely severe in Poland. Unofficial estimates put it at a million and a half hectares, about 3 million acres, and so on. The air pollution is causing the loss of buildings and statues and other treasures that date back to the middle ages, and survived the World War II bombings but are now succumbing particularly to sulfur dioxide damage. Water in Poland is, if anything, even worse. And, according to the Polish Academy of Sciences, there is a realistic possibility that all of the country's tap and well water, its drinking supply, could be unusable or contaminated by the year 2000. And indeed even fifty percent of the river water supply is already considered unfit for industrial consumption. Hungary's water problem is different. It depends almost entirely on water that flows across its borders from other countries and therefore is heavily dependent, as all countries in Europe are, from both -- in the air dimension - - on the environmental policies of its neighbors, and those that share its water source. Indeed the water in the Danube and other rivers that leaves Hungary now is cleaner than that which comes in. But Hungary has a tremendous agricultural runoff water pollution problem and is, and its national treasure, Lake Balaton, which is a major tourist attraction and a source of foreign exchange earnings for Hungary, is heavily eutrofide from phosphorus and nitrogen runoff. Hazardous wastes are another important issue in particular because as environmental regulations have tightened in Western Europe it has become more and more a phenomenon to see companies choosing to basically dump hazardous waste in Eastern Europe in unregulated sites. Now that's a phenomenon that everyone here is familiar with in different dimensions but the West-East transfer of hazardous waste is becoming a serious source of concern and friction. And indeed because Poland in particular is so heavily industrialized its production of industrial wastes is really enormous, much of it very toxic, heavy metal production in particular. So, that its total production of industrial waste is almost half of what ours is, the US, in absolute terms. And yet, its land area is only 3 percent of the US. So it's 45 percent as much in 3 percent of the land area. Energy. Bill mentioned the energy intensity of the US as being only half as good as that of Europe and Japan. Hungary's energy intensity is twice as bad as the US and Poland's is twice again as bad as Hungary's. I put the numbers on the fact sheet. Energy intensity is not a perfect indicator of differences in energy efficiency, because it includes such differences as climate and population density, but it's not a bad one, and it's the best that there is to give you a single picture of the efficiency of energy use, how much economic production you get out of every dollar that you spend -- every unit of energy that you must consume, and the economic woes in Hungary and Poland are very tightly bound to their energy waste loss. Finally, let me just say a word about the political aspects since I think that will be a major -- it's a topic of really major interest. In both Poland and Hungary, environmental opposition to government policies has been a prime source of public organization and motivation throughout the decade of the '80s. The decade opened in Hungary with a major chemical incident, not unlike our Love Canal, and -- which generated -- which became a national incident and led to Hungary passing its first laws on regulation of hazardous waste a few years later. The Polish Ecology Club has been really the prime -- one of the prime sources of unofficial public organization and was -- because environmental issues were so emotional, so intense, so important, the government hesitated to -- all governments have hesitated to move against them even in very difficult political times so that, for example, the Polish Ecology Club, which is the leading group, was not forced underground in 1981 - - during the 1981 crackdown. Chernobyl has had a very important effect throughout Eastern Europe, and plans for nuclear power construction continue to be the source of very large public protests. And then, finally, in Hungary, the construction of a dam on the Danube, financed by Austria and Czechoslovakia -- and indeed the irony is that the dam originally was planned in Austria and it was stopped in Austria, but through environmental opposition -- now being built in a much less -- much more controversial site in Hungary. And that dam has generated a flood of public opposition, which I gave you one quote there to suggest -- really became the first truly nationwide issue of the post-'56 revolution era. And it continues under construction and the opposition indeed continues and has generated two major groups, called the "Danube Circle" and the "Blues," which continue to be a very potent political force. As democratization proceeds, there is the danger, that both with decentralization of decision making and with the new emphasis on profit and loss, that environmental conditions might even get worse before they get better. Well, thank you all very much for coming. Copyright (c) 1989 The Current Digest of the Soviet Press July 12, 1989 LENGTH: 1742 words Gorbachev Visits West Germany SOURCE: JOINT STATEMENT. Pravda, June 14, pp. 1-2; Izvestia, June 15, pp. 1, 3. Complete text The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and the Federal Republic of Germany are united in the view that, on the threshold of the third millennium, mankind faces a historic challenge. Problems of vital importance to everyone can be solved only by all states and peoples acting together. All of this requires new political thinking. -- The person, human dignity and human rights, and concern for the survival of mankind must be at the center of attention in policy. -- The enormous potential of the creative forces and abilities of man and of modern society must be used to secure the peace and prosperity of all countries and peoples. -- Any war, be it nuclear or conventional, must be averted, the conflicts in different regions of the planet must be settled, and world peace must be preserved and reliably guaranteed. -- The right of all peoples and states to freely decide their own fate and to sovereignly build relations with one another on the basis of international law must be guaranteed. The primacy of international law in domestic and international policy must be ensured. d -- The achievements of modern economics, science and technology are opening up unprecedented opportunities, which must be used for the good of all people. Both the risk and the chances involved here require joint responses. Therefore it is important to expand cooperation in all these areas, to continue to reduce any obstacles to the development of trade, and to seek and make dynamic use of new forms of intersection for mutual gain. -- Decisive actions are necessary to protect the natural environment in the interests of today's and future generations, and hunger and poverty in the world must be eliminated. -- New dangers, including epidemics and international terrorism, must be combated energetically. The sides are fully resolved to live up to the lofty responsibility that stems from the recognition of these circumstances. The existing differences in ideas about values and in political and social orders are not a barrier to the conducting of joint policy that shapes the future and transcends any one social system. II. Europe has an exceptional role to play in the building of a peaceful future. Despite the continent's decades of disunity, an awareness of European distinctiveness and commonality is alive and gaining strength. It is essential to promote the development of this process. The Soviet Union and the Federal Republic of Germany see promoting the overcoming of Europe's disunity, relying on historical European traditions, as the top-priority task of their policy. They are determined to work together in searching for ways to create a Europe of peace and cooperation -- a peaceful European system, a common European home, in which there is also room for the US and Canada. All the sections of the Helsinki Final Act, as well as the final documents of the Madrid and Vienna meetings, map out the course toward realizing this goal. Europe, which suffered more than anyone else from the two world wars, has an obligation to set an example in maintaining stable peace, good-neighborliness and constructive cooperation capable of bringing together the potentials of all states, regardless of differences in their social systems, for the common good. The European states can and must live together without fear of each other, peacefully competing with one another. The building blocks of a Europe of peace and cooperation should be: -- Absolute respect for the integrity and security of every state. The right of every state to freely choose its own political and social system. Absolute compliance with the principles and norms of international law, in particular, respect for peoples' right to self-determination. -- Energetic continuation of the process of disarmament and arms control. In the nuclear age, efforts must be directed not only toward averting war but also toward shaping peace and making it more reliable. -- A comprehensive dialogue covering all -- both traditional and new -- topics in bilateral and international relations, including regular meetings at the highest political level. -- Implementation of human rights and promotion of exchanges of people and ideas. This includes the development of partnership ties between cities, of transportation and means of communication, and of cultural contacts and contact through tourism and sports; the encouragement of language study; and also a favorable disposed examination of humanitarian issues, including family reunification and travel abroad. -- The development of direct contacts between young people and the fostering in the younger generations of commitment to the idea of building a peaceful future. -- Broad and mutually beneficial economic cooperation, which would include new forms of cooperative interaction. The June 25, 1988, joint statement by theCouncil for Mutual Economic Assistance and the European Community and the normalization of relations between the European member states of the Council forMutual Economic Assistance and the European Community, as well as the political dialogue that has been started between the Soviet Union and the 12 member statesof the European Community, are opening up new prospects for general European development in this area. -- The stage-by-stage creation of structures for general European cooperation in various areas, in particular, transportation, energy, health care, information and communications. -- Intensive ecological cooperation and the use of new technologies which, in people's interests, would prevent, among other things, the occurrence of dangers that extend beyond individual countries' borders. -- Respect and solicitude for the historical culture of the peoples of Europe. Its diversity is one of the continent's great treasures. Ethnic minorities in Europe and their culture are part of this wealth and deserve to have their legitimate interests protected. The Soviet Union and the Federal Republic of Germany appeal to all the states participating in the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe to join in the common work on Europe's future architecture. III. The Soviet Union and the Federal Republic of Germany declare that no one should build his own security to the detriment of others' security. Therefore, they will strive to eliminate the causes of tension and distrust through constructive, future-oriented policy, so that the persisting sense of threat will be replaced, step by step, by an atmosphere of mutual trust. The sides recognize that every state, regardless of its size or world view, has its own legitimate interests in ensuring security. They condemn any striving for military superiority. War must no longer be a tool of policy. In matters of security and the development of armed forces, policy should serve only to reduce and eliminate the threat of war and to ensure peace with fewer weapons. This rules out an arms race. Both sides desire to eliminate existing asymmetries through binding agreements subject to effective international verification and to reduce military potentials to a stable balance at a lower level that is sufficient for defense but not for attack. In particular, both sides consider it necessary to rid armed forces of the capability of launching a sudden attack or initiating large-scale offensive actions. The Soviet Union and the Federal Republic of Germany advocate: -- a 50% reduction in the strategic offensive nuclear weapons of the US and the Soviet Union; -- agreed-upon Soviet-American solutions at the talks on nuclear and space weapons; this also concerns observance of the ABM Treaty; -- the establishment of a stable and reliable balance of conventional armed forces at a lower level, as well as agreement upon further measures to enhance trust and security throughout Europe; -- a global, comprehensive and effectively verifiable ban on chemical weapons at the earliest possible date; -- prompt agreement on a reliably verifiable nuclear test ban within the framework of the Geneva Disarmament Conference. They welcome the stage-by-stage movement toward this goal during the current contacts between the US and the Soviet Union; -- the institution of further confidence-building measures, greater openness regarding military potentials and defense budgets, and effective international mechanisms for crisis management, including the management of crises outside Europe. IV. The Soviet Union and the Federal Republic of Germany, mindful of European history and Europe's position in the world, as well as of the weight that each side has in its respective alliance, are aware that the positive development of their bilateral relationship is of central importance for the situation in Europe and for East-West relations as a whole. Desiring the reliable establishment of stable good-neighbor relations, they will rely on the positive traditions of their centuries-old history. Their joint goal is to continue to develop and deepen fruitful cooperation by imparting new quality to it. The Moscow Treaty of Aug. 12, 1970, remains the foundation of the two states' relations. The sides will make full use of the possibilities contained in this treaty and in other agreements. They have decided to consistently expand the treaty base of their relations and to work toward partnership cooperation in all areas on the basis of trust, equal rights and mutual gain. Berlin (West) is participating in the development of cooperation under strict observance and