E D I T O R I A L S

Heavily-polluting factories on Russia's Lake Baikal

as far as Russia's environment is concerned, has been a disaster. Yet still, the idea that the economic collapse is a longterm blessing for Russia's environment is one that most ecologists reject, opting instead for the theory that greater economic growth provides the resources necessary to clean up the mess that same economic growth has triggered.

According to Mark Borozin, the editor of Green World, Russia's largest environmental newspaper, the contraction has been a two-edged sword. "For fifteen years, no-one has invested," he says, in maintenance and pollution control equipment: factories that are producing are doing so more dirtily, and are more prone to cut corners in following environmental

laws. "So there has not been a sharp improvement in the environmental situation from the fact that factories are standing idle," he says. "There is some improvement; but by 10 per cent, by 12 per cent."

Christopher Thies, International Coordinator of Greenpeace's forest campaign, also says that the crisis is dangerous. It has led to a substantial drop in timber exploitation in Russia; but in the economical cut-throat conditions which prevail, long-term considerations of sustainability often lose out to extractive exploitation. "Over-consumption causes major global environmental problems, but an economic crisis is equally risky: everything is being produced at the

cheapest possible level."

What's more, the crisis has had a wider effect on the government and its capacity to control. The State has not simply withdrawn from supporting producers: it has often, in effect, withdrawn from regulating them as well. In areas where there are few sources of employment and revenue, and where police and politics are often corrupted, there are serious problems in enforcing the environmental laws that do exist. Instead of the State sponsoring the destruction of the environment, it is allowing uncontrolled exploitation.

In the dwindling ancient forests of Karelia, the Federal Forest Service, responsible for the protection, rehabilitation and use of Russian forests, has engaged in large-scale logging activities under the cover of "sanitary cuttings". According to Greenpeace, the Service is "directly dependent on timber exploitation for maintaining its funding, and appears to be the major logging company in the country."

So the crisis may be something of a mixed blessing for Russia's environment. But the fact remains: the reversal of economic growth has provided much needed relief - even i f the citizens of Russia are too busy surviving to appreciate it. And when economic growth begins again, it is likely to be doubly harmful, particularly in a country that harbours 22 per cent of the world's remaining forest cover.• Stephen Carter graduated from Cambridge University in 1997, and has been working in Moscow as a journalist and news radio producer.

A Big Bang for Accountable Science By John Pap worth

The much-hyped Cassini spacecraft, designed to travel to Saturn, where it will orbit the planet for four years collecting scientific data, was set to re-enter the Earth's orbit in August of this year. The project attracted enormous controversy, and became a symbol of what many perceived to be the latest manifestation of the arrogance of science. Had there been an accident - and there have already been at least nine involving similar craft - Cassini would have released 400,000 curies of radioactive plutonium into the atmosphere. [See The Ecologist Vol.27 No.6]

Cassini was scheduled to come within 312 miles of the Earth in the course of its re-routing to Saturn at a speed of 42,000mph. It was put on course with

accuracy, which is just as well. A failure to do so would have caused it to enter the Earth's atmosphere and burn up, prompting the release of 15 to 20 pounds of lethal plutonium dust. This in turn would have caused lingering, painful, lung cancer deaths to many thousands of people over the next half century.

and we are assured that prior warnings were little more than Luddite rumblings. Perhaps we should organise special festive days of rejoicing when these mishaps don't happen, before bringing their perpetrators before an international court for even presuming to put so many human lives at such risk.

"The bottom line", according to US Space Command, in its 1998 document Vision for 2020 "is that every credible vision (sic!) for economic prosperity and military effectiveness by 2020 depends on space-based capabilities."

The US space programme is constantly being expanded even though the technology involved is so complex and dependent on such a vast range of factors as to make mishaps a statistical inevitability. And yet, still when disaster is avoided business continues as usual,

In the words of John Gofman, himself a nuclear physicist, "The use of plutonium in space is a manifestation of organised insanity." And it would seem madness is but a breeding ground for greater madness, for its latest manifestation is an awesomely preposterous proposal - wait for it - to activate a nuclear accelerator designed to replicate the Big Bang.

