When clean air activist Patti Gora-McRavin visited Russia last fall, she found a surprising connection to the battles she’s fought in eastern Washington, and a new resolve to help save the arctic, and the planet.
By Patti Gora-McRavin
Patti speaking at "Jazzed for Justice" in 2009.
As our plane approached Pulkovo airport in St. Petersburg in early November, it was already dark. I worried whether our ride to the hotel would be there promptly or if we’d be left to fend for ourselves.
At Pulkovo, arriving international passengers must pass through a gate of sorts where the security personnel are visible only from the nose up, giving us the first taste of what “faceless bureaucracy” must mean. My husband tried to joke on his way in that he was choosing a particular path because the lady on that aisle looked sort of friendly. She caught his comment and scowled in response.
Once through the customs gate, we looked for our taxi driver. He held up a scrawled sign and motioned us to follow. We immediately nicknamed him “Igor” for his utterly dour personality. He was scrawny, with bloodshot eyes, clearly a two-pack a day smoker. He looked as though a smile had never crossed his face. He motioned in sign language for us to stay at the curb while he got the car. We slid in, and he careened his way toward the hotel.
Statue along the Neva River, St. Petersburg
We tried to glimpse the first bit of the landscape. It was apparent, even in darkness, that it was pretty stark. Amidst sparkling new car dealerships for luxury cars, we saw monumental statues dating to the siege of Leningrad during World War II when the Germans blockaded the city for nearly 900 days and over a million people died of starvation.
There are no small events memorialized here. The architecture seems to call out the soul of a people who can endure anything, who can undergo any sort of hardship and emerge victorious. These were not people to be trifled with.
I wondered again how I’d gotten here.
My work for the past twenty years has been to clean up air pollution generated from the burning of farm fields. Oddly enough, this work brought me to St. Petersburg from the farming and university community of Pullman, Washington.
I didn’t become a crusading clean air activist by choice. I’d started out as a frightened mother who saw her baby suffering repeated bouts of pneumonia from the burning. When a 21-year-old named Aaron Ditmer from our town died as a result of an acute asthma episode caused by field smoke, I knew I had to work to prevent such an outcome for my own child. In the process, I met so many people who were sickened, hospitalized, or having to abandon their homes in the area because they were regularly sickened by smoke from agricultural burning. These encounters changed me forever and I became committed to working on this problem.
In 1998, my late husband, Jeff and I began to work with Save Our Summers and the Center for Justice to file suit along with seven other plaintiffs to get the state to stop sending deadly plumes over eastern Washington each fall.
Over a quarter million acres were being burned each year. By 1999, we were in Federal Court, using the Americans With Disability Act to assert that field smoke prevented people with lung diseases from using public schools, roads, libraries and other public spaces during the burns.
Support from the Center for Justice was critical to winning that suit. Yet the needed changes occurred only through a harrowing series of settlements, overturning of settlements and re-negotiations that finally created a solution that both farmers and people with lung disease could live with. It involved a new model of cooperation between stakeholders and regulators that metered the amount of smoke put into the air over time and space in such a way that human health would not be compromised.
Over the past ten years of trying to make this agreement work, the state regulators have come to work in good faith and earnestness to protect public health. Karen Wood from the Eastern Regional Office of the Department of Ecology has been a pivotal player in working to implement the new policies in the Air Program Office. In the past year, she has been working with a non-governmental organization called The Clean Air Task Force, based in Washington D.C.
I didn’t become a crusading clean air activist by choice. I’d started out as a frightened mother who saw her baby suffering repeated bouts of pneumonia from the burning.
In the summer of 2010, a perfect storm occurred in Russia. After a devastating drought forced the government to ban wheat exports for the first time, the forests caught fire in an unprecedented way. These forests–part of the great taiga covering the broad reaches of the northern hemisphere–are crucial, as they represent over 20% of the world’s forested lands. Last summer, the smoke from these fires began to impact Moscow in ways that could no longer be ignored. In fact, over 56,000 more people died than normally expected from the impacts of smoke by September 1 of 2010.
The Global Fire monitoring center showed that between 10-12 million hectares (a hectare is approximately 2.5 acres) were burning. To complicate matters, in 2007 Russia adopted a new forest codex, which eliminated the 70,000 workers who used to monitor the forests and were the first line of defense for fires. (This is analagous to a situation in which the US would disband the forest service, and all its workers and fire
Photo courtesy freefoto.com
monitoring equipment.) With no infrastructure to fight fires, they raged out of control.
As you may have heard, even the forests around Chernobyl were at risk, which would have put more radioactive elements into the air. To complicate matters, the Russian government did not disclose the seriousness of the fires to the public.
The connection to eastern Washington is that most of the Russian forest fires were initiated by out-of-control agricultural burns near small villages. In addition to the immediate health effects from the vast plumes of smoke, there are lasting environmental effects as well. Climate experts from both Russia and the U.S. have been able to determine that the arctic ice is melting at a faster rate than expected from mere carbon emissions. The discovery of black carbon deposits on the arctic ice has led researchers to conclude that these deposits contribute to the unexpected rate of heating.
And where do the black carbon deposits come from? Sarah Doherty of the University of Washington is a climate researcher who has used chemical analysis and atmospheric transport data to show that the black carbon deposits come from agricultural burning in the northern villages of Russia, the same burns that are causing the forest fires. While there are plenty of other places in the world on fire at any given time, there is solid evidence that the black carbon which gets to the arctic comes from agricultural burns in northern Russia.
The St. Petersburg meeting sponsored by Bellona and The Clean Air Task Force had the important goal of working to curtail the spring burning of cropland and grassland in northern Russia as a way to slow down the warming of the arctic ice.
Karen Wood led a session on what we’ve learned from our experiences working with regulating agricultural burns in eastern Washington. While our cropping systems and farm equipment are much more advanced than the Russians, we were able to share ideas with our Russian counterparts for starting to change the tide on burns in the small villages.
The meeting brought together climatologists, soil scientists, farmers, and environmental activists to work on this problem. We have a monumental problem to solve. It was only a few years ago, in 1999 that we felt we had a monumental and unsolvable problem with burning in eastern Washington. Perhaps our experience in finding a way through can now help on a planetary level as well.
Dare I say it? It’s a small world, after all. What we do locally seems to resonate now on a planetary level and we are able to see the connections more immediately and clearly.
I hope we have come together in time to help save the arctic. If we can’t, no scientist can predict with any accuracy what will happen globally.
At the gathering in St. Petersburg, I witnessed an outpouring of cooperation and concern like nothing I’d ever seen before. Somehow, by collecting soil and forest scientists, climatologists, Greenpeace activists, U.S. State Department and Russian Government representatives along with American clean air activists and regulators we learned the peril of the present situation. The scientific presentations gave no doubt that we are at about ten minutes to midnight. When the clock strikes, we have no more arctic ice.
I think it was this sense of being some of the few humans on earth who were presented this information in such a compelling way that it made this much clear–we all better work cooperatively or else all is lost.
It seemed to me that each person present felt this shift away from a personal agenda, toward a new frame of reference: We’re all in this together, and we’d better get busy.
This gives me hope even though I realize that hope will not be enough. We must find a way to inspire and speak to the hearts of the Russian souls who have come to the call of their country before. Now, the call will be to save the arctic and perhaps with it, the rest of the earth. One wonders what sort of monument might be erected to commemorate that.
More information about the presentations at the St. Petersburg conference are available here.
