A Universe of Pollution

From Vilnius to Vladivostok, across more than eight million square miles, a beleaguered environment bears witness to a legacy of irresponsibility. After 70 years development-at-all-cost, the great rivers of the former USSR are open sewers of human and chemical waste; the Black and Caspian Seas are threatened with asphyxiation. Air in more than a hundred cities is at least five times more polluted than Soviet standards allowed, putting millions at risk for respiratory and other diseases. Tons of nuclear waste from icebreakers and submarines lie under Arctic waters. The use of toxic chemicals as a remedy for inefficient farming practices has poisoned the soil.

The will to change, though now overshadowed by economic problems, emerged in1986 with glasnost. That year a group of scientists led a campaign that blocked plans to divert the northward flow of several major rivers south to rice and cotton fields of Central Asia. Soviet environmentalists, or greens, in fact, landed some of the first crippling blows to the Soviet system itself.

Exercise 5. Read the text “A Universe of Pollution” once again and answer the following questions:

Questions:

1. Why has the environment of the former Soviet Union been called beleaguered?

2. How serious was the air pollution after 70 years development-at-all-cost?

3. Where are tons of nuclear waste from icebreakers and submarines?

4. What has happened to the soil after the use of toxic chemicals?

5. Why were the plans of diverting some rivers to the south blocked in 1986?

Exercise 6. Match the following texts with the pictures given below:

A B.

C. D.

E .

G.

F .

Text 1. With forests of oil rigs in their backyards, the children of suburban Baku in Azerbaijan have learned to enjoy the viscous pools of runoff from the dilapidated and leaky pumps. Adults worry about fire hazards. Once the U.S.S.R.’s major source of oil, Azerbaijan’s oil fields fell into decrepitude after the Soviets began exploiting their great Siberian deposits in the 1960s. Like all Soviet successor states, Azerbaijan has been left holding a bag of environmental horrors.

Text 2. Exhausted after a day’s exposure to dust, masked workers breathe deeply while leaving the giant cement plant at Kunda. Though one of Estonia’s most polluted towns, Kunda is a safe haven compared with Chelyabinsk, a Russian city where area residents are undergoing lung and other diagnostic tests (right). Unknown to them, a nearby lake and river were used for years as dumps by a weapons plutonium plant. The lake shrank in a 1967 drought, and thousands of people were exposed to wind-borne radioactive dust.

Text 3. Blighting the lush forests of Russian Lapland, broad belts of pine and birch succumbed to acid rain, then to wildfires. Some of the survivors bear foresters’ identifying markers. Among the polluters: a nickel smeltery in nearby Monchegorsk. In the great forests of the Far East, where decades of clear-cutting have already left scars, foreign timber companies are moving in — a cause for concern to environmentalists.

Text 4. Where fish swam, camels now tread over the floor of the Aral Sea. Once a striking body of blue on the world globe, the bountiful lake has shrunk to half its former size and is now two shallow lakes far from the old shores. Diverting vast amounts of water from the lake’s two feeder rivers for the irrigation of cotton and rice. Soviet planners ignored the predictable consequences to achieve short-term production goals.

Text 5. In the oil fields of Baku, Azerbaijan, explosions and fires are so routine that observers simply shake their heads and go about their business.

Text 6. Model ghost town, the city of Prypyat — built for Chornobyl personnel — was evacuated two days after the explosion. The previous day residents were sunning themselves along the Prypyat River, even nearer to the ruptured power plant (background). Elsewhere in the 20-mile-radius evacuation zone, police have their hands full pursuing vagrants who invade the homes in some 75 deserted villages.

Text 7. “Bouquet of Magnitka,” the inhabitants of Magnitogorsk call it, the noxious smoke from their economic life-support system – the world’s largest steel mill. The city of 435,000 was born on the Ural River in 1929 with Joseph Stalin’s first Five-Year Plan and soon became a showcase for the Soviets’ industrial revolution. Today, still using some of its old furnaces, the complex employs 50,000 workers to produce 12 million tons of steel yearly. In contrast, a state-of-the-art mill like the U. S. Steel plant in Gary, Indiana, produces seven million tons with only 7,500 workers. As with all Soviet steelworks, gas and dust filters for the smokestacks here are often missing or inoperative. A third of the city’s inhabitants suffer from respiratory ailments, including asthma and chronic bronchitis.