full application of the provisions of the quadripartite agreement of Sept. 3, 1971. n3 [See CDSP, Vol. XXIII, No. 36, pp. 21-22.] V. The Soviet Union and the Federal Republic of Germany, confident of the long-term predictability of each other's policies, are fully resolved to further develop their relations in all areas. They will impart stability and solidity to the progressive development of the relations between them. This policy takes into account the treaty-based and alliance-related obligations of the sides and is not directed against anyone. It responds to the innermost and long-standing aspirations of their peoples to heal the wounds of the past through mutual understanding and reconciliation and to build a better future together. -- [signed] M. GORBACHEV, H. KOHL, Bonn, June 13, 1989. UN Chronicle Copyright (c) 1990 Information Access Company; United Nations Publications 1989 December, 1989, LENGTH: 1360 words The town hall of the world; Forty-fourth General Assembly "We are no longer in the cold war", a relaxed and assured United Nations Secretary-General Javier Perez de Cuellar declared, just before the opening of the Assembly. "The benevolence of the political climate and the general will to pragmatic action have never been so evident"' he also stated. Major-General Joseph N. Garba of Nigeria, who was unanimously elected President of the Assembly, totally agreed: "Where hitherto there existed a climate of fear and mutual suspicion, there now is emerging an atmosphere of trust", he said as he opened the forty-fourth session. IAC "Remarkable changes" were taking place in the world, he went on, the product of a gradual improvement in super-Power relations. A few days later, The New York Times echoed his assessment. "Unlike some General Assembly sessions in the past", it said, "this one was marked by very cordial relations between Washington and Moscow". Both the Secretary-General and the Assembly President warned against complacency. "In this relatively benevolent international climate", Mr. Perez deCuellar said, international drug trade and terrorism were emerging as new threats to peace and stability. The United Nations had to consider urgently how it could best be used to counter those threats. During the forty-fourth session, the world body was expected to increasingly focus its attention on issues with a more direct impact on the everyday life of ordinary people-drugs, terrorism, the threat to the environment, external debt, poverty and human rights. If the trend towards peace continued, the Secretary-General indicated, the United Nations would be able to concentrate in the 1990s on "the vast problems and possibilities of the future". And the future, he felt, is starting to happen now. "Three years ago this would have seemed to many to be an idle dream, an unrealistic and escapist piece of idealism. Today it is the major challenge to IAC the United Nations", he said. The new cordiality between the super-Powers has allowed the Security Council to develop, in the past two years, as "a responsive, collegial body working in close cooperation" with the Secretary General to bring peace or, at least, avoid war in many of the world's trouble spots, he said. But while Namibia is on the road to independence and fighting has stopped in some places, old conflict areas such as the Middle East or Kampuchea "have so far continued to defy the new climate", he said, and disarmament still looms large, and largely unfinished, on the horizon. Chemical weapons-one of the most inhumane military devices ever used-captured the attention of the forty-fourth Assembly right from the beginning. United States President George Bush on 25 September announced from the Assembly rostrum that his country was willing to destroy 80 per cent of its chemical weapon arsenal before the signing of an international agreement banning all chemical armaments, if the Soviet Union joined in cutting chemical weapons to an equal level. IAC Next day, from the same podium, USSR Foreign Minister Eduard A. Shevardnadze welcomed Mr. Bush's initiative and said the Soviet Union was ready, together with the United States, to go further and assume mutual obligations before a treaty banning chemical weapons was concluded. But progress in the political field has not gone hand in hand with an improvement in the international economic situation. The debt crisis crippling many developing countries-not too long ago fashionably considered in some circles as a mere technical problem -was now widely recognized as having world-wide economic, political and social consequences, Assembly President Garba said. Many of the 158 items on the agenda of the forty-fourth session-a record high number-are in some way connected to the economic pressures now crushing millions of people throughout the world, from skyrocketing debt service payments to the trade barriers that hinder poorer countries from selling their goods in more affluent markets. Other new items on this year's agenda touch upon some socially significant problems: setting up an international drug court to deal with drug traffickingacross national frontiers and organizing a special Assembly session on drugs; Operation Lifeline Sudan; environmental protection; African Alternative IAC Framework to Structural Adjustment Programmes for Socio-Economic Recovery and Transformation; and emergency aid to Caribbean countries victims of Hurricane "Hugo". Four other new items refer to education and information for disarmament, protection and security of small States, a proposed UN Decade for International Law and granting of observer status to the Council of Europe. On 9 November, the United States and the USSR submitted jointly a new item on"enhancing international peace, security and international co-operation in all its aspects in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations". Among the social issues taking centre stage at the forty-fourth session are the rights of children, literacy and crime. The Assembly is expected to adopt a convention on the rights of the child and continue preparing for International Literacy Year, and the Eighth Congress on the Prevention of Crime and the Treatment of Offenders, both in 1990. Three other major international meetings on issues with deep social-as well as economic and political-impact will hold the Assembly's attention: a 1992 environment and development conference, and special Assembly sessions on international economic co-operation and on "the destructive consequences of IAC apartheid" In another sign of the importance it attaches to these issues, the Assembly will observe the twentieth anniversary of the Declaration on Social Progress and Development. As it prepares for the 1990s-which it has proclaimed as the Third Disarmament Decade and International Decade for the Eradication of Colonialism-the Assembly will work on an action plan to usher in a world free of colonialism by the twenty-first century. It will also continue work on an international development strategy for the 1990s. It will also spend time and energy devising ways to reinforce the international machinery that is making much of this progress possible. The continuing UN financial crisis and the Organization's internal reforms will be scrutinized. In the legal area, the Assembly is to consider convening a plenipotentiary conference to adopt a convention on the status of the diplomatic courier and thediplomatic bag not accompanied by diplomatic courier. IAC While giving increased attention to the concerns of ordinary people everywhere, the Assembly is keeping in sight that the UN is "the guardian of the world's security", as Secretary-General Perez de Cuellar stated in his annual report to the Assembly (A/44/1). The UN should have the means to keep simmering conflicts "under a global watch", he said. It could thus prevent outbreaks of violence, rather than try tostop them after they happen. Information from space-based and other technical surveillance systems would enable the UN Secretariat to monitor potential conflict situations from a clearly impartial standpoint, Mr. Perez de Cuellar said. "The question is whether the potential of modern technology can be placed in the service of peace." This year's review of the Organization's peace-keeping operations at the Assembly will be "done under this light and it will be very important", predicted UnderSecretary-General for Political and Security Council Affairs Vasiliy Safronchuk at a press conference on 4 October. "Many countries are starting to think that the UN should not only be a fire-brigade", and that "an early warning system" to allow for preventive action should be set up . IAC The future-oriented mood of the delegates was expressed on 18 September by outgoing Assembly President Dante Caputo of Argentina at the closing of the forty-third session. "What will be the nature of this new world which is emerging in the post-cold-war period? . . . And what type of security will this Organization and the main leaders of the world have to build? That may well be one of the greatest fundamental challenges that lie ahead." Copyright (c) 1990 PR Newswire February 26, 1990 INCREASE U.S.-SOVIET ENVIRONMENTAL COOPERATION' WASHINGTON, Feb. 26 /PRN/ -- The American Committee on U.S.- Soviet Relations released the following policy bulletin: "Increase U.S.-Soviet Environmental Cooperation: The American Committee on U.S.-Soviet Relations believes that since bilateral relations with the Soviet Union have improved and awareness of global ecological interdependence has increased, it is now time for the two great nations to assume leadership roles in environmental cooperation. The U.S.-Soviet Agreement on Cooperation in the field of environmental protection could serve as one means of engaging the Soviet Union in productive international cooperation and offer the Bush administration a non-controversial way to support perestroika that would benefit both countries. This agreement, signed in 1972, facilitates cooperation between government agencies, academic institutions and non- governmental organizations in many aspects of environmental protection. In the months prior to the latest joint U.S.-Soviet committee meeting of the bilateral agreement this January, members of both delegations expressed a desire to improve the agreement's effectiveness. Recognizing the pressing need for expanding cooperative efforts in environmental protection, the American Committee on U.S.-Soviet Relations recommends the following measures -- all of which can be implemented within the framework of the bilateral agreement -- to assist the USSR in addressing its serious environmental problems: -- Arrange for regular consultative exchanges between deputies of the Supreme Soviet Ecology Committee and their staff with their American counterparts. American experience could prove invaluable to Soviet legislators as they rewrite Soviet environmental protection statutes. -- Promote expanded East-West trade in pollution control equipment. A U.S. governmental commission led by William Ruckleshaus is currently identifying the obstacles to increased transfers of environmental technology to developing countries and Eastern Europe. This group should also study ways of accelerating the movement of pollution control equipment to the Soviet Union. In addition, the easing of COCOM restrictions, tariffs and Export-Import Bank credits for such transactions would surely help. -- Expand scientific collaboration. In particular, the Environmental Protection Agency should continue its efforts to widen the scope of its Environmental Monitoring and Assessment Program to include the Soviet Union and eventually the whole world. The compilation of a unified data base of environmental and health statistics would contribute significantly to the work of future generations of scientists and policymakers. -- Provide training for environmental managers. The United States has had 20 years experience in developing environmental priorities and managing environmental policy in a large country with a federal system of government. The USSR State Committee for Environmental Protection would benefit from the advice of American environmental professionals. -- Create a similar training program that focuses on the economics of pollution control. In the Soviet Union there is an increasing interest in the "polluter pays" principle. Substantive interaction between Soviet and Western policymakers on this issue would help both sides develop effective monetary incentives for pollution control that enhance the environment without imperiling economic growth. The American Committee on U.S.-Soviet Relations believes that joint U.S.-Soviet efforts in environmental protection can significantly improve U.S.-Soviet relations by demonstrating the advantages of mutually beneficial cooperation. CONTACT -- Dr. Robert Berls of the American Committee on U.S.