The project, known as 'Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider' (RHIC) is the baby of one of the US Government's foremost

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research bodies, the Brookhaven National Laboratories (BNL), which has spent eight years building it. A recent test firing was described as "successful" and the first nuclear collisions are planned to take place before the end of 1999.

A team of physicists is even now investigating whether the project could go disastrously wrong. Whatever damage it wreaks, it is a project involving Wellsian magnitudes of forces deliberately set in motion by men whose professed aim is to obtain "information".

The experimental test firing involves a beaming of particles around the giant machine, whilst inside the Collider, atoms of gold are stripped of their outer electrons and pumped into one of two 2.4-mile circular tubes. Powerful magnets will then accelerate them to 99.9 per cent of the speed of light. The ions in the two tubes will travel in opposite directions to increase the power of the consequent collisions.

Inevitably, as planned, they will smash into each other at one of the intersections between the tubes; in doing this, they will generate minuscule fireballs of supreme matter with temperatures of about a trillion degrees, i.e. 10,000 times

Perhaps we should organise special festive days of rejoicing when these mishaps don 9t happen, before bringing their perpetrators before an international court for even presuming to put so many human lives at such risL hotter than the sun. Some of the fears being expressed by some more responsible members of the scientific fraternity carry their own warnings. All agree that the risks of a colossal disaster are tiny and extremely remote, but this does not mean they are not there.

The machine is the most powerful ever to have been made; it may have the power to create 'strangelets' - a new type of matter comprised of sub-atomic particles called 'strange quarks'. Once formed, there is a possibility that these 'strangelets' might spark off an uncontrollable chain reaction that could transform anything they touch into even more mysterious forms of matter.

Following warnings of these possibilities, and of others suggesting there might ensue a new 'black hole' or a general disruption of the galaxy, one of the

Whoops

directors of RHIC has set up a special committee of physicists to review the possibilities of an unforeseen disaster. They will no doubt report that worst scenario possibilities are astronomically improbable, but one does not need to be a qualified physicist to see that the entire project is a gigantic stride into the unknown, and that consequences may ensue which are quite beyond the mindframe of those who have caused them to comprehend or envisage. This, after all, has been a bleak undercurrent of almost all scientific development in the modern era.

What scientific expert promoting artificial fertilisers foresaw their disastrous effects on soil structure? Or on the weakened disease-immunity systems of the crops? Or the effects on human health? Penicillin and other wonder drugs were going to abolish some of humankind's disease scourges: all they have done is to promote the emergence of far more powerful disease forms which are resistant to the strongest antidotes science can contrive. The same blind pride is observable with the sedulous promotion of genetically engineered life forms. In every case, the mind-frame of the originators is focused on short-term or immediate benefits regardless of wider or longer-term consequences.

It might be thought that a project of an importance greater than that of any other single issue in the realm of public affairs would be embarked upon only after extensive open debate and, given the disastrous global consequences of any mishap, after some kind of general consensus had been reached in favour of proceeding. In fact, the entire space pro­

ject, despite the incredibly vast sums of public money involved (the Cassini space rocket project alone is estimated to have cost approximately $4 billion), has been shrouded in secrecy from the outset.

The ultimate purpose of this exercise, we are assured, is to defend freedom and democracy. But what means are being employed to justify what ends? Those engineering this project could scarcely show greater contempt for the democratic ideal as they work night and day in ways which negate its practice en route to destroying it. One authority has suggested the cost of this exercise requires "an expenditure roughly equivalent to crashing one stealth bomber a week for an indefinite period." But money is a token of resources employed, and one wonders, i f all the expertise and brainpower devoted to it were focused instead on making our planet more habitable and even more enjoyable, what sort of heritage we might create for our posterity. As things are going, it will be little short of a miracle i f we are destined to have any posterity at all; far from improving life, we are seeing life itself put under increasing threat to exist.

We are assured that the project is equipped with all the latest and most sophisticated safety devices, that the risks of danger are so infinitesimal as to be hardly worth bothering about, and that in the event of any malfunctioning there are enough operative safety measures on board to correct the consequences without harm to anyone. We could do worse than recall that the same lavish assurances were showered on the Titanic.•

John Papworth is Editor of Fourth World Review.

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