Pollution has never respected frontiers, but there's something new in the air when a member of a Soviet delegation pleads with Americans to help block a new dam that would damage a wilderness valley in Siberia.
"The vocal support of environmentalists from around the world is critical to our efforts to save the valley," said Maria Cherkasova, secretary of the Socio-Ecological Union, one of the Soviets' largest private environmentalist groups.She was a private citizen among the Soviet officials at a meeting in Washington last week of the U.S.-Soviet Joint Committee on Cooperation in the Field of Environmental Protection. She called for a campaign of letters to President Mikhail Gorbachev and other Soviet leaders on behalf of the Katun valley near the Chinese border.
Pollution - domestic and international - is expected to be a lively issue in Washington in the next few months. This week the Senate takes up a clean-air bill that originated with the Bush administration. A similar bill is working its way through the House, and agreement this year is widely expected, though Bush has threatened to veto it if changes in Congress make it cost too much.
Cherkasova's plea was cited by Worldwatch Institute as evidence of new East-West cooperation on the environment. The institute, a non-profit advocacy group, found other examples:
- The Soviet government is already getting advice on more efficient use of energy, which also means less pollution, from the Natural Resources Defense Council in New York and the Rocky Mountain Institute in Colorado.
- Congress has decided to allocate a symbolic $40 million to help the environment in Poland and Hungary
- Volkswagen of West Germany will join with East Germans to make a new, less polluting "Super-Trabbi" to be sold in both countries. The Trabant (Satellite) - familiarly known as the Trabbi - has been the only readily available car in East Germany. The need for something else struck West Germans sharply as more and more of them began to appear on their beloved autobahns, driven by East Germans and spewing thick streams of black from their two-stroke engines.
- Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden will set up an investment company for joint environmental ventures in eastern Europe.
Hilary F. French, author of an article to appear in the March-April edition of "Worldwatch Magazine," also found some cause for concern in the prospect of new relations between East and West. She said environmentalists are worried that the rush to help Eastern Europe's economy could lead to disasters.
"Even in the environmental area, `technology transfer' could do more harm than good if it is simply a way for western companies to find new markets," she wrote.
She suggested that Western companies could try to sell obsolete equipment and emphasize what she called "technological band-aids" rather than root out pollution at the source, as she urges.
In a longer study, called "Clearing the Air: A Global Agenda," she pointed out that pollution comes from both East and West. Norway, for example, "imports" 96 percent of the sulfur that falls on its soil - most of it presumably from the East. But it also "exports" 76 percent of its own emissions.