Valery Dranchuk: Pushcha eaters and Pushcha choppers hiding behind declarations
Alexander Baichun, "Svoboda" (Liberty Life Radio), January 13, 2009
This week’s social news editor for Svoboda is Valery Dranchuk, one of the leaders of the Belarusian environmentalist movement and head of the Social initiative "TERRA Convention"
Today, on the Old New Year’s Eve, Valery Dranchuk named the Council of Europe’s suspending the European Diploma for Belovezhskaya Pushcha “the event of the year 2008.” He said he was going to live the year 2009 under the sign of… the bison. The Belovezhskaya Pushcha bison.
– Just to give you some background, Pushcha is Belarus’ strict wilderness area with a honorary status of World Heritage Site and since 1997, a prestigious Council of Europe Diploma, Valery says.
Unfortunately, idiocy and desertification have not spared this marvelous land. Surprising and paradoxical as it may sound, its current state is depressing. Pushcha has been left without water and its ecosystems have been severely undermined despite a high margin of safety and a robust potential.
Here is that dear landscape provided with every safeguard, or so it would seem to be. It would, but it is not, as we can see.
And yet, one good thing happened recently – hope for salvation and a better day for Pushcha appeared, still faint but real and tangible enough. And that hope is immediately related to the suspension of that same award for Belovezhskaya Pushcha. Last summer, Council of Europe experts did not confirm the special diploma for a third term as easily as they had, before, taking a more suspicious, principled and critical approach instead.
The national park and the presidential administration of affairs have been set a condition that they have to produce the management plan, the goals and the future vision. It is now time for them to make their choice, whether to cut down and sell Pushcha, or heal and protect it. The diplomatic decision is not only a good example of a Western organization’s local action on the Belarusian regime’s red tape, but a result of many years of appeals by the Belarusian independent public to the Diploma founders to take sanctions to save the nation’s titular nature reserve.
What we get as a result of that is the Pushcha Management Plan. It is a fact one cannot deny, because the Plan reads: “renovation of ecosystems”. Is that not the first official admission that these have been seriously affected by many years of abuse? And now, in pursuance of a condition set by the Council of Europe and the principles of the Aarhus convention on public participation in environmental decision-making, this Plan must be published and publicly discussed.
It is critical that both the Plan and the academy scientists’ declared visions for the Great Forest that span decades, not turn out to be more government bluff and deception; that these grand declarations not conceal Pushcha eaters and Pushcha choppers of every caliber – both those who have established themselves in Pushcha and those occupying the offices at the presidential property management department. The latter are the managers of the park and they are the ones who are responsible for the dear landscape of Belovezhskaya Pushcha, no matter how vast its area.
That is the most important that can be said about our Great Forest, Belovezhskaya Pushcha, and its nationwide defense.
Happy Old New Year! Happy Year of the Bison!
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