-Soviet Relations, 202-546-1700 This topic is for the East Europen situation. What's the Western response to their environmental crisis? Copyright (c) 1989 The British Broadcasting Corporation; Summary of World Broadcasts October 30, 1989, LENGTH: 1453 words FINNISH-SOVIET DECLARATION SOURCE: Tass in Russian for abroad 1703 gmt 26 Oct 89 Agency ``full text'' of ``Finnish-Soviet Declaration The New Thinking in Action'' signed by Mikhail Gorbachev and Mauno Koivisto on 26th October Finland, a neutral North European, non-nuclear state which actively participates in the activities of the United Nations Organisation and in the process of the strengthening of security and co-operation in Europe and the Soviet Union, a Euro-Asiatic state which possesses nuclear weapons, is a permanent member of the UN Security Council and a member of the Warsaw Treaty Organisation, proceeding from the fact that at the present time the prerequisites for a decisive turn for the better in European and international relations and for the consistent construction of a more just and democratic world, free from nuclear weapons and violence, are taking shape; striving commensurate with their opportunities, roles and responsibilities by specific deeds in the spirit of the new thinking, elaborating and implementing new ideas, to aid the formation of such a world; confirming their resoluteness to follow the spirit and letter of the UN Charter, the Final Act of the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe and the decisions of the subsequent forums of the CSCE; relying on the experience of good neighbourliness and interaction, accumulated during the decades of the functioning of the treaty on friendship, co-operation and mutual help of 1948; taking into account the specific nature of the situation of each country and its foreign policies and the differences in their socio-political structures, ideological values and specific national features and convinced that these differences are not an obstacle to constructive foreign policy activities; wishing to build a better future; Declare their resolve to inculcate in European and international practice the following principles and priorities active participation in shaping a world free of violence and intimidation, inequality and persecution, discrimination and interference in internal affairs. All disputes, including regional conflicts, must be resolved only by peaceful means, by political methods. No-one must strengthen his security at the expense of others. There can be no justification for any use of force, whether by one military-political alliance against another or within such alliances or against neutral countries by any side. Joint security requires the dismantling of military confrontation; unconditional respect for the principle of freedom of socio-political choice,de-ideologising and humanising of relations among states, subordination of foreign-political activity to international law, supremacy of universally human interests and values; provision of international security by means of stage-by-stage nuclear disarmament with reliable political and legal guarantees and strict regard for the interests of all states. These efforts must include the specifying, without delay, of definite parameters of minimum nuclear deterrence, including tactical nuclear weapons, as one of the intermediate stages towards this; the achievement as soon as possible of agreements on a 50% reduction in the strategic offensive armaments of the USSR and USA, the total and universal banning of chemical weapons and the cessation of nuclear tests; reduction by the member states of the military alliances of their conventional armed forces in Europe, which would effectively remove their ability to launch a sudden attack or engage in large-scale offensive operations;the lowering of these forces to the level of reasonable sufficiency for defence.Everything possible to be done to promote the adoption at the Vienna talks, as soon as 1990, of large-scale accords which could be put on record at summit level; the speedy drawing-up of a qualitatively new generation of measures to strengthen trust and security in Europe and widen the sphere of their operation; the shaping of an extensive system of reliable monitoring of disarmament processes; a global policy of openness [Russian otkrytost], extending to the sky, and land, the oceans and space and conducive to comprehensive international security. IN THE ECONOMIC SPHERE The equal and unhindered interaction of economic systems and integration processes on the basis of broad commercial and economic, scientific and technical and industrial co-operation aimed at the more effective joint use of the material resources and intellectual potential of European and other countries; the improvement of the opportunities of all countries to participate in the work of international economic organisations and financial institutions, such asGATT, IMF and IBRD; The prevention of the deepening of differences in the levels of economic development by means of balanced economic growth. The solution of problems connected with the use of natural resources taking account of the development interests of various countries and with the aim of improving the quality of life. IN THE ECOLOGICAL SPHERE Revival of the harmony between Man and nature. The creation of a healthier environment for human habitation via the combining of scientific and technical progress with the improvement of the global and regional eco-systems; promotion of an environmentally stable economic development, the creation of nature-protecting technologies and the exchange of these as a common obligation of all states, the financing of nature-protection measures on an international basis where necessary. During political and economic decision-making at global, regional and national level, it is necessary to take into account the interests of the protection of the environment; fuller use of the opportunities of the UN and its Economic Commission for Europe in the interests of solving the general problems of the environment. Among these problems, those calling for the most urgent measures are unfavourable alterations to the atmosphere and air pollution. Efforts should be made to ensure that substantial results are achieved in 1992 at the UN conference on the environment and development; Preservation and restoration of the purity of territorial eco-systems, development of international co-operation in protecting the environment in the Arctic, the ecological rebirth of the Baltic Sea. IN THE HUMANITARIAN SPHERE The provision everywhere and in full measure of the human rights and basic freedoms secured at international level as the yardstick of the political practice of states. The dynamic implementation of the concept of the human dimension of the Helsinki process and the imbuing of it with a new quality at the all-European Humanitarian Conference, the next stages of which will take place in Copenhagen in 1990 and in Moscow in 1991; an unhindered and open exchange of people, ideas and information, intellectual, spiritual and cultural values and experience in socio-economic andpolitical development with the aim of overcoming inert stereotypes of thinking and an image of the enemy which is left over from the past, not allowing its rebirth and replacing it in the consciousness of the generations, and above all of young people, with the image of a partner; the harmonisation of the internal legislation, administrative rules and practices of states with their international obligations; respect for the free implementation of the rights of national minorities and ensuring their full equality with others without any discrimination; the strengthening of the parliamentary dimension of the common European dialogue, the activisation of contacts between parlimentarians, the mutual exploitation of the experience of bodies of people's power, including within theframework of such organisations as the Council of Europe and the European Parliament, the Nordic Council and the encouragement of broad European contacts between various social circles; an energetic struggle against the dangers which do not have national boundaries including international terrorism, crime, drug addiction and epidemics; advancement and deepening of the Helsinki process as a whole both on a conceptual and practical plane, the gradual movement towards a single Europe a Europe of law-based states, a Europe of trust, a Europe of harmony, openess and stability, not shut in on itself but facing outwards towards all the continents; the convening of a new conference of leaders of the states participating in the CSCE in connection with holding an all-European meeting in Helsinki in 1992. Finland and the Soviet Union will build their international policies, their interaction in the interests of peace and their good-neighbourliness and co-operation on the basis of the present declaration. They call other countries and peoples to this as well. The Boston Globe December 17, 1989 The scars of pollution; Iron Curtain rises to reveal dirt, death; POISON IN THE EAST The Soviet Union and its East bloc allies have been keeping a dirty little secret for more than 30 years. They hid evidence of how acrid emissions from cars without catalytic converters and factories without filters were eroding their most cherished monuments. In Krakow, that evidence is locked in a courtyard behind the Church of St. Peter and Paul, which has become the burial ground for 17th century statues that survived invasions by Swedish kings and Austrian emperors, by Hitler and Stalin, only to have their noses nibbled off and eyes eaten out by pollution. They espoused Marxist dicta on the harmony between man and nature. In truth, while scientists in West Germany's Black Forest and New Hampshire's White Mountains need binoculars to see how acid rain has thinned trees, along the East German-Czechoslovak border pollution has completely consumed thousands of acres of evergreens. All that remains are tree skeletons too brittle and thinto be salvaged for paper. Worst of all, they kept under wraps pollution's human toll: Clinics in Poland and the Soviet Union contain ward after ward of infants breathing through tubes, with birth defects scarring their bodies and brain damage limiting their learning - conditions their doctors say were caused or aggravatedby levels of lead, sulfur dioxide and other toxins in the air and water up to 200 times higher than in US cities. Now, with the dramatic lifting of the Iron Curtain, proof is pouring out of an environmental nightmare, the legacy of more than three decades of industrial development with little or no environmental control. The lessons for the East are ones of failure - of Marxism and Stalinism, ofcentralized planning and Socialist economics. But a two-month investigation by The Boston Globe also found signs of hope - in public pleas for clean air and water as loud as the cries for democracy, in new leaders who know cleanups will cost tens of billions of dollars but who are committed to finding solutions. The message for the West is just as vital. Devastation in the East makes clear what's in store for us, and for developing countries such as China, if we continue to pollute. It gives a truer picture of how much money Poland, Hungary and other East bloc nations will need to prove that their experiments with democracy can produce a healthier quality of life for their people. And, most important, it underlines the need to work with our traditional adversaries to slow global warming, clean the oceans and attack other problems that threaten the planet we share. "There is no way we can make real progress in addressing global environmentalproblems unless we work with Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union in addressing their environmental problems," explained William Nitze, President Bush's ecological point man at the State Department. "It is a very exciting time there politically, I'm very encouraged," Nitze added. "The only thing that discourages me is the magnitude of the problems." Rumors that socialist countries were destroying nature have circulated for years, as Western analysts scoured Soviet technical journals for any hint of problems and emigrees carried out tales of woe. The Russians were said to have covered up a nuclear catastrophe in the Ural Mountains; the East Germans reportedly were dumping toxic wastes into open pits. The first solid evidence of how bad things were came in April 1986, when the Chernobyl reactor exploded and spread radiation around the globe. A closer look revealed that Chernobyl's design was inherently unsafe, that its operators were poorly trained and that 19 other Soviet reactors were similarly flawed. Even after Chernobyl - and glasnost - data on the depth and breadth of environmental damage were hard to come by. "It was considered high treason to talk about these problems," Dr. Magdolene Hanicka explained recently while guiding visitors through her clinic in Krakow, pointing out case after case of children she said were disabled by pollution. Within the last several months, however, Hanicka and other officials across the East have opened up about their pollution problems, inspired by glasnost and prospects of Western aid. Environmentalists, who had been quietly organizingfor a decade, are advertising their concerns around the world. And Westerners, including reporters, have been invited for the first time to see first-hand whatis wrong and why. "Pollution in that region is among the worst on the earth's surface; I know of nowhere that is worse," said Michael Gwynne, who runs the United Nation's Global Environment Monitoring System. "It's something that is going to have to be put right." Numbers tell part of the story: In Poland, 65 percent of the rivers are so dirty that even industries will not use the water for fear of corroding their pipes. In Czechoslovakia, where sulfur dioxide concentrations are eight times higher than in the United States, half the forests are dead or dying. And in Dorog, Hungary, an industrial town an hour from Budapest whose coal plants belchsulfur dioxide, children are stricken by bronchitis and asthma three to four times as often as in the rest of the country and suffer twice as many congenitalheart defects. Other damage is tougher to measure: In Budapest, the "Paris of the East" which was formed in 1873 by the union of two old cities, the haze is often so thick that from the Pest side of the Danube River you can't see the magnificent castles hundreds of yards away on the Buda side. In the vast wilderness of Siberia, one of the most desolate places on Earth, a huge brown cloud of dust and dirt blown over from industrial regions reminds you that it is impossible toescape pollution. And in Gdansk, Poland, birthplace of Solidarity, the Vistula River contains a witch's brew of bacterial and chemical contaminants that cause welts on hands or feet left in the water too long. In the West, pollution today often consists of invisible toxic emissions whose sources are uncertain and whose levels are measured in parts per billion. In the East, environmental ills are less abstract: Like residents of Pittsburgh 25 years ago, the 425 million people living in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union can see and smell their pollution and observe its deadly effects. For Maria Guminska of Krakow, the evidence is all around: Cancer has killed six of 23 residents of her apartment building, including her husband, while lilac bushes, apple and plum trees, and other plants have dried up or changed shape. Guminska and her neighbors traced the problems to an old pharmaceutical plantdown the street that spewed dioxin and other dangerous chemicals. They got the company to cut its emissions, but Guminska - a biochemistry professor at Nicolaus Copernicus Medical Academy and founding member of the Polish Ecology Club - says the plant simply waits until dark to belch its toxins. Problems on her street are typical of those across the nation, Guminska said.Unless the economy improves or countries such as the United States help, she warned, "I can't see things getting better. Many people will continue to get sick." On either side of Europe's crumbling East -West divide people today are asking how socialism could have failed so miserably in safeguarding the environment. After all, environmentalists have always seen a plannned economy as the road to a pollution-free society. Capitalists are more interested in making money than preventing pollution, they reasoned, whereas public planners would have the will and power to prevent industry from harming the