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Irkutsk, Russia — Five time zones west from Moscow, just above Mongolia, Lake Baikal is so clear that swimmers who brave its cold, tempestuous waters would risk vertigo if they looked down.

The lake fills a crevice that runs 1,600 metres in depth and more than 600 kilometres in length. It is also the world's largest source of fresh water, with more volume than Canada's Great Lakes put together and enough to account for four-fifths of Russia's supply. And as locals like to remind visitors, it is the world's oldest lake, perhaps 25 million years old, which would make it 24 million years older than just about any other.

HELL ON EARTH
Sunday: Welcome to hell
Monday: In the shadow of nuclear catastrophe
Tuesday: New battles loom over Russia's great lake
Wednesday: Globalization's spark of hope

Baikal, remote and rugged, has long been appreciated for its unique place on the planet and unparalleled ecosystem. With more than 2,500 species of plants and animals in its waters and along its shores — three-quarters of them endemic to the region — it is as diverse a place as one can find in Siberia. But if Lake Baikal was once seen as a living museum for Earth, it is now being thrust into an uncertain future.

As Russia hurtles into a new century of free-market enthusiasm, its new capitalists want to build a pipeline, several thousand kilometres long, from the world's largest reservoir to the parched lands of China. The idea is about more than improving Russia's exports. It has pitted entrepreneurs against environmentalists in a struggle over the country's vast base of natural resources, and how best to develop them.

At Lake Baikal, the two sides have been clashing for decades over using it for industrial development, with the environmentalists mostly losing. For 45 years, a massive cellulose plant has been spilling chemicals into the southern end of the lake that Russians reverently call "the Pearl of Siberia."

"It's not that it's in a terrible place," one municipal official said. "It's in a beautiful place. It just happens to make terrible things."

As in many post-Soviet states, the authorities around Baikal do nothing to hide their belief that pumping up the region's sagging economy is more important than mitigating any damage their projects could do to the natural surroundings. Even Vladimir Fialkov, the chief scientist in charge of studying Lake Baikal, envisions a day when Baikal water will be pumped to China, and possibly to the thirsty billions of Africa, the Middle East and the United States.

"Our analysis shows it is the most pure water in the world," crowed Mr. Fialkov, who heads the Limnological Institute in the lakeside town of Listvyanka.

Within minutes of meeting a journalist, he pulled out a half-litre bottle of "Baikalskaya" fresh water and put it on the table. "Please, try some," he said.

'When the shortage of water is higher, the price of water will be higher too'
Anatoli Malevsky,
chairman of the Irkutsk regional government's natural-resources committee

Some officials believe the only reason not to build a pipeline right away is that as the world grows thirstier, demand will drive up prices and make an expensive pipeline project easier to finance.

The majestic lake is deep enough to satisfy humanity's demands for another 50 years.

"If it's profitable to export oil and gas by pipelines, it will eventually be profitable to export Baikal water by pipelines too," said Anatoli Malevsky, chairman of the Irkutsk regional government's natural-resources committee. "When the shortage of water is higher, the price of water will be higher too."

Baikal's value has long been known to Russians, just as it has long been a cause for ecologists. At least 336 rivers and streams flow into the lake, and its basin has for decades been a base for mining, timber and shipbuilding industries. In Soviet times, schoolchildren were taught to refer to the crystalline lake as the Sacred Sea, and practised drawing its jalapeno shape in class.

Then, in the 1950s, the government decided to build the enormous cellulose plant on the southern shores, in the village of Baikalsk.

Local anger gave birth to the first real environmental campaign of the Soviet era — decades before Mikhail Gorbachev rose to power. "Really, perestroika and glasnost were what gave the environmental movement a chance to voice itself more loudly. But that first fight over Baikal was the start," said Jennifer Sutton, head of the Baikal Ecological Wave, an environmental group based in the neighbouring city of Irkutsk.

A pattern for the next 45 years of wrangling over Lake Baikal was set: The environmentalists won a public-relations war and generally made life harder for the bureaucrats who wanted to build the cellulose plant. In 1987, the Gorbachev government ordered the Baikalsk mill to be "reprofiled" so that its activities would be harmless within six years. In 1996, the United Nations declared Lake Baikal a World Heritage Site.

Opponents of the mill acknowledge today it is one of the cleanest operating plants in Russia.

But environmentalists say many of their victories have been hollow, which they fear will be the case again in their fight to stop any plans for a water pipeline to China.

