Communist Pollution

U.S. industry is often painted as the chief villain by conservationists, but pollution is hardly unique to capitalist nations. It is often worse in Communist countries, where technocrats toil to boost industrial production with little thought to environmental consequences.

In Russia, a huge chemical plant was built right beside a beloved tourist attraction: Yasnaya Polyana, Leo Tolstoy's gracious country estate. Unmonitored fumes are poisoning Tolstoy's forests of oak and pine, and powerless conservationists can only wince. With equal indifference, the Soviet pulp and paper industry has settled on the shores of Lake Baikal. No matter how fully the effluents are treated, they still defile the world's purest waters.

The level of the Caspian Sea has dropped 81 ft. since 1929, mainly because dams and irrigation projects along the Volga and Ural rivers divert incoming water. As a result, Russia's caviar output has decreased; one-third of the sturgeons' spawning grounds are high and dry. Meanwhile, most municipalities lack adequate sewage treatment plants, carbon monoxide chokes the plateau towns of Armenia, and smog shrouds the metallurgical centers of Magnitogorsk, Alma-Ata and Chelyabinsk.

Capitalist Garbage. Despite all this, Communist countries have a few environmental advantages over Western nations. For one, they give a relatively low priority to consumer goods. The

Russians, for example, have few cars, scarcely any leaded gasoline and nothing like the plethora of disposable diapers, plastic containers and nonreturnable bottles that clog capitalist garbage cans. Paradoxically, Communist regimes also can--at least in theory--cure by fiat the very environmental ills they cause by runaway industrialization.

To sample Communism's environmental efforts, TIME Correspondent Burton Pines recently visited Poland's most polluted region: Upper Silesia, a mineral-rich and heavily industrialized area near the Czech border. In 1965, the provincial government decided that unless it strengthened its 15-year-old environmental control program, Upper Silesia was headed for ecological ruin. As a result of ensuing reforms, one environmentalist told Pines, "I think we started fighting pollution in time."

At first glance, such optimism seems premature. Upper Silesia is still blighted by strip mines and slag heaps. Its rivers remain gutters carrying the wastes of 4,000 factories. The veil of soot and gases is so thick in some areas that only 60% of normal sunshine ever reaches the ground.

But Pines also saw signs of progress. In Upper Silesia's grimy cities--Katowice, Swietochlowice, Chorzow--bulldozers are pushing slag heaps into craters caused by crumbling mines. Carefully planned parks and green belts are starting to sprout on the reclaimed land. Government officials now demand attention to "the human element" in all new projects--less noise, better designed apartments, conveniently located cultural facilities. More important, the causes of pollution are slowly being controlled. In the past four years, 14% of the mining and power industries' capital investment went for environmental safeguards. Compulsory filters in factory stacks have cut air pollution by 25%.

Hard Questions. Even so, Upper Silesia's environmentalists find their task difficult. "The managers of industry do not like us," says Professor Tadeusz Ziel-inski, a planning commissioner who sits on central boards to oversee industrial decisions. "We ask them hard questions: At what cost to society have you fulfilled your goals? How dirty have you made the air and water? How many people have you concentrated together?"

New laws spell out high fines and long jail sentences for plant managers who cause pollution. Results are slow. If all goes according to official plan, by 1985 Upper Silesia may have removed the slag heaps and repurified most of its rivers. But sulphur-dioxide emissions from smokestacks remain an unsolved problem--one that still confronts all industrialized nations.

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