environment. The first problem with that reasoning is that early leaders of the socialist revolution didn't buy it. Karl Marx, communism's spiritual father, and Vladimir Lenin, the Soviet Union's first leader, were preoccupied with redressing intolerable factory conditions and other social ills, and assumed nature could be molded to man's needs. That was not an unreasonable expectation since the society they inheritedwas made up largely of peasant farmers and had not been plagued by industrial pollution. Even industrialized Western nations were naive about pollution's catastrophic effects. Lenin's successor, Joseph Stalin, took a less benign approach. Soviet conservationists were planning to establish 20 million acres of nature preserves, "but Stalin overrode that," explained Nicholas Robinson, a professor of law at Pace University and specialist on Soviet environmental policies. The Soviet dictator went on to "exterminate an entire generation of ecologists. That set back scientific evaluation of the environment until Khrushchev." If lack of concern among early leaders got environmental protection off to a bad start, inherent contradictions between state-run economies and effective pollution control made things even worse. For one thing, communist officials had the conflicting duties of promoting industrial development and policing pollution caused by that development. "When the state is doer and checker, doing usually prevails over checking," said Marshall Goldman, associate chief of Harvard University's Russian Research Center. What that meant, Robinson said, is that "inspectors went into factories and found pollution violations, collected fines and sent them to Moscow. Meanwhile, the company was requesting money from Moscow to pay the fines. The money was going around in a circle and having no deterrent effect on antisocial polluting behavior." Socialist industries also had less incentive than capitalist ones to use resources efficiently since they were not penalized for waste. That was especially dangerous in the Soviet Union, where supplies of coal and other minerals were so abundant that the nation abandoned partly tapped mines and wasted twice as much energy as many Western nations. "Our country's wealth in terms of natural and manpower resources has spoiled - one may say even corrupted - us," Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev acknowledged in a 1987 speech. A final flaw in state-controlled systems was their intolerance of opposition,including that of environmentalists. "The damage we see in Eastern Europe is what we would have had in the West without the environmental movement," said Conrad von Moltke, adjunct professor at Dartmouth College and founder of the Institute for European Environmental Policy. Whatever environmentalists had hoped for, "in the real world there is not much difference between a production quota and the profit motive," said Lester Brown, president of the Worldwatch Institute, an environmental think tank. "Both lead to a focus on production at any cost. The difference is that capitalist countries were aware of that and took steps to modify that impulse and centrallyplanned economies didn't." The United States and its allies exacerbated the problem by isolating the East politically and economically, said Alexander Timoshenko, a senior analystat the Soviet Academy of Sciences. That forced socialist states to build their own cars, power plants and factories, all worse polluters than comparable equipment in the West. And, Timoshenko said, the drive to increase military output as well as industrial production depleted the funds that might have paid for expensive environmental controls. If their economies had flourished, the Soviet Union and its allies might have overcome all those barriers. After all, the United States and other capitalist countries experienced their own environmental nightmares in the 1950s and 1960s, and - with prodding from environmentalistnvironmental Protection Agency and former science attache at the US Embassy in Poland. "It was like trying to take a round hole and put it over a square peg. The thing didn't fit." Sandor Jobbagy, a Hungarian environmental official, agreed: "Industry was king. Pollution was purposely ignored to develop industry. The result was we did not develop in a healthy or sane manner." Ironically, Soviet research on mercury and other toxins is so advanced thatalthough Soviet officials pay little heed, the United States has used the information to set its safety limits, Robinson said. And, said Goldman, while the Soviets "have the strictest environmental laws in the world . . . they can afford to because no one observes them." Westerners historically have not cared much about pollution in the East bloc. We had our own environmental nightmares to worry about, and with the Warsaw Pact nations seeming to pose a major military threat, pollution or anything else that drained their resources and diverted their attention was seenas a boon to the West. The global environmental crisis has changed all that. First radioactive rays from Chernobyl spread as far as the United States, then industrial chemicals pierced the ozone layer of the atmosphere and oceans began spitting back sewage and syringes. The most alarming proof of global interdependence has come within the last 18 months, as searing droughts and record high temperatures lent new credibility to warnings the Earth is heating up. Researchers predict Cairo and Shanghai could be flooded as warming expands the oceans and melts the glaciers; they also predict that the American farm beltcould be transformed into a wasteland and Massachusetts could lose 10,000 acres to the encroaching sea. The pollutants responsible for those and other woes do not recognize national boundaries or political divisions. The Soviet Union and its allies produce 20 percent of the carbon dioxide, methane and other gases responsible for global warming, the same percent as the United States. With ozone depletion, they are responsible for about 5 percent ofthe problem, one-sixth as much as the United States. And they are a major sourceof the contaminants that are soiling the Baltic Sea and Pacific Ocean and killing forests across Europe and Asia. China, which seems hellbent on repeating the mistakes of its socialist brethren, contributes just 10 percent of gases responsible for warming. But thatwill double by early next century if the Chinese succeed in industrializing and continue burning fuel inefficiently and without controlling pollution. "Our future and their future are completely and totally linked in terms of these environmental solutions," said Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), who is helping organize next year's international Earth Day celebrations. "We have to care," the senator added. Kerry and others say that for the United States to make a difference, that care must be translated into billions of dollars in aid. The only way that levelof help can be provided, officials in the East and West agree, is through an enormous shift of spending from arms to the environment. Helping the East may turn out to be the cheapest way for the West to attackglobal warming and similar woes, said Nitze, the State Department official. Soviet and Eastern European factories, power plants and cars are the dirtiest in the world, with few or no pollution controls, and fitting them with rudimentary filters is much less costly than adding sophisticated controls to USplants. That reasoning has convinced the Finns, Swedes, West Germans and others to buy millions of dollars worth of pollution-scrubbing equipment for Poland's industries. Such aid also could be a bonanza for US firms that supply low-sulfur coal, catalytic converters and other energy and pollution -control services, Nitze explained. And it would provide an opening for US scientists to study up-close what happens to people, trees and buildings when pollution gets that bad. Most important, East -West collaboration in rescuing forests, protecting monuments and saving lives threatened by pollution could lead to "the whole betterment of relations in all sectors," said Timoshenko, the Soviet legal specialist. But to be effective, that help must come now, warned Laurens Brinkhorst, the European Community's top environmental official. "For many years the West and America have been saying we are ready to work with the East on issues like cleaning the environment, providing the military threat is removed. "Well, that threat is being dismantled. The reform movement is a golden chance to use a window of opportunity that may close if things do not go well," he added. "We should grab the chance and work in an active way to prevent the reform movement from falling back." ON THE BORDER, PROBLEMS BECOME SHARED HOF, West Germany Climbing through lush spruce forests near this remote Bavarian town, you sense you've left behind the troubles of the world. And the government wants to keep it that way, making the few industries around meet air pollution limits that are among the toughest in the world. As you near the 3,200-foot peak of Schneeberg Mountain, however, something seems amiss. More than half the trees are thinning, and one in five is dead. The rich, diverse underbrush has been replaced by monotonous brown grass, the kind that can withstand anything but the darkness of a healthy forest. If you could test the rain pouring from the heavens, you'd find it more acidic than vinegar. And the damage is not limited to trees. Since 1980, when East Germany dramatically increased its use of dirty brown coal, the incidence of bronchitis in the region is up 99 percent, while asthma cases are up 456 percent. "The increases are parallel, there is a connection between air pollution and respiratory disease," said Dr. Rudolph Sies, a general practitioner who has tracked the trends. Hof's troubles make it clear that while West Germany is on its way to scrubbing clean its factories and cars - and getting its Western allies to do the same - that is not enough. Eighty percent of the pollution raining down here is blown over from power and paper plants in East Germany, less than 40 miles away. The only way to save Hof, specialists agree, is to get the East to join the cleanup. The lessons of Hof are not limited to states with common borders, such as East and West Germany. The same linkage exists on a global scale - with pollution from East Germany and its neighbors fueling global warming, depletion of the Earth's ozone layer and other problems that threaten countries as far away as the United States. "The worst mistake we could make is to look at places like Hof with complacency," said Conrad von Moltke, who teaches at Dartmouth College and founded the Institute for European Environmental Policy. "Hof tells us why we have to help the East eliminate pollution. There is no way to isolate environmental problems. "The real challenge is to avoid having Hof become a metaphor for wider environmental damage." That challenge is even more pronounced in Lubeck, a 1,000-year-old town northof Hof known for five towering churches dating to Henry the Lionhearted's rule in the 12th century, a central square magnificently reconstructed after World War II, marzipan candy, sandy beaches along the East German border and, more recently, a dizzying array of pollution problems. Acid rain has killed 16 percent of the trees in Lubeck's forests, made another 33 percent sick and caused millions of dollars in damage to the old City Hall and marketplace. Officials lay much of the blame on the East, where even the newest power plants and factories have antiquated pollution controls. Dangerously high bacteria levels forced the closing of beaches along the Black Sea for the first time last summer. Since nearly all of West Germany's sewage receives advanced treatment, East Germany again is suspected of being amajor culprit. Worst of all, officials believe paint coatings, medical debris, sewage sludge and other toxins from the Schoenberg hazardous waste site just across the East German border are leaking and poisoning Lubeck's drinking water. But the Schoenberg situation also shows how sticky East-West pollution issues can be. Nearly all 40,000 loads of waste trucked there each year come from the West. West German firms know it is much cheaper to ship their wastes across the border, where environmental standards are much looser, and the West German government has gone along for 19 years, apparently relieved to find a quick and easy solution to its toxic disposal worries. "The East Germany site is an escape for our industry. It's easy and it's hidden," said Peter Boege, Lubeck's environmental chief, who is as angry at his government as he is at East Germany's. "To get East Germany to make improvements, we should pay for them." Reinhold Hiller, Lubeck's representative in Parliament, agreed that the two must collaborate to end the town's pollution problems. If that happens, he added, Lubeck could be transformed from a symbol of pollution to a symbol of solutions. "We can set an example for cooperation between the USA and the Soviet Union," he said, "and for the Third World and industrialized countries." SOCIALISM: A LEGACY OF POLLUTION; EAST GERMANY 80% of rivers contaminated. Most cities have air pollution 50 times safe limits. 6 million people at risk from environmentally induced disease. In Bittefeld and other cities, 90-100% of children suffer respiratory diseases. 37% of trees dead or damaged. CZECHOSLOVAKIA 30% of forests dying, another 20% damaged. 30% of Czechs, 16% of Slovaks exposed to dangerous pollution. Sulphur dioxide concentrations per unit of land 8 times higher than in US. YUGOSLAVIA Belgrade is 5th most polluted city in world. 3.5 times more sulphur dioxide per unit of land than in US. 48% of trees dead or damaged. 126 towns have air pollution problems. ALBANIA 10% of land drained for farming since World War II, killing wetlands. BULGARIA 80% of cultivable land damaged by wind, water erosion. 158 plants, 62 birds, 26 fish, 17 mammals threatened with extinction. 25% of plant, animal species vulnerable. ROMANIA Less than 20% of waterways provide drinkable water. 30% of arable land eroded. SOVIET UNION 100 major cities have serious air pollution. Most rivers polluted. 8 of 10 deaths in Lithuania blamed on pollution. 59% of trees damaged or dead. HUNGARY Budapest air pollution during rush hour 30 times higher than safe limits. Pollution blamed for men having lowest life expectancy in Europe. POLAND 65% of rivers too corrosive and dirty for industry to use. 10-15% of students chronically ill. 50% of trees badly damaged, another 17% harmed. GRAPHIC: PHOTO MAP, 1. Smoke from a coal-burning bauxite plant blankets the community of Ajka in Hungary. There are few pollution controls anywhere in Eastern Europe. / GLOBE STAFF PHOTO / SUZANNE KREITER 2. An environmentalist shields herself from acid rain in a forest near Hof, West germany, that is dying due to emissions from nearby East Germany. 