Ken Hanly:
> By the way I have never really understood completely the virtues of
>biodiversity.
It is really quite simple. Biodiversity affects us as well. For example,
the Amazon rainforest that you describe as being of little interest to you
personally is a haven for all sorts of herbs that have medicinal value.
During the 19th century one of the main source of revenue for the Brazilian
republic was medicinal herbs that grew in the rainforest. For more
information on this, I recommend that you look at "Fate of the Forest" by
Alex Cockburn and Susanna Hecht. It is in the interest of humanity to
protect such areas. Do we save the rainforest for possible medicinal value
and as a carbon sink to counteract global warming? Or do we allow
multinational corporations to turn its trees into lawn furniture or pulp
for newspaper ads as is the case today?
We should also remind ourselves that the infant Soviet republic was
dedicated to preserving biodiversity.
The Communist Party issued a decree "On Land" in 1918. It declared all
forests, waters, and minerals to be the property of the state, a
prerequisite to rational use. When the journal "Forests of the Republic"
complained that trees were being chopped down wantonly, the Soviet
government issued a stern decree "On Forests" at a meeting chaired by Lenin
in May of 1918. From then on, forests would be divided into an exploitable
sector and a protected one. The purpose of the protected zones would
specifically be to control erosion, protect water basins and the
"preservation of monuments of nature.
What's surprising is that the Soviet government was just as protective of
game animals as the forests, this despite the revenue-earning possibilities
of fur. The decree "On Hunting Seasons and the Right to Possess Hunting
Weapons" was approved by Lenin in May 1919. It banned the hunting of moose
and wild goats and brought the open seasons in spring and summer to an end.
These were some of the main demands of the conservationists prior to the
revolution and the Communists satisfied them completely. The rules over
hunting were considered so important to Lenin that he took time out from
deliberations over how to stop the White Armies in order to meet with the
agronomist Podiapolski.
Podialpolski urged the creation of "zapovedniki", roughly translatable as
"nature preserves." Russian conservationists had pressed this long before
the revolution. In such places, there would be no shooting, clearing,
harvesting, mowing, sowing or even the gathering of fruit. The argument was
that nature must be left alone. These were not even intended to be tourist
meccas. They were intended as ecological havens where all species, flora
and fauna would maintain the "natural equilibrium [that] is a crucial
factor in the life of nature."
Podiapolski recalls the outcome of the meeting with Lenin:
"Having asked me some questions about the military and political situation
in the Astrakhan' region, Vladimir Ilich expressed his approval for all of
our initiatives and in particular the one concerning the project for the
zapovednik. He stated that the cause of conservation was important not only
for the Astrakhan krai [does anybody know what this means?], but for the
whole republic as well."
Podiapolski sat down and drafted a resolution that eventually was approved
by the Soviet government in September 1921 with the title "On the
Protection of Nature, Gardens, and Parks." A commission was established to
oversee implementation of the new laws. It included a
geographer-anthropologist, a mineralogist, two zoologists, an ecologist.
Heading it was Vagran Ter-Oganesov, a Bolshevik astronomer who enjoyed
great prestige.
The commission first established a forest zapovednik in Astrakhan,
according to Podiapolski's desires Next it created the Ilmenski zapovednik,
a region which included precious minerals. Despite this, the Soviet
government thought that Miass deposits located there were much more
valuable for what they could teach scientists about geological processes.
Scientific understanding took priority over the accumulation of capital.
The proposal was endorsed by Lenin himself who thought that pure scientific
research had to be encouraged. And this was at a time when the Soviet Union
was desperate for foreign currency.
After Lenin's death, there were all sorts of pressures on the Soviet Union
to adapt to the norms of the capitalist system that surrounded and hounded
it and produce for profit rather than human need. This would have included
measures to remove the protected status of the zapovedniki. Surprisingly,
the Soviet agencies responsible for them withstood such pressures and even
extended their acreage through the 1920s.
One of the crown jewels was the Askania-Nova zapovednik in the Ukranian
steppes. The scientists in charge successfully resisted repeated bids by
local commissars to extend agriculture into the area through the end of the
1920s. Scientists still enjoyed a lot of prestige in the Soviet republic,
despite a growing move to make science cost-justify itself. Although pure
science would eventually be considered "bourgeois", the way it was in the
Chinese Cultural Revolution, it could stand on its own for the time being.
The head administrator of Askania-Nova was Vladimir Stanchinksi, a
biologist who sought to make the study of ecology an exact science through
the use of quantitative methods, including mathematics and statistics. He
identified with scientists in the West who had been studying predator-prey
and parasite-host relationships with laws drawn from physics and chemistry.
(In this he was actually displaying an affinity with Karl Marx, who also
devoted a number of years to the study of agriculture using the latest
theoretical breakthroughs in the physical sciences and agronomy. Marx's
study led him to believe that capitalist agriculture is detrimental to
sound agricultural practices.)
Stanchinski adopted a novel approach to ecology. He thought that "the
quantity of living matter in the biosphere is directly dependent on the
amount of solar energy that is transformed by autotrophic plants." Such
plants were the "economic base of the living world." He invoked the Second
Law of Thermodynamics to explain the variations in mass between flora and
fauna at the top, middle and bottom of the biosphere. Energy was lost as
each rung in the ladder was scaled, since more and more work was necessary
to procure food.
This is the tradition I believe socialists need to reclaim, not finding
excuses for timber companies and cattle ranchers.
Louis Proyect
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