• Montanarvv
• 10 Nov 2024
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Nature protection means painstaking saily efforts

Problems of nature protection in the largest Soviet republic — the Russian Federation — are discussed Nikolai Vasilyev, First Deputy Prime-Minister, and Nikolai Ovsyannikov, Deputy Minister of Land Reclamation and Water Conservancy, who is also chairman of the All-Russian Nature Conservation Society.

From an interview in LITERATURNAYA CAZETA

CORRESPONDENT: What is being done in the field of nature protection in the Russian Federation?
VASILYEV: You cannot separate the efforts of our republic from the consistent, regular nature protection work that is carried out across the country. We all take an integral approach to the utilisation of natural resources.

A great deal has been done in this direction in recent times.

This includes government decisions on rational utilisation and protection of nature in the basins of the Volga and the Ural, Lake Baikal and the Caspian Sea, integrated CMEA biosphere programmes, decrees of the Soviet Union's Supreme Soviet, the Central Committee of the Communist Party and the government on intensification of nature protection and better utilisation of natural resources.

OVSYANNIKOV: In 1971 the Fifth Congress of the All-Russian Nature Conservation Society took place, which was attended by representatives of all the 15 Union republics.

VASILYEV: Our main concern is presently operating industrial enterprises. We aren't worried about the new ones: now no new Soviet industrial enterprise goes into operation until its cleaning installations are ready

OVSYANNIKOV: Control over the operation of cleaning installations has been assigned to the Russian Federation's Ministry of Land Reclamation and Water Conservancy. The state commis sions which accept each new enterprise include representatives of our ministry. We never sign the acceptance certificate if the effluent-cleaning system is not in order. In all cases without exception we enjoy government support.

CORRESPONDENT: Is it profitable to build cleaning installations?

VASILYEV: Profits alone are not our yardstick. Sanitary and hygienic, aesthetic and moral considerations are as important to us.

In some chemical, metallurgical and other plants the filters are extremely complex and expensive. So what should we do? Allow these plants to function without filters? Let direct profits form the criteria? Certainly not.

Nature protection measures cannot be allowed to depend upon momentary profit, though, where possible, it should be derived.

At the Novo-Taghil Cement Plant, in the Urals, the dustcatchers, which recycle cement dust, bring in appreciable profits. More than 4,000 big plants in the Russian Federation are now equipped with filters of various kind, many of them profit earning.

CORRESPONDENT: Which of all the nature protection problems would you single out?

VASILYEV: I should say, that of land. It is a priceless and, at the same time, almost irreplaceable asset. The arable area can be expanded but it is a difficult job. According to estimates, it would take thousands of millions of roubles to open up 10 million hectares of land in rhe Russian Federation's non-black-earth zone.

Since arable land is being encroached on by urban centres and new industrial enterprises, in recent times the attitude to building on it has become more strict. Some requirements for land are overstated. For instance, the designers of the Khabarovsk heat and power plant demanded an area of 800 hectares. Thorough checking revealed that this plant could be located on a much smaller area. We vigorously fight the idea that Russia's expanses are boundless.

OVSYANNIKOV: In spite of the fact that the Soviet Union has one-seventh of the world's agricultural land.

CORRESPONDENT: Does the state of the Russian forest cause any alarm?

VASILYEV: No. Posterity will not be left without forests. In the republic's European part, the forest area is not shrinking, it is already growing. In pre-revolutionary Russia, reforested tracts amounted to only 900,000 hectares over 70 years. Now, annually 750,000 hectares are reforested.

In the Eighth Five-Year Plan period (1966-70) the country cut timber over an area of 10,2 million hectares, but planted trees on an area of 11,2 million hectares.

OVSYANNIKOV: The rational utilisation of natural wealth presupposes strategic thinking, so to speak, the measurement of results in time units much longer than decades. For us, the conservation of nature and the rational utilisation of its resources means, above all, work — painstaking daily efforts.

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