3. Across the East bloc, people live in the shadow of horrendous pollution. Stefan Zak, 55, (above top) blames the Glogow copperworks in Poland, where he worked for six years, for his lung and leg problems. The plant still belches toxins that have forced officials to raze an adjacent village. In Mosonmagyarovar, Hungary, (above) two children wander across a toxic waste dump in search of salvage. And in Dorog, Hungary, Gabor Varga, 3, one of dozens of children with pollution -related respiratory problems, is examined at a public clinic. 4. GLOBE STAFF MAP Copyright (c) 1989 Globe Newspaper Company; The Boston Globe December 18, 1989, Poland is left choking on its wastes; Plight of village symptomatic of pollution damage across nation Six years ago, this looked like any other remote Polish village: 55 houses built around a church and railway station, children playing in the square, a small cafe where farmers drank tea and coffee and talked about their crops, families and community. Today, Wroblin is a mountain of rubble. Bulldozers have leveled 50 homes; the other five will come down soon. The tavern is gone, along with nearly all the farmers and their children, and the church is closed. All that's left in the square is a 6-foot crucifix decorated with red and white flowers and ribbons, an unsettling tribute to a town made so sick by pollution that the government felt obliged to end its misery. "It's like being in the desert," said Zdzislaw Dabrowski, who lives on the outskirts of town with his wife and children, waiting until he can afford to move to the nearby city of Glogow, watching out his back window as the copper plant that transformed his village into a ghost town continues to belch smoke. Dabrowski and his wife, Barbara, saw tomatoes turn brown, beets turn yellow and other crops wither away. They watched their baby rabbits die and sat up withneighbors disabled by diseases of the kidney, liver, stomach, lungs and heart that doctors blamed on lead, sulfur dioxide and other emissions from the copper factory. And they searched for answers for their 12-year-old son's repeated headaches, their 10-year-old daughter's persistent bladder infection and their 6-year-old son's concerns about being the smallest child in his class. Six years ago the government stepped in, declaring Wroblin and several surrounding villages a "protected zone." The state-owned copperworks bought people's farms and helped 180 families relocate to the city. "We were a bad neighbor, we were causing problems to the people," acknowledged Tadeusz Krukowski, the plant's top environmental official. While the factory and related mines provide 44,000 jobs, he added, "of course we also have been damaging agriculture. . . . Sometimes we even make the agricultural products unusable." Wroblin sounds a lot like Times Beach, Mo., Love Canal, N.Y., and scores of other communities made uninhabitable by pollution - but the Polish village is different. While at most US sites the pollution was stopped after it was uncovered, herepeople were evacuated expressly so the copper plant could continue belching toxic gases. And while at Times Beach and Love Canal there is still debate aboutwhether anyone was hurt, here the suffering is too flagrant to deny. There is an even more glaring distinction: Times Beach and Love Canal are notorious because they are the exception, but what happened at Wroblin is symptomatic of the environmental devastation occurring across Poland and Eastern Europe. The Polish government admitted as much in 1983 when it designated 27 places "areas of ecological hazard." The danger zones include 11.3 percent of the country and 12.9 million people, 35 percent of Poland's population. The best areas, the state said, have suffered "serious environmental damage;" the worst are "ecological disasters." Pollution-related losses to forests, crops, buildings and human health are costing the country 200 to 400 billion Polish zlotys a year - 10 to 20 percent of its national income. Nowhere is that damage more apparent than in Poland's cherished rivers. The country regularly reviews the waterways and assigns them to one of three categories: clean enough to drink, clean enough to use in agriculture or clean enough for industry. In a just-completed government survey, none of the water was clean enough for drinking, and 65 percent was so loaded with salts, toxins such as mercury and cyanide, and human feces that even industries were afraid touse it. The Poles have invented a fourth classification to describe that water: "poza kategoria," or beyond categories. The Vistula, Poland's grandest river, has been reduced to an open sewer wherenone of the water is suitable for drinking or agriculture. Mercury levels are three times what researchers say is safe, while lead levels are 25 times higher. Water quality in lakes is no better: A recent survey of 132 lakes found that the water in 29 percent was suitable only for industries and in 53 percent was too polluted to be used even by factories. A confidential review produced this summer by the World Bank, and obtained byThe Boston Globe, traced that polluted water to its source: Half of Poland's cities, including Warsaw, and 35 percent of its industries do not treat their wastes. Of the water that is treated, 34 percent goes through an antiquated system like the one in Greater Boston, which removes just 40 percent of human wastes and almost no chemicals. In addition, coal mines dump their corrosive wastes straight into the Vistulaand other rivers. Industries that tried using that water found it ate right through their pipes. Coal is also the major reason the air is so polluted. Poland is one of the world's most coal-dependent countries, relying on the fuel for 78 percent of its energy, and its brown coal emits alarmingly high levels of sulfur and soot. Even worse, Polish power plants waste four times moreenergy than ones in Western Europe, and furnaces in older Polish homes extractjust 10 percent of the useful energy from coal. Like the rest of Eastern Europe, Poland has never taken the most basic steps to limit pollution. Most factories and power plants have no scrubbers, andany filters they have are outmoded and ineffective. Their gasoline still contains lead, which was banned in the United States after tests linked it to brain damage in children. Polish cars, meanwhile, have no emissions controls, and many use "two-stroke" engines, which burn an oil-gasoline blend that emits up to eight times more hydrocarbons and 50 percent more carbon monoxide than plain gasoline. As a result, Poland, with just 38 million people, ranks seventh in the world in sulfur dioxide production - leaving the country with a blanket of the dangerous gas three times thicker than in the United States. Concentrations of airborne particles that pose a major risk of lung disease are twice as high in Poland's dirtiest cities as in polluted US cities, and levels of other toxins are similarly elevated. The problem is especially bad in Katowice, an industrial area with more than 4 million people. Sulfur dioxide levels often reach twice the safe limit, nitrogen oxide can be six times higher, carbon monoxide 21 times higher, airborne dust 35 times higher and lead has been measured at levels 196 times higher than the government considers safe. One of the best gauges of Poland's air pollution problem is the damage to thecountry's lush forests. Scientists have known for years that more than half of Poland is exposed to levels of sulfur dioxide high enough to harm trees badly. A recent official survey confirmed that 50 percent of the country's forests are badly damaged and another 17 percent are slightly affected by pollution. Those numbers come alive in Jelenia Gora, a region near the border with Czechoslovakia and East Germany that Poles call "the Bermuda triangle of pollution." The tops of nearby mountains look like they have been ravaged by forest fires; the real villain is a witch's brew of sulfur dixoide, nitrogen oxides, heavy metals and other noxious gases pouring from power plants and factories in the three countries. Sometimes the gases weaken the trees, leaving insects, high winds and other natural forces to finish them off. Other times pollutants inflict fatal damage directly, retarding life-giving photosynthesis, turning needles from green to grey, thinning treetops and eventually sapping all life from firs, spruce and other evergreens. Older trees, those over 60, were the first to go, since they are the most sensitive. Foresters replaced them with species they thought were tougher, but half withered away within two years. Of the 17,000 acres of forest nearest the Czech border, more than 7,000 are completely dead. "Every year we have less and less green trees, and there is no hope that whatremains will remain for long," said Edmund Kuczkowski, a deputy forester who hasspent 34 years caring for the trees. "It is painful for me to see them perish with my own eyes. "This is a warning what man can do, a warning to Poland and the world." Poland is sounding a similar warning with other resources: - Crops: Coal creates problems in this area, too, with the most recent reviewfinding 83 percent of the nation's farmland highly acidic. Lowering that aciditycosts Poland about $ 5 million a year, or nearly as much as forest damage. The problem is especially bad in Katowice, where average lead levels in the soil are five times higher than safe limits set by the World Health Organization, and levels on much of the region's farmland are 80 times higher. Concentrations of cadmium, another toxic metal, average four times higher than is safe in Katowice, and in some places are 50 times higher. "You won't see these levels anywhere else in the world," said Rafal Kucharski, a government air pollution researcher. Those contaminants can only be removed by digging up and carrying away the dirt, Kucharski said, yet despite government warnings, people plant potatoes, carrots, parsley, celery and other crops in the most polluted soils. - Wildlife: Forty-one animal species reportedly have become extinct in Polandrecently, and pollution threatens 66 percent of the remaining species. - Buildings: The erosion of the nation's structural inheritance is the easiest pollution effect to measure: One year an eye or nose are where they belong on a statue, the next they have been eaten away by sulfuric acid and other noxious gases. The most disturbing damage has been recorded in the ancient city of Krakow, which made the United Nation's list of key cultural sites. While city officials have restored 800 buildings, damage is spreading more quickly than repair efforts and has even reached Medieval windows and precious tapestries housed indoors. - People: The same pollutants that are toppling trees, soiling crops and eating away at buildings are killing people. The official numbers are numbing: Life expectancy for men who survive infancyis lower than it was 20 years ago, and for men between 40 and 60 it has fallen to 1952 levels. In Upper Silesia, which has what may be the world's heaviest concentration ofindustry, levels of circulatory disease are 15 percent higher than in the country as a whole. Cancer rates are 30 percent higher, respiratory disease is up 47 percent and every fourth pregnancy results in medical complications. Elevated lead levels, meanwhile, have caused an "appalling increase" in the number of retarded children, according to a 1985 report by the Polish Academy of Sciences. "I do not know the proper words to express the problem," said Lucjan Pawlowski, coauthor of the Polish Chemical Society's landmark study on pollution. "The enormous political changes going on here, however, make me optimistic wecan do better," he added. "I must have some hope because otherwise life would bealmost impossible." RALLIES AGAINST POLLUTION PACED OTHER PROTESTS BUDAPEST The rest of the world awakened to the revolutionary change sweepingHungary when 200,000 delirious demonstrators gathered here in October to proclaim the first Hungarian Republic since 1947. But for many Hungarians, thmarched arm-in-arm with drives for democracy. "By the mid-1980s the environmental issue was seen as a legitimate area for political activity all across the East," said Stanley Kabala, a researcher at the University of Pittsburgh who has written extensively about environmental issues in that region. "It may be that pollution was just too bad to ignore any more." Hungary's situation shows how that passion for the environment developed and survived crackdowns that stifled prodemocracy forces for nearly 40 years. First, there was the sorry state of the environment. In Budapest, air pollution during rush hour reaches levels 30 times higher than what the government says is safe, and just 25 percent of the city's sewage is treated before it is dumped into the Danube. Those problems help explain why, in recent years, life expectancy for Hungarian men was the lowest in Europe. "This was not something abstract and highly intellectual," said Judit Vasarhelyi, who is one of the country's leading environmentalists and whose husband is a leader in the prodemocracy movement. "The environmental issues wereconcrete and real. People could identify with them in a way that they couldn't with more abstract issues of political philosophy." The Danube dam, which the government finally canceled this fall, gave environmentalists a highly emotional issue around which to rally support beginning in 1984. The dam would have been built on one of the river's most bucolic spots and could have polluted drinking supplies for 5 million people andflooded valuable farmland. In pressing their case, journalists, scientists and activists used techniquescommon to the West but not seen here since the communists took power. They gave Parliament petitions with more than 10,000 signatures, printed and handed out leaflets, staged demonstrations that attracted up to 50,000 people, took out newspaper ads and even held a press conference for foreign journalists. The environmentalists also received data, money and support from colleagues across the globe, including the Sierra Club, Greenpeace and the Connecticut-based Foundation to Protect the Hungarian Environment. The movement's tactics and mass appeal made it a "laboratory for the liberalization movement," said Vasarhelyi. Why did the hard-line government put up with the protests? "We were tolerated because we were for something, protection of the environment, and not against the regime," the activist explained. That does not mean environmentalists