Chastin's Way

((Photo: Pavel Gorshkov )

“The development of market relations that has occurred in Russia over the past decade... has dotted the i’s: enterprises that are leaders in their industries are also leaders in the field of ecology.” Until very recently, this thesis was in the “green” movement one of those indecent truths that are known to all serious people, but are not subject to public discussion. Especially with outsiders, who find it difficult to explain how knowledge of this is combined with the staunchly negative attitude of most “greens” towards industrial civilization as such. However, today the taboo has been violated in the most blatant way: the quoted phrase was published in one of the highest circulation Russian newspapers. And there is no way to attribute it to the ignorance of journalists or the irresponsibility of technocrats - under it is the signature of a professional environmentalist, director of the Russian representative office of the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) Igor Chestin.

Origin
Igor Chestin’s path to his current activities began at the age of 14, when he came to the famous KYUBZ - a circle of young zoo biologists, a kind of “primary school” for many field biologists. From there there was a direct road to the biology department of Moscow State University and further to professional zoologists. However, after graduating from an elite language special school, native Muscovite Chestin suddenly applied to the Faculty of Chemistry and Biology of Kalinin University. In his own words, he felt the need to live separately from his parents. People who knew him then give a different explanation - there was too much competition at Moscow State University, and he really didn’t want to join the army.

Be that as it may, the path of life, which seemed to have taken a sideways turn, very soon returned to the main road: in 1983, Chestin (according to his friends - without any connections) was transferred to the Faculty of Biology of Moscow State University, and to the most prestigious department of the field department - zoology of vertebrates. Due to the difference in programs, he had to lose a year and, in addition, take many courses. However, he not only successfully coped with this, but during two years of study at the department he acquired such a reputation that after graduation he remained to work there.

However, in parallel with this, his other career developed. While still