Well, here we are
Well, here we are: "On April 6, the State Duma passed in the first reading a bill from the Russian government that introduces amendments to the Urban Planning Code, laws on specially protected natural areas, environmental impact assessment, protection of Lake Baikal, and six other legislative acts. It was developed as part of the government's anti-crisis project approved in March 2022. Environmentalists and some deputies are concerned: the project could harm Russia's protected natural areas and needs revision."
The gist of the anti-crisis project is as follows. I quote greenpeace.ru: "If the bill is passed, construction without environmental impact assessment will become possible in nature reserves, national parks, and federal sanctuaries; on the Baikal natural territory, logging will be allowed not only for expanding the infrastructure of BAM and the Trans-Siberian Railway (a law on this was passed back in 2020), but also for building any infrastructure, including municipal-level — this could be anything, since the bill lacks specifics. Regional natural areas will also suffer — any plots can be cut out of their boundaries for construction."
It's easy to pull off any outrage under the radar when people's main attention is distracted by other topics. If earlier such laws weren't passed in such a short time and theoretically you could gather petitions (or at least try to do something — there was at least time), now any obscurantism is easily justified by the crisis, the virus, the special operation, etc. How are these two things — the crisis and nature reserves — directly connected?
If it's even possible to influence the situation at all (I don't believe that the people have any real influence in any country in the world), you could have done so before April 14 at 4:00 PM — that was the deadline for submitting amendments. Now it's too late — all decisions have been made.
Time to get ready for life in the new reality. When, for example, you go to the Fisht reserve, Altai, Baikal, Kamchatka, and instead of mountains and nature you see a block of residential buildings with some guys with armed security, who can afford to live on what was once protected land. And instead of nature, you get the city you came from. If they even let you in at all.
And what about a factory, a plant, industry? Forests will be cut down, endemic species will die, nature will begin to lose its beauty — and this is the whim of a certain handful of people who shoved this initiative into a certain place where it was heard and adopted.
This is the world we live in, alas. We need to get used to the new realities and keep living on. Humanity has never been particularly rational and has always done outright nonsense, in every era. Millennia have passed, and we were savages then and remain savages now. Society has always been arranged the same way, on the principle of dominance — might makes right. Primates live by a similar script.
One thing consoles me: Russia is a big country, and if you want, you can discover new reserves for yourself. Eventually, influential assholes will get to them too and shit all over everything that's valuable and sacred to you.
Arthur O'Harra.