had it easy. In 1986, the police banned a demonstration against the dam planned for Budapest. Those who came anyway were"beaten by truncheons and hit with tear gas," said Janos Vargha, a leader of theanti-dam movement. Vargha, a journalist, said he was ostracized by the Hungarian Association of Journalists. Still, he added, environmentalists' actions "made wider and wider borders" for behavior the state would accept from prodemocracy activists. Environmentalists have been equally active in other East bloc countries: EastGermans formed 250 environmental groups and a dozen environmental libraries, Bulgarians founded Eco-Glastnost, Soviets rallied more than 200,000 people at antinuclear protests and Czechs founded more than 600 conservation groups for youths and more than 1,000 for adults. In Poland, the first influential, independent environmental organization - the Ecological Club - was founded in the fall of 1980, just as Solidarity was starting. The two collaborated, and local Solidarity chapters typically had environmental committees. But in December 1981, when Solidarity was outlawed, the 4,000-member Ecological Club was allowed to continue. "We weren't suppressed because we were very small, and because of our less visible involvement in political debate," said Zbigniew Bochniarz, a founding member of the Ecological Club now teaching at the University of Minnesota. "It helped that our headquarters was in Krakow rather than Warsaw, that we had a very good relationship with the Krakow government and that we got strong supportfrom the Catholic Church." Kabala offered a more pragmatic explanation for the government's tolerance: "It couldn't put everyone in jail." Today, the Ecological Club is thriving and Poland has two feuding Green parties along with more than 100 local environmental groups. But while environmentalists' goals still generally coincide with those of the freedom movement, there are differences, said Andrzej Kassenberg, vice chairman of the Ecological Club. "We want a free market but we want it to protect the environment," Kassenbergexplained. "We are very afraid that a market economy will produce new dangers for the environment, so we want some constraints." CITY'S RICHES CRUMBLE UNDER TORRENT OF TOXINS KRAKOW, Poland This magnificent Medieval city is a study in contradictions. It boasts some of Europe's most cherished architectural treasures, including the 1,000-year-old Wawel Castle, but its air and water are among the most polluted in Europe. It was saved from the Nazis by an advancing Soviet Army, only to watch its Soviet masters wreak what many say is even worse devastation. It is a monument to civilization at its best, and its worst. Sorting out those contradictions, observers say, is vital to understanding - and ending - the environmental nightmare gripping Krakow, the rest of Poland andthe East bloc. When World War II ended, Krakow had a third as many people as today, a vibrant cultural life, a large and healthy middle class and emotional ties to Austria, Italy and France. Many saw those qualities as strengths, but Poland's new socialist rulers viewed them as a threat to the classless society they were building and vowed to remake the city into an industrial center. "They wanted to break up bourgeois society and mix it with the working classes," said Marec Paszucha, the city's deputy mayor. "They succeeded, and theresults were catastrophic for the social structure and the ecology. " Nowhere is the outcome of that experiment clearer than at the Lenin Steelworks just outside the city. Built in the early 1950s, this vast network ofpower plants and foundries, apartment complexes and public halls, was designed as a tribute to the socialist dream, promising to provide work and a good livingto 40,000 workers. Instead, it has become a symbol of a failed social and environmental policy. The steelworks produce 80 percent of the noxious gases that hang over Krakow,along with 50 percent of the dust and 60 percent of the solid wastes. Eighty percent of its workers end up on disability pensions; just 12.5 percent reach normal retirement. Part of the problem is that the plant uses an anachronistic open-hearth technology and includes none of the pollution-control equipment that rescued Pittsburgh, Birmingham, Ala., and other US steel centers. Plant managers say upgrading the complex and adding scrubbers would cost nearly $ 500 million; Krakow officials put the price tag at $ 5 billion. The steelworks and related factories also were sited inappropriately. They not only scarred the pristine landscape and pulled apart the community's social fabric, but also belched toxins into the air that hang over the city for days because of frequent temperature inversions. "This lack of ventilation has given us the most polluted air among Polish cities and one of the worst situations in the world," said Jozef Gega, associate professor at the University of Mining and Metallurgy and a leader in the Krakow chapter of the Polish Ecological Club. Krakow's air, which makes the city seem out of focus most of the year, gets even dirtier in winter, when people burn coal to heat their homes and offices. Another way to measure pollution's toll is to watch how it eats away at Krakow's ancient monuments, said Adam Gula, vice president of the Ecological Club branch. The nuclear physicist has been doing just that for four years, tracking how a tiny cavity in an old sandstone building was transformed into a hole 2 inches deep. Pollution dissolved the gluing compounds in the sandstone and made the grainsdisintegrate, explained Gula. The hole developed at about eye-level, probably caused by a factor unrelated to the dirty air. But the lower the damage gets, the faster it proceeds, since car emissions and other pollutants are more concentrated near the ground. "Krakow managed to survive World War II because of lucky circumstances and now we are paying with pollution," Gula said. Clean water also is a problem: Krakow's drinking water contains levels of lead, mercury, zinc, cadmium, arsenic and other dangerous metals twice as high as US researchers say is safe. "It stinks," 12-year-old Magda Szjunar said, explaining that no matter how hot it gets she never swims in the Vistula River. President Bush offered a similar verdict when he visited Poland this summer and promised $ 15 million in cleanup aid. Two-thirds will pay for scrubbers for a power plant, with the rest going to help the city monitor the quality of its air and water. Spurred by Poland's most active environmental community, Krakow is launching its own efforts to fight back. The country's new noncommunist government has given deputy mayor Paszucha the power to close polluting plants, and he promised to reduce production at the steelworks 30 percent by the end of the year. "We are not just playing any more," the city official insisted. "Our bad state of affairs gives us the basis for taking radical action that could not have been taken five years ago." GRAPHIC: PHOTO, 1. GLOBE STAFF PHOTOS/SUZANNE KREITER / Jagoda Szafron, 4, lies in Krakow, Poland, hospital, where doctors say she is a victim of noxious air emissions there. 2. Dangerous gases spewed from the industrial smokestacks of Katowice in Poland cloud the region of more than 4 million. Carbon monoxide often reaches levels 21 times the safe limit. 3. A train heads toward huge coal and bauxite plants in Ajka, Hungary. The coal used for fuel in much of the East bloc emits high levels of pollutants. 4. Zdzislaw Dabrowski soon hopes to be able to move his family, including sons Kamil, 6, and Yolagta, 12, from theirhome on the outskirts of Wroblin, Poland, a village condemned by the government because pollution from a copper plant made so many sick. Fifty homes have already been razed. Copyright (c) 1990 The Reuter Library Report February 13,1990 EAST EUROPEAN REFORM SPURS BALTIC CLEAN-UP EFFORT Political reform in Eastern Europe has given fresh impetus to efforts to clean up the heavily-polluted Baltic Sea. Affluent Nordic states are planning new ways to help Baltic states such as pollution. Closer links between ecologists of East and West -- contacts which have sometimes fallen foul of officialdom in the East -- and a freer flow of information are seen as helping the clean-up. "I'm quite convinced we will reach better and quicker results than we have ever done before," said Fleming Otzen, executive secretary of the Baltic Marine Environment Protection Commission, founded in 1974 and also known as the Helsinki Commission. The Commission begins its annual meeting on Tuesday. As international concern grows, Sweden and Poland last week invited leaders from seven other states to a conference on ways to reduce pollution in the Baltic. A statement from Swedish Prime Minister Ingvar Carlsson's office said he and his Polish counterpart had invited leaders from Finland, the Soviet Union, Denmark, East and West Germany, Norway and Czechoslovakia to two days of talks in Sweden in September. Ecologists say there is no time to lose. Swimming has been banned off some beaches because of high levels of bacteria from sewage. Areas of the seabed lie lifeless, devastated by pollution pumped into the almost tideless sea, officials and environmental campaigners said. "It is very critical. This really is the last moment to look at the nature ofour industrial and economic activity," said Heidi Hautala, who chairs Finland's Green Party. Green issues are coming increasingly to the fore in Eastern Europe as the voices of activists, once in underground opposition, are finally being heard. In a sign of change, East German Environment Minister Peter Dietrich admitted late last month that the Baltic had been used as a dumping ground for heavy metals and other waste. East Germany's heavy industries belch out 5.6 million tonnes a year of sulphur dioxide -- a prime cause of pollution when it lands in the Baltic. nutrients. The report, prepared by a Finnish-Soviet joint venture and led by a Tallinn University professor, said bacteria levels on two Estonian beaches last summer were 40 times the recommended limit. Latvia's two main industrial cities, Ventspils and Liepaja, pump their waste water straight into the Baltic. Otzen said the rising level of nutrients in the Baltic was alarming and the Helsinki Commission's chief current concern. The nutrients come from agriculture all around the sea but the chief source is sewage from cities in the East, he said. They deprive the sea of oxygen and form a layer of toxic hydrogen sulphide onthe seabed. Blooms of sometimes poisonous algae appear which have been known to kill cattle. The Helsinki Commission is aiming for a 50 per cent cut in the level of nutrients by 1995. The West has indicated its willingness to help in the clean-up campaign. "Eastern European countries have now focussed on these issues and are willingto discuss international cooperation and financing," said Peter Laurson, head of the international department of the Nordic Development Bank (NIB). The NIB, set up by the Nordic states to help fund export projects, is contemplating aid either though long-term loans to Eastern European governments or through a new agency, the Nordic Environmental Finance Corporation (NEFCO). NEFCO should be finalised at a Nordic Council meeting in Iceland later this month, Laurson said. It will provide loans to joint ventures with Nordic firms and have paid-in capital of around 46 million dollars of Nordic government funds. The Nordic Project Fund report listed joint ventures, ranging from the reconstruction of a cement plant to production of pumps for sewage works, which would need investment of more than 150 million roubles (240 million dollars) in Estonia alone. One factor encouraging investment is the freer flow of information on the environment from Eastern Europe. "It doesn't make sense to help them and offer technological solutions when wedon't know what the real problems are," said senior Finnish Environment Ministry official Tapani Kohonen. On Monday, 10 non-political environmental activists' groups from six Baltic states launched the Coalition Clean Baltic (CCB) with the aim of collecting and distributing information and putting pressure on governments for action on the environment. However, some Baltic Greens fear even greater damage to the environment. Ecologists from Poland, East Germany and the Soviet Union told a Brussels news conference in December they feared an influx of outdated, polluting technology. This is a view shared by Finland's Green Party, which last summer set up an information centre in Helsinki to forge closer links between green activists allaround the Baltic. Hautala said the West must ensure technology exported to Eastern Europe conforms with the highest Western environmental standards and not with the ofteninadequate local regulations. "There is an illusion that our life is so fantastic because of our high levelof consumption. I don't think people have been very well informed," she said. Copyright (c) 1990 Chicago Tribune Company; Chicago Tribune March 25, 1990 Pollution a legacy of communism Every building, street, leaf or scrap of earth in this town of 10,000 is black, shrouded in the soot of some of Eastern Europe's worst pollution. Each year, Copsa Mica's two factories spew out about 30,000 tons of pollutants. Some of it is soot from a factory that puts dye in rubber. Some is dust from a plant for nonferrous metals. Everybody has known for years it was bad to live here, but under the dictatorship of Nicolae Ceausescu, nobody dared say so. Residents say the pollution problem was acknowledged only when Ceausescu's son, Nicu, visited the town for two days last fall and the factories were shut down. The situation in Copsa Mica is in some ways typical of industrial areas in other Eastern European countries, where Communist governments eager for industrial development ignored environmental damage. Now, millions of people in East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Hungary and Romania are using their new freedoms to expose one of the legacies of Stalinism: destruction of the environment in economies run by decree ratherthan logic. As Eastern Europe rediscovers its political voice, ecological movements and Greens parties are becoming important. In Czechoslovakia, for instance, where an estimated 35 percent of all forestsare damaged by pollution, sulfur dioxide emissions are double those in revolution against Communist rule. In Romania, too, an emerging National Ecology Movement claims at least 40,000 active supporters. Even before May's scheduled elections, the provisionalgovernment has set commissions to battle the blight imposed by Ceausescu's rule. "Ceausescu ordered the building of big factories, but when it was a question of