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Can a study cruise and a noble scrap of paper save the Black Sea?

Neal Ascherson
Saturday 27 September 1997 23:02 BST
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A Huge Greek ship is steaming slowly round the Black Sea. Its cargo is not oil or wheat, golden fleeces or Trojan horses. The E. Venizelos, a 38,000-ton ferry from Crete, is loaded with intellectuals.

There are marine biologists, ecologists, historians, philosophers. There are environmental bureaucrats from all over the world, including Ms Ritt Bjerregaard, European Commissioner for the Environment. There are scientists from every continent, and there are men and women of religion, above all, from the world of Orthodox Christianity. At each port, more bearded Patriarchs come on board with their retinues. At the debates, the front rows are dominated by their tall smokestack head-dresses,

This voyage is a "Symposium" on religion, science and the environment. Its subtitle is "The Black Sea in Crisis" . Two years ago, another cargo of the wise and the holy travelled around the Aegean Sea in homage to St John the Divine and his Book of Revelation. The proposition was that a new Apocalypse now faced the human race and its spiritual leaders - the destruction of the natural environment. This time, the second Symposium is applying its Apocalypse vision to a practical and urgent problem: the deadly sickness of the Black Sea.

Its ecosystem is collapsing. Since the Eighties, the fish stocks have withered away almost - with some species - to nothing. Reckless overfishing is partly responsible. But so is the pollution that comes from the great rivers - above all the Danube, which delivers the backdoor industrial effluent of Germany and Austria. This has led to the plague called "eutrophication": an excess of nutrients in the water, especially from chemical fertilisers, which chokes the shallower coastal shelf with phytoplankton and destroys fish spawning grounds. Raw sewage produces almost annual cholera outbreaks on the Ukrainian coast, oil spills multiply, and dams on the big rivers prevent sturgeon and shad from running upstream to breed. A sinister jellyfish- like creature, Mnemiopsis, colonised the damaged ecostructure in the Nineties, swelled to nearly a billion tons of "biomass" and devoured the plankton on which marine life feeds.

How can this voyaging Symposium help? If we, the passengers, do nothing useful for the Black Sea, then it will have been no more than a study cruise. But one proposal is to take up the work achieved in the last four years by the Black Sea Environmental Program and its director, the British- born ecologist Laurence Mee. Coaxed along by the energy and wiles of Mee, the six governments around the coast - Turkey, Russia, Ukraine, Georgia, Bulgaria and Romania - have signed up to a Black Sea Action Plan for cleaning up rivers, better fishing management, sewage treatment and public education about the environment.

The governments are genuinely thrilled to have drawn up the Action Plan, and proud that nations once traditional enemies are working at the same table. The trouble is that Mee is leaving, and his initial funding to get the Action Plan launched will not be renewed, and that the governments - most of them poor - will leave the Plan as a noble scrap of paper and do little to put it into practice.

To step in as a new pressure group, to lobby for the Plan to become Action and for the world's big donors to finance at least part of what Black Sea governments undertake, could be one achievement for the voyage of the E. Venizelos. But there are other, deeper levels of purpose here. As I write from the port of Varna in Bulgaria, this ship has put in at Trabzon in Turkey, Batumi in Georgia, Novorossisk in Russia, Yalta and Odessa in Ukraine and Constanta in Romania. And at almost every port, more great figures of the Orthodox churches have come on board. At the outset we had the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople and Metropolitan John of Pergamon. Since then, we have had the Georgian Patriarch, the mighty Moscow Patriarch, Alexei II, the Ukrainian, Romanian and Bulgarian Patriarchs. This is, in short, a floating Council of the Orthodox churches. Ostensibly dedicated to debating God's purpose for Man in the natural world, it is in fact the first general meeting of Orthodox church leaders since the fall of Communism. History is being made. But what sort of history?

At Trabzon (Trebizond ) in Turkey, guests joining the ship were stoned by a small mob of Islamists and ultra-nationalists. For them, the Symposium was merely an ill-concealed Greek attempt to restore the ancient dominion over the Black Sea shores which the Greek world lost when the Turks captured Constantinople 550 years ago. But the purpose here, not openly stated, seems to be something quite different and more subtle. It is nothing less than the modernising of Orthodox Christianity.

Its national churches are often suspicious and even ignorant of one another. But the most disabling legacy of the past is political: a tradition of passive compliance with whatever regime is in power. What if the national Patriarchates could learn to co-operate again? What if the hierarchies combined to push their governments to defend the Black Sea environment? Campaigning for the environment could be the ground on which Orthodoxy could learn to stand at a critical distance from the state.

In a few places this is happening. On the Ukrainian side of the Danube Delta, the Orthodox clergy have signed an agreement with the nature reserve's director; he will mend monasteries while the priests adjure the faithful to obey the ecological rules. Already the fishermen are replanting the reed-beds. But these days few state institutions have enough money to keep going, let alone to implement the Action Plan.

At one level, there is new wealth. It is four years since I was in Odessa, and the city centre has transformed itself out of recognition: opulent shops, pavement cafes as clean and well-served as they would be in Marseille. The Russian port of Novoro-ssisk glows with fresh paint, and the children wear new, pretty clothes. But how Russian or Ukrainian incomes can afford this high-price economy is a mystery.

While private business blossoms, state institutions starve. A friend I met in Odessa is paid pounds 30 a month by her marine biology institute - or rather not paid for the last four months. Here in Varna, I can see Bulgaria's most modern Black Sea research vessel stuck in port because there is no money for fuel or an engine overhaul. At Betumi, in Georgia, the dolphinarium which is supposed to be the Action Plan centre for biodiversity is half-ruined, rain spouting through a hundred holes in the roof.

Near Novorossisk, the great oil companies of the world plan to lay an underwater pipeline for Caspian oil out to a loading buoy. But a local ecology group has collected almost 10,000 signatures to trigger a referendum against the project. There has already been one devastating oil spill in the port, and many Russian citizens, balancing risk against promised benefits, want the scheme scrapped. Another group is fighting a similar plan at Odessa.

Ordinary people are now ready to fight for the Black Sea. But their governments, struggling with the colossal costs of the transformation to capitalism, cannot spare cash for the environment. Our ship will soon sail for the Bosphorus and Istanbul, its passengers debating whether Man is in Nature or above it. But their influence on the money centres of the world will decide whether the Action Plan can save a fish, a bird or a litre of Black Sea water.

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