Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
in Moscow and 5,000 members within the Federation, has also meant that community-
based environmental protests against massive road developments, river and air
pollution or uncontrolled logging are not unknown. Community-based environmental
organizations in Russia, as elsewhere, are invariably short of funds, but it should
also be noted that the environmental movement did play an important role in under-
mining the Soviet regime in its final years, and any progress towards environmental
justice or 'just sustainability' in the former Soviet Union is often limited by political
and national security as well as economic concerns (Agyeman and Himmelberger,
2009). NGOs are also often consulted by the Russian Government on a formal
level by the WWF, which recently calculated that only 10 per cent of environmental
policy requests, recommendations or orders emanating from the prime minister or
president were actually implemented. For Mol (2009) and Whitehead (2010) the
emphasis on developing Russia's resource sector economy has led to a gradual loss
of strategic control over Russia's natural capital, with a consequent negative impact
on environmental protection. Thus for Whitehead, this
has generated a distinctly hollow feel to the sustainable development commitments
that were made in the early periods of socio-economic transition. These hollow
sustainabilities exemplify socio-environmental commitments that are girded by
impressive policy pronunciations and institutional architectures, but which are
ultimately betrayed in the avarice of economic redevelopment.
(2010: 1631)
However, to understand whether or not sustainability is actually operating as a
heuristic in Russia, it is necessary to go deeper into Russia's culture and her past.
Initially it seemed that sustainable development would overtly become an important
element in the country's transition from socialism following the collapse of the
Soviet Union in 1991. Russia participated actively in the 1992 Rio conference and
a number of important presidential decrees and legislative changes followed (Oldfield,
2001). This was not followed through, however, by the formulation and implemention
of a comprehensive sustainable development planning strategy or construction of
the necessary infrastructure to realize it. There is no policy framework for renew-
able energy technologies in Russia, which means that Russia's renewable energy
development is not yet firmly established (Karghiev, 2006). The sheer geographical
size of Russia, and its topography and diversity, does not make things easier
either for government, NGOs or the grass-roots environmental movement. A sense
that Russia is a special case, a global eco-service provider, resonates loudly with
Russian nationalism and a notion of Russian exceptionalism. There are also massive
contradictions within Russia - a free market economy violently induced by the
neoliberal shock doctrine (Klein, 2008), and a culture of political autocracy and
associated elements of command-and-control economic management. There is also
Russia's powerful scientific, religious and mystical heritage to factor into the equation
or any dialogue of values surrounding the concepts of sustainability and sustain-
able development. The work of Vladimir Ivanovich Vernadsky (1863-1945) on the
biosphere, and particularly the
noosphere
, has Gaia-like connotations associated
in the West with James Lovelock. An underpinning assumption of the noosphere
concept is that humankind is actually incapable of developing a substitute for the
Earth's biota's naturally occurring regulatory mechanisms and must therefore work