buying anti-pollution devices, he never accepted that," said architect SerbanPopescu-Criveanu, chairman of one of the new national bodies. "He said 'Let's start, and we'll do that later.' And that later meant never." Similarly haphazard planning and the resulting pollution helped bring about last fall's revolt in East Germany, home of some of central Europe's dirtiest industrial towns. In Bulgaria in 1988, it was environmental dissent and a government crackdown on it that sowed the seeds of today's broader opposition to the Communists. Folklore values the peasant customs, forests, lakes and clean air that vanished under communism. Despite the East's growing environmental awareness, the cost of cleaning up the mess, lack of international cooperation and a threat of unemployment mean that any improvement will take decades. Hungary, for instance, decided in 1982 to become the first East bloc country to control toxic waste that previously was buried in unregulated dumps, which environment official Robert Reiniger calls "ticking timebombs." The one waste burner put into operation since 1982 cost $36.7 million, including more than $2 million in hard currency in a country that needs every cent to repay its $20 billion foreign debt. On the international scale, costs are far higher. A recent study by the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis near Vienna estimated that $18 billion a year would be needed to cut by 50 percent the sulfurous emissions eating at Europe's forests. Even that huge investment won't arrest the acidification of Europe's soils unless the money is used chiefly to curb the air pollution from its chief sources in Eastern Europe, the institute's experts say. Yet cross-border cooperation is hard to achieve. Czechoslovakia and Hungary, for instance, still cannot decide the fate of a giant, half-completed plan to dam and re-channel the Danube river for hydroelectric plants. But both countries now agree potential energy gains should be weighed against possibly lasting damage to land and wildlife. While governments seem to fear losing the huge sums already spent on projectssuch as the Danube dam, workers worry about losing their livelihood if industries are closed. When Romania's new government closed a well-known national eyesore, a synthetic materials plant in the northern town of Suceava, hundreds of its workers traveled to Bucharest to protest. Communism's failure to keep its promises of a better life for its people meanthat many of Eastern Europe's new voters, like the East Germans last weekend, favor parties who offer economic growth. While new wealth may help curb some existing pollution, it could create new environmental damage by increasing demands for energy in countries with few natural fuel resources and growing appetites for consumer goods. In Budapest, for instance, the growth in private car ownership means clogged city streets. But it also means the incidence of asthma has doubled in the last 10 years in one busy district where lead content in the air is 18 times what it should be. Copyright (c) 1990 Reuters The Reuter Library Report May 6, 1990, Sunday, BC cycle ENVIRONMENTAL TALKS TO HELP START CLEAN UP EAST EUROPE The world's richest industrial states meet next week to discuss how to start cleaning up the environmental catastrophe left by decades of communism in Eastern Europe. Around 40 ministers from East and West Europe, the United States and Canada meet in the west coast city of Bergen from May 13-16 to discuss how to curb pollution which may be wreathing the globe in a poison cloud. Before the political upheavals in Eastern Europe last year, communist states in the region refused to reveal the extent of their pollution -- ranging from dead rivers and contaminated farmland to permanently leafless forests and towns blackened by soot. "This is the first time since the revolution in East Europe that 40 ministersfrom East and West will sit at the same table and discuss their strategy," said Norwegian Environment Minister Kristin Hille Valla. "The democratic process has led to an entirely new openness," she told Reuters. But while the conference will produce political statements on cutting pollution both in Eastern Europe and around the globe, ministers will not signany legally binding conventions -- to the dismay of many environmentalists who want action now. The ministers are likely to be deeply divided even over their joint non-binding declarations -- outlining long-term environmental policies for helping Eastern Europe, the developing world and on cleaning up at home. The Bergen meeting, with preparatory talks from May 8 involving members of "green" groups, industry, youth organisations and others, is one of four U.N. regional meetings ahead of a global environmental conference in Brazil in 1992. The talks are a follow-up to a 1987 report by the U.N.'s World Commission on Environment and Development, chaired by former Norwegian Prime Minister Gro Harlem Brundtland. "In order to maintain the current momentum in relations between East and Westwe need a broadened network of cooperation in the fields of economy, trade, industry, technology, ecology and resource management," said Brundtland. Hille Valla said: "We are concerned that Western countries should be trying to transfer new technology to East Europe, not obsolete technologies which we have rejected." The West could also offer training and expertise to the East. Any bill for cleaning up Eastern Europe would be huge. The West German government has estimated it will take up to 200 billion dollars and 20 years to bring East European industry up to Western environmentalstandards, without even addressing pollution already emitted. Some environmentalists see a solution, saying that the end of the "Cold War" means cash saved from defence should go to protecting the environment. "At present the world spends 900 billion dollars a year on defence against military threats. The environment gets only 14 billion dollars," said Lester Brown, head of the Washington-based environmental group Worldwatch. A draft of a ministerial statement drawn up by Norway says industrialised nations, who have polluted the globe for decades, have most responsibility for the environment and should give developing countries cash to help them cut pollution. "Assistance to East Europe for environmental measures must not reduce our aidto the developing countries," it adds. Brundtland said she would be interested to see how far countries such as the United States and Britain, often criticised as among the slowest to impose pollution controls, would support such declarations. U.S. President George Bush has argued against some tougher anti-pollution measures, saying scientists have not yet agreed whether a blanket of pollution could be slowly warming the globe and creating the so-called "greenhouse effect". "Environmental measures must anticipate, prevent and attack the causes of environmental degradation," Norway's draft statement says. "Even if final scientific proof is lacking, doubt should count in favour of the environment. " According to U.N. estimates, the lifestyle of the average American produces the same amount of carbon dioxide as 185 Nigerians. Carbon gases are mainly blamed for the "greenhouse effect" which may be heating the globe. Norway has gone further than many other Western countries in its environmental policies. Among the measures, Norway has said it will hold carbon dioxide emissions at current levels by the year 2000, and obliges ministries to present a "green budget" each year to review the environmental impact of spending. Some environmental groups, fearing the Bergen conference will fail to agree Socialist Left Party, which has 17 of the 165 seats in the Norwegian parliament."There will be no concrete obligations, especially on phasing out polluting carbon gases." Copyright (c) 1990 The British Broadcasting Corporation; Summary of World Broadcasts January 23, 1990, Tuesday LENGTH: 3235 words HEADLINE: GORBACHEV'S ADDRESS TO GLOBAL FORUM ON ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION Tass in Russian for abroad 1810 gmt 19 Jan 90 Text of report in English 1840 gmt 19 Jan 90 Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev delivered an address today to the participants in the global forum on environmental protection and development forhuman survival. He said Our esteemed guests, ladies and gentlemen, comrades, the five days you have spent here in Moscow, in an atmosphere of intensive creative communication, your meaningful discussions and the documents you have adopted give grounds for saying that an important step has been taken in forming mankind's ecological awareness. And this is extremely topical. The threat of a military thermonuclear catastrophe was understood before. Scientists made an indispendable contribution to this, too. International forcesat all levels - political, diplomatic and public - have already been mobilised to remove this threat. And the first results are evident. But we are now faced by another threat whose seriousness was until recently obviously inadequatley assessed - a threat to life on Earth as a result of despoliation of the environment for habitation. Great minds of the past foresaw the consequences of man's unthinking ``subjugation'' of nature. They issued a warning --- by destroying the plant and animal world and poisoning the soil, water and air, the human race may destroy itself. By the end of the 20th century we have the most acute crisis in relations between man, society and nature. One can assert, to paraphrase Immanuel Kant, that the ecological imperative has powerfully entered the politics of states and the people's everyday life. It is not only because the damage already inflicted upon nature is difficult to putright that this imperative is acquiring an unconditional nature. The new scientific, technical and technological revolution, all the consequences of which we are as yet unaware of, may make this damage irreversible. Unlike certain out-and-out pessimists, we are not fatalists. However, the hour of decision has come, the hour for an historic choice. And for the reasonable person there is no alternative, since he is not predisposed to suicide. Humanity is part of the biosphere, is one with the biosphere. We are providing ourselves with vital resources at the expense of the products of past biospheres. And we must not forget that clean water, oxygen in the air and soil productivity are the result of the inter-action of hundreds of thousands of plant, animal and micro-organic species, the components of the eco-system. The durability of eco-systems and, consequently, the quality of the environment, depends on preserving and maintaining biological diversity and the balance of the biosphere. Your forum said unambiguously that something must be very fundamentally changed in the factors of further progress. Changed in order to guarantee man's original right; the right to life. We agree with that conclusion. I have to admit that it is only recently that the entire and vital significance of the ecological problem has been realised in the Soviet Union at policy level. The threat of war clouded our eyes. There is nothing more to be said about that. But that is not all there is to it. After the revolution, having launched the industrialisation of the country, we were not inclined ``to be distracted'' into what we then thought of as secondary matters and even less to spend our limited means on these objectives. The size of the country and its riches encouraged this carefree attitude to ecology. Even when environmental pollution in a number of areas began to assume dangerous proportions, this was not properly appreciated right away. The ecological alarm was raised - let us give them their due - by our scientists, and then by the public. Perestroyka, having changed the actual philosophical approaches to the problems of social development, has also radically changed our views on ecology. A detailed report on the national ecological situation, the first in the history of the Soviet state, has been published in this country recently. This ``green book'' has provided an impartial analysis in this country recently. This ``Green Book'' has provided animpartial analysis of our misfortunes and dangers. Atmospheric pollution over a number of major cities exceeds the permissible level. The state of water resources is fraught with serious consequences for fauna and flora. Soils are being degraded. Harm is being done to the people's health. The viability of future generations is called into question. In its resolution on ``The main directions of the USSR's domestic and foreign policy,'' the first Congress of People's Deputies predetermined profound reconsideration of our whole development, including our attitudes towards nature, and the path towards the greening of our politics. What do we understand by this? Above all a radical change of the nature of our production activity from the viewpoint of its ecological consequences. We must take into account theecological capacity of the territories when we place economic complexes there. We must compare the possibilities of the ecological systems of individual regions with the appropriate national economic plans and take this into account in demogrpahic regional and national policies. What is involved here is, of course, consistent and stringent application of measures for nature protection, the actual technology used in industry and agriculture, being economical with energy and resources, and introduction of closed- cycle technologies and production plants. The greening of politics is a new view of the problem of consumption and its rationalisation. The raising of people's living standards must not be done at the cost of exhausting nature but should be accompanied by the conservation and renewal of the living conditions of the plant and animal world. The greening of politics also affects approaches to tackling many social tasks connected primarily with damage to people's health as a result of the harmalready done to the environment. The greening of politics means maximum support for scientific research and fundamental disciplines which study the biosphere and its eco-system. The greening of politics is affirmation of the priority of values common to humanity, enriching education and upbringing with ecological content from childhood onwards and developing a new and modern attitude towards nature. At the same time it is the return to mankind of his awareness of himself as a part of nature. The moral improvement of society is inconceivable without this. We have already embarked upon the fundamental restructuring of the whole matter of environmental protection within the country. Target programmes according to region or