New laws, including a tax on polluters to pay for the damage they cause, are frequently dodged. Moreover, a court recently ruled that the polluter-pay tax is unconstitutional, leaving open the question of what regime, if any, the government will introduce to replace it.

The decree to clean up the Baikal mill also led nowhere. The plant continues to spew dioxins, sulphur oxides and chlorinated organic compounds into the lake, polluting an area of more than 30 square kilometres from its southern tip.

"Building the plant there was one of the biggest mistakes the Soviet government ever made," said Roman Pukalov, chief Baikal campaigner for Greenpeace Russia. "The government knows that now, but the plant is still there because of local corruption."

While Baikal remains startlingly pure, the location of several plants along the Selenga River, its largest tributary, has meant that sections of the lake are deteriorating.

Inside the 30-kilometre zone around the cellulose mill, there were once 30 species of crustaceans. Today, only four can be found. Species of plankton crucial to the ecosystem have also disappeared, and scores of Baikal's signature species, the nerpa freshwater seal, have turned up inexplicably dead on the shores.

Ms. Sutton worries most about the plankton because they eat bacteria and thereby play a crucial role in keeping the rest of the lake clean. While they can handle almost any type of natural bacteria, the tiny organisms have proved no match for the tonnes of industrial waste that have been discharged into the lake in recent decades.

"These endemic species are very sensitive to pollution," she said. "You destroy the natural filter, you'll destroy the lake eventually."

'Now, the situation is worse, not better, than it was then'
Russian environmentalist

In many ways, the continuing battle for Baikal, whether over the quality of its water or its purpose, epitomizes the state of Russia's environmental movement. The greens are waging public-relations battles, and winning some, but have yet to declare victory.

"We raised public awareness 40 years ago [during the struggle against the Baikal cellulose plant]," one veteran Russian environmentalist said. "But that's about it. Now, the situation is worse, not better, than it was then."

Part of the problem is that Russia's system is not yet a truly democratic forum, and remains a place where the most powerful vested interests eventually get their way. Last year, in its biggest show of strength to date, the green movement collected 2½ million signatures calling for a referendum on two of the biggest ecological questions facing the country: the government's plan to start accepting foreign nuclear waste for storage, and President Vladimir Putin's plan to abolish Russia's two main environmental-protection agencies.

The country's Central Election Committee, however, rejected the request, disqualifying nearly 700,000 of the signatures for "technical reasons" such as incorrectly filled-out passport details. That left the movement below the two million signatures the Russian constitution requires to trigger a referendum. The greens have not made another attempt.

While that failure could easily be laid at the feet of an obstructionist political system, some veteran observers say it's also a sign that the environmental movement in Russia has yet to catch up to its counterparts in Western Europe and North America.

"Without a civil society, there's no pressure on politicians, and therefore there's no political will to get things done," said Alexei Yablokov, a former top adviser to former president Boris Yeltsin. "We have no civil society."

Though the groups spearheading the Baikal campaign — Baikal Ecological Wave and Greenpeace — are among the most developed non-governmental organizations in the country, they have not been able to penetrate the political process far enough to influence decisions.

At the Irkutsk natural-resources committee, Mr. Malevsky has lost his optimism about the lake's future, even as he promotes it as a source for water exports. He said that in the two years since Mr. Putin came to office, the closing of environmental-protection agencies and the transfer of their tasks to the Natural Resources Department have meant fewer people doing environmental monitoring and policing.

"Nowadays, enterprises can cause air pollution and water pollution and not pay at all," Mr. Malevsky said.

Budgets have also shrunk unexpectedly, leaving programs such as water purification around the Baikal cellulose plant in the lurch.

"Unfortunately, over the last few years, we have seen a worsening of the ecological situation across the country," he said. "A lot of ecological programs are going to have financial problems because of this terrible federal law."

In Canada and other Western countries, environmental groups and their political allies would mount a public-relations offensive, leaking reports to the media and lobbying sympathetic politicians to press the government to reverse course. But in a remote corner of Russia, drumming up support for the world's oldest lake has been as difficult under a democracy as it was under the Soviet regime — in part because the people fighting for Baikal feel they are not yet living in a true democracy.

"A developed democracy has a developed civil society," Mr. Yablokov, the former Yeltsin adviser, said in an interview. "In Russia, we're just not there yet. We're allowed to take part in the debate, but we're not allowed to win."