Death by suffocation Oleg Lystopad for Novaya gazeta, Kyiv, Ukraine 10 December 2008 (abridged translation)


MPC defines the maximum permis- sible concentration of a contami- nant. This is the level of pollutant concentration in the environment – the air for example – which in ex- cessive quantities can easily damage people’s health. Very often these lev- els exceed the norms several times over in Donetsk Oblast.


Some people might say: “Hey, that’s not the issue!” During the economic crisis we should care about the work of the enterprises, and later on we’ll take care of the environment. How- ever, there is no “later”. We need to think about that all the time, as the crisis will be over but health is fragile and life is short (and terribly short to be honest, as the average life expec- tancy for men in Donetsk is 53 years). Significant improvements in environ- mental protection would take years, if not decades. So the sooner we start – the sooner we will get there.


Donetsk is the administrative centre of the Donetsk Oblast, the big indus- trial, scientific and technical centre of Ukraine. It is located on the river Kalmius in the steppe zone in the south-eastern part of the country. At the beginning of the 1990s the population was 1.1 million people. Now the city is on the verge of losing


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its million-residents status. Further- more migration into the cities jeop- ardises the rural economy making survival even more difficult.


Hand out the gas masks! Had paganism survived in Ukraine, then Donetsk residents would most- ly respect Stribog, the god of wind. Strong, predominantly eastern or south-eastern winds are one of the factors that save industrial Donetsk from smog. According to data from the Ministry of the Environment of Ukraine, Donetsk is really in danger of suffocation: over the last 20 years there has been a steady increase in the MPC for dust, nitrogen oxide, for- maldehyde and benzopyrene. Accord- ing to the calculations of Vladimir Berezin, a member of the Bakhmat Environmental and Cultural Centre the level of harmful emissions ex- ceeds 1 kg per resident every day.


The barrows are asleep but not the coal tips Residents of Donetsk joke sadly: “Considering the environmental conditions here, we all live like coal miners. But how can we describe the conditions for coal miners then?”


The product of the coal miner’s work is not just coal, but coal tips too,


heaps of waste rock. On the terri- tory of Donetsk there are more than 100 coal tips, and over 60,000 in the Oblast. There are small, medium- sized and huge coal tips. In all they occupy 5,000 hectares, or 0.2 per cent of the Oblast’s total land surface.


The oldest tips, dating from the days when Donetsk was called Yuzovka, are covered by trees and bushes. The second group were extinguished re- cently and now adorn the scenery with their gray humps. And finally, the last group of the monsters are the most harmful ones. They are burn- ing and polluting the environment all day long with poisonous gases.


When a coal tip has cooled down (and this will happen in 20 to 30 years’ time if we are lucky), it will still pollute, covering everything with dust. Smart Alecs will imme- diately say: “Plant it with trees and the problem will be solved”. Yes, but there is a small problem: the tip is cone-shaped as that was more con- venient. So now we have to find something that will grow on such a steep slope, and more particularly on such poor soil!


A small green spot However, the scientists of the


Donetsk Botanical Garden did man- age to identify such plants. Indeed this institution is well known in Ukraine, and abroad, for its collec- tions of steppe plants, exotic species, etc., and the work of its scientists, which concentrates on plant survival in industrial zones. However, over the last few years miserable budget- ing has left no opportunity for doing this work effectively.


The Garden, part of the National Academy of Science of Ukraine, was established in 1964. In 2001 its Steppes of Ukraine collection was designated part of the national her- itage of Ukraine. The Garden’s col- lections include 97 species on the IUCN Red List. More than 30,000 people visit it annually.


However, all that was virtu- ally ignored when on 1 July 2002 Ukraine’s Cabinet decided to with- draw 147 hectares of land from its ownership. After an intense, protracted battle in the courts, the general public managed to return this area of land to the Garden, which promptly lost a further 59 hectares of the reserve’s land (by law the Garden belongs to the State Nature Reserve Fund), this time to a private investor.


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