facility have been endorsed or are in the stages of development. The USSR Supreme Soviet has adopted a resolution ``On urgent measures for the country's ecological improvement.'' Work is coming to an end on a draft long-term state programme of environmental protection and the rational use of natural resources. It envisages gradually attaining normative environmental quality and the conservation of the specific diversity of biological resources and scientifically well-founded indicators for the use of natural wealth, (by the year 2000 in some parameters by 2005). In other words, a tremendous amount of work lies ahead to harmonise the relationship between man and nature. There is a place for everyone in this for legislative and executive bodies, science and education, public organisations and movements and individual initiative. Public organisations for the protection of nature have become widespread in our country. It must be said that they have struck powerful blows against technocratic lack of understanding and resistance in this area, too. Sometimes, it is true, as in other countries, the actions of our ``greens'' suffer from exaggeration. While passionately protecting nature, one must not encroach upon the very life-support systems of the population. To quite simply close down one production facility or another is of course a simplistic thing to do, although we do have to resort even to this as a result of the problem having been neglected. In principle, however, such an indiscriminate approach to the business of saving nature will not produce great results but could cause great harm to the development of society's production forces and consequently to the opportunities for preserving nature at the current level. What is the best solution here? At the basis of the rational distribution of production forces and of energy and other facilities of state-wide importance there must also lie and obligatory requirement of ecological safety with the inclusion of impartial expert scientific advice, if necessary international advice too. I want to speak especially about the growing importance of the monitoring by the USSR Supreme Soviet and the republican and other soviets of the implementation of any programmes to do with the ecological state of society. I would like to draw your attention also to the following point. On the territory of our enormous country there are untouched eco-systems, too. In this connection we ascribe great importance to the creation of national parks and other protected territories. By the year 2000 their area should grow approximately threefold. These are unique natural laboratories, to be found fromthe islands of the Arctic to the Caucasus and Central Asia. They can serve as standards of virgin nature as well as objectives of international co-operation among the ecologists. Ladies and gentlemen, in different countries the ecological situation is shaping up in different ways. Many have some interesting experience of nature protection activity. Our starting point is that any successful experience is worth everybody's attention and practical application. The ecological crisis we are undergoing is convincing, if tragic, proof of the fact that the world is indeed interconnected and interdependent. Nowadays this seems to be accepted everywhere. From this it follows, however, that a corresponding international policy is needed in the sphere of ecology too. Only provided that such a policy exists, only jointly can we stave off a tragedy. Of course, the working out of such a policy raises unusual and tough questions, at times concerning state sovereignty. Still this is a solvable task, but here too on the basis of collective efforts and search for consensus. At your forum many interesting things have been said on how worldwide ecological policy might take form and we shall think about everything that has been said. I want to assure you of this. In principle the Soviet Union is for the energetic and urgent elaboration of an international programme on saving thebiosphere and restoring its living forces. I shall speak about our basic ideas on this matter. First. The Soviet Union resolutely supports the nature protection plans and actions of our worldwide universal UN organisation and its bodies. We want the UN environment and development conference planned for 1992 in Brasilia to be held at summit level. It would probably be right if the matter of drawing up an international code of ecological ethics were raised there. Being binding on all states, this would contain common criteria for a civilised attitude towards nature. Such an undertaking would symbolise readiness on the part of the world community, in the person of its top representatives, to build life in the 21st century according to new laws. The 1992 conference could also adopt a global programme of action on environmental protection and rational use of natural resources. This would embrace defending the Earth's climate, protecting the planet's flora and fauna and preserving biological diversity without which it would be impossible to preserve the regulating properties of the biosphere and consequently of life on Earth itself. Second. The Soviet Union considers it essential to draw up an international law regime for protecting unique natural zones of worldwide importance. This applies above all to Antarctica. The many metres-thick crust of Antarctic ice is an invaluable depository of the Earth's past and its geological and ecological history. Significantly, it was Antarctica that became the world's first nuclear-free zone and the first territory on the planet completely open for international scientific research. The Soviet Union shares the concern of many scientists and public figures over the exploitation of the Antarctic's natural resources. Our grandchildren will not forgive us if we fail to preserve that phenomenal eco-system. The USSR is ready to take part in securing the viability of the Antarctic, a universal nature reserve, our common natural laboratory. There is the problem of the Danube and the Black and Mediterranean Seas; 75% of the pollution flowing into the Black Sea comes from the Danube. The upper limit of the hydrogen sulphide stratum in it has over recent decades risen from a depth of 200m to 75m from the surface. A little more, and it will flow through the entrance to the Bosphorus into the Sea of Marmora and the Aegean and Mediterranean Seas. However, only Bulgaria, Romania, Turkey and the USSR are involved in the BlackSea agreements. Can we resolve the Black Sea problem by cleaning up the Dnepr, Dnestr and Azov alone, without the Danube and without thecountries situated along its course? Can the problems of conserving the Mediterranean Sea be resolved without the Black Sea countries and without the USSR? It is high time for us all to think about this together. And is not mankind's ``ecological heritage'' such as tropical forests and coral reefs in need of universal concern? Or unique natural phenomena such a Baykal? Third. The Soviet Union considers the creation of international machinery fortechnological cooperation on nature conservation to be a matter of some urgency. The integrity of world civilisation demands unity of action in this sphere, too. We are in favour of drawing up a system of international exchanges of ecologically clean technologies to which all countries - without exception - would be guaranteed access on a most-favoured nation basis. Furthermore, we are ready to allow inspection on our territory in order to remove any suspicions regarding the inappropriate use of technology. It is for this reason that I share the concern that was expressed here, namely that there were few representatives of the business world at this meeting in Moscow. This shortcoming must be surmounted at subsequent meetings. And I hope that Dr Hammer will be a connecting link between this present meeting and future ones. We wish him long life. Fourth. The transition to new forms of co-operation worthy of the 21st century places the need to have an international mechanism of ecological monitoring and control on the agenda. Ecological confidence measures today can be backed up by methods, procedures and instruments analogous to those which areapplied in monitoring arms reductions, including on-site inspections. We could start by opening national nature reserves. Fifth. The right to a healthy environment is one of the human rights, but theright for an individual or for a group of people to take part in developing an ecological policy must also be guaranteed. The Soviet Union shares this conclusion of the Sofia ecological conference of states party to the all-European process. It presupposes complete and authentic ecological information. An order is needed whereby each state would, on a regular basis, present reports on its environmental protection activities and on ecological incidents, both those which have taken place and those it was possible to avert. The member countries of the European Community are now actively discussing matters of the organisation and functions of a European environment agency. The Soviet Union supports the idea of setting up an agency and is ready to join in its work right from the start. There are ideas deserving of attention, for example a proposal from Austria to set up international detachments of nature protectors - ``UN green berets''. Perhaps it really would be worth setting up a sort of international `` Green Cross' ' which would come to the aid of states inthe event of ecological disasters. The USSR's proposal to set up a centre for emergency ecological aid is in this vein. We see the main task of the centre to be the setting up of international taskforces of experts who would travel to localities where the ecological situation has got seriously worse. The UN Secretary General will soon be sent a list of Soviet scientists and specialists whom the government of the USSR will be ready to dispatch to the localities at its own expense on instructions from the centre. Sixth - last but not least, so to speak. The Soviet Union considers that the time has come when it is essential to bring about a limitation of military activity not only to decrease the risk of war but also because of the necessity of preserving the environment. The most correct and decisive step here would be a complete ban on nuclear tests. Before your prestigious international forum I once again state the Soviet Union's readiness at any time to end nuclear tests completely and for ever if the USA will also do the same. In connection with the convention on the banning and complete elimination of chemical weapons, which we are hoping will soon be signed, the need is arising for ecologically safe technology to implement this task. Here, too, international co-operation is desirable. For we are faced with destroying tens of thousands of tonnes of this fearful weapon. And in general military activity on land, in the air, on the seas and oceans and even in space must be done with the ecological consequences borne in mind. With this aim we intend to introduce certain limitations with the regard to the flights of military aircraft and the movement of ground forces and of warships. We are also ready for international accords on this subject. Esteemed ladies and gentlemen and friends, it has often happened that one term or another, when it arose, had one meaning, but then with time it gained new content. This has happened with the very term ``ecology'' which, born in the 19th century as a purely scientific concept, has today a more momentous meaning for us. This has happened with the term ``biosphere'', which also appeared in the 19th century. In the works of the great Russian scientist Vladimir Ivanovich Vernadskiy this concept was given a new interpretation. He created the study of the biosphere and brought up the problem of turning the whole environment of human existence into a sphere of the supremacy of reason. In conclusion I want to say to you Everything that was discussed at your forum and its documents are a call for ensuring the triumph of the trinity of scientific knowledge, humanist reason and universal morality. The task is as majestic as it is difficult. I wish all of you and all of us success. [Note According to a Tass report (in English 1840 gmt 19 Jan 90), the forum adopted a declaration urging governments and peoples of the world to face the dangers of the deteriorating ecological situation couragously and accept responsibility for adopting ``spiritually wise, technologically sound, ethical and far-sighted stewardship of the planet''.] SOVIET ECOLOGY 1. "Bitter Winds Blow Through Siberia" by Michael Zimmerman and Peter Riggs, THE CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR, January 11 1989, (1) 2. "Ecology-Soviet Style" by Ron Moxness, THE CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR, November 20, 1974, (1) 3. "Poland to clean up its historic Vistula" by Eric Bourne, THE CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR, August 9, 1978, (1) 4. "Soviets plan rescue of Azov Sea" by Paul Whol, THE CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR, September 13, 1978, (1) 5. "Kremlin decrees vast cleanup of polluted Soviet waterways" by Elizabeth Pond, THE CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR, February 11, 1976, (1) 6. "Environmental Damage Seeps into Central Soviet Union" by Paul Quinn-Judge, THE CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR, July 6, '89 (2) 7. "The winds of Glasnost propel Soviet environmentalists" by Christine L. Westbrook, THE CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR, December 13, 1988, (1) 8. "Soviets revive gigantic plan to water Asain deserts with Siberian rivers" by David K. Wills, THE CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR, October 17, 1980, (1) 9. "Perestoika vs. a growing wasteland" by Jeff Trimble, U.S. NEWS AND WORLD REPORT, December 5, 1988, (1) 10. "Soviets send mixed signals on their concern about environment" by Elizabeth Pond, THE CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR, April 8, 1987, (1) 11. "Soviets rescuing lake they damaged" by David K. Wills, THE CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR, October 19, 1977, (1) 12. "Facts still scarce on nuclear disaster in Soviet Union" by Lloyd Timberlake, THE CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR, January 12, 1977, (1) 13. "The Greening of the U.S.S.R." by Dick Thompson, TIME, January 2, 1989, (2) 14. "Russians begin to battle polloution" by David K. Willis THE CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR, December 23, 1986, (1) 15. "Soviet wildlife in red book of danger" by David K. Willis, THE CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR, May 3, 1982, (1)