IGOR KOSTIN IMAGO-SYGMA

Chernobyl did have a tremendous impact on my thinking about the environment and nuclear weapons. But my understanding of the importance of the natural environment came much earlier. I am of peasant stock, and as a young man I worked on a collective farm in Stavropol. A large part of my life was spent on the land. I saw the effects of such problems as soil erosion, the spread of the deserts, and air and water pollution. I saw that man's intrusions in nature were often imprudent and harmful to man himself. Acting as the master and even king of nature, man gave no thought to the consequences. But the consequences came without fail--at once or a little later.

When I came to Moscow in the late 1970s, I learned even more. As a secretary of the Central Committee and member of the Supreme Soviet working for the natural resources commission, I saw how hasty construction and wasteful operation of huge irrigation systems blighted the Central Asian region, destroying the Aral Sea and depleting the rivers Syr Darya and Amu Darya. In Russia, hydroelectric projects built with little thought for their consequences flooded millions of hectares of fertile land. A similarly careless approach to locating industrial projects jeopardized Lake Baikal, the world's largest body of freshwater.

Alas, man does not always learn from his mistakes. I was involved in the debate over redirecting the waters of Russia's northern rivers to the south.

Our reform policies--perestroika--gave scientists and activists a chance to challenge this project and show that it would not work. That put a stop to it.

And then came the thunder of Chernobyl. During that accident's first days, many scientists--even some respected ones--argued that it was "no big deal," that we would get by. From day one, however, it was our policy to get to the bottom of it. We decided that people must know the truth. The power of the atom had gone out of control, and it took the nation's supreme effort to cope with it. It was a watershed in our understanding of many things.

The new era of glasnost and free speech brought people's concerns out into the open. Protests led to the emergence of a grass-roots environmental movement, which made us review a number of decisions taken previously--not just on constructing new nuclear power plants but also on other projects that threatened the environment. In the late 1980s, the reformist government agreed to close hundreds of industrial facilities, despite the impact on the economy. When I came to the United Nations in October 1988, I brought a package of environmental initiatives. One of them called for creating a global non-governmental organization to help save the environment. Named the International Green Cross, at my suggestion, it is based near Geneva and has affiliates in dozens of countries. Our main goal is to help set in motion a value shift in people's minds. Our environmental education programs, in cooperation with the U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization and several governments, aim at helping people understand a simple truth: man is not the master of nature but just a part of it. After all, the environment has existed for billions of years without man and could, in extremis, do so again. So this is the challenge: we need environmentally sustainable development if new generations are to succeed us on earth.

Modern civilization has given decent living standards to people in advanced Western nations. But how do we assure economic well-being and human dignity for the rest of mankind without ruining the environment? This problem has no purely technological solution. A political and moral choice will have to be made.

Green Cross organizations are developing specific programs of "environmental healing." Among the most important is Legacy, an educational project that addresses the environmental consequences of the cold war, including the discharge of toxic wastes by military bases and the stockpiling of chemical weapons. Another research initiative concerns a problem at the intersections of ecology, economy and politics: the issue of freshwater. We recently brought to Geneva a group of water experts, many of whom predicted that this diminishing resource may ignite some of the next century's most dangerous conflicts.

The Green Cross is off to a good start, but the more I think about it, the more I realize that we are just at the beginning of the road. Last March I attended a conference in Rio de Janeiro that took stock of what has happened in the five years since the Earth Summit. There is very little to cheer. Governments are in no hurry to implement even the modest pledges made in 1992, even though the time we have to transform our way of living is quickly shrinking. Still, I remain an optimist. I reject defeatism and frustration. But I also reject the view that things will somehow work themselves out. I am convinced that mankind can meet the environmental challenge if all of us join this cause, if all of us act. ----Translated by Pavel Palazchenko