The Ukrainian parliament is still deadlocked over the allocation of committee portfolios as a sequel to the speaker saga. However, the pace of contemporary life nationwide requires prompt lawmaking decisions. The key Verkhovna Rada operators attach priority to the tax, pension, medical, and above all political reform. Under the circumstances, the International Environmental Protection Day passed unnoticed on June 5. Perhaps this was because the Ukrainian parliament is now without the Green Party. The question of who will deal with ecological issues thus becomes relevant.
From the outset, the ecological situation in Ukraine has been accorded minimal political attention. At one time, the Green Party was quite active in this political niche, yet the legislative effort proved insufficient. In four years, according to www.greenparty.ua, they prepared four ecological bills, specifically, On the Report of the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine, Concerning Progress in the Implementation of the Law of Ukraine On the Status and Social Protection of Citizens Affected by the Chornobyl Disaster; On Changes in Certain Legislative Acts of Ukraine, Concerning Measures to Stimulate the Development of Wind Power Engineering in Ukraine; On the Treatment of Animals in Populated Areas; and On the Fundamentals of Ecologically Friendly Business. In other words, this came to one bill a year. Otherwise, the Greens actively lobbied in the spheres of privatization, concert tours, and various appointments within Verkhovna Rada. While their leader Vitaly Kononov demonstrated activity by often taking the floor, other party functionaries, and names figuring in the roster did not even bother to speak from their seats. In other words, there was no systematic effort to change environmental law: rather strange, considering that the ecological policy was proclaimed the Green Party’s priority.
The importance of the issue for Ukraine hardly requires any explaining, but there is no formal evidence of any official steps being or having been made to improve the situation. According to the International Institute of Ecology, Ukraine is among the top ten countries flagrantly violating the right of man to a safe environment. EU officials visiting Kyiv have on more than one occasion pointed to over 300 changes that must be made in our environmental laws. In addition, there must be guarantees that these laws will work. Ukraine can provide no such guarantees at present; instead, it boasts a variety of ecological problems, including the absence of adequate waste management facilities (every citizen annually adds 300 kilograms to the nation’s refuse heap of 20 billion tons), wear and tear of hazardous facilities, and the obscure issue of the nuclear complex. Add here industrial enterprises that have never had elementary waste disposal installations.
Fresh water is also a problem. Naturally, water cannot be pure, considering the condition of all the water resources in this country. Chlorination killing pathogenic bacteria is a traditional way to solve the problem, but the process results in the formation of chloride organic compounds. The European Union, where Ukraine hopes to get, practices ozonization and ultraviolet irradiation.
However, actual protection of the environment will be impossible until the problem becomes a priority in official documents. Ukraine’s bad ecology is explained by a number of factors. While some are variables, three can be safely assumed as underlying simply because they are always present.
1. Material interests. Consuming everything provided by nature is considerably more profitable than returning, restoring, and preserving. Every environmental project calls for heavy spending, meaning that some will lose some profit. This explains the wariness toward ecologists, Greens, and calls for preserving and saving nature. Nobody wants to lose money.
2. Lack of concerted action. The whole environment, the entire biosphere is an extremely sensitive, complex, and inherently indivisible organism. In other words, treating its ills by dividing it into convenient sections is absolutely ineffective. It makes as little sense as saving “at least a part” of the body of a drowning man.
3. Unrealistic financing. Spending money on environmental projects without first blocking the principal channels of pollution is wasteful and hopeless, meaning that standard approaches to ecological problems are doomed from the outset.
Now that Verkhovna Rada is without the Green Party, many predict that the environmental theme will sink into oblivion. In reality, a number of specialists have submitted projects, among them Volodymyr Hoshovsky. He believes that the key principle of the ecological legislation is: “There must be a law proclaiming nature, the environment a subject of the law superior to man.” The legislator is sure that this approach to the problem will help avoid the threat of a manmade disaster in Ukraine. Experts point to over two-thirds of the population living in high artificially caused disaster risk areas. In case of a breakdown at a large facility (like a nuclear power plant, dam, or arterial energy pipeline), tens of millions might suffer, whereupon no one will need any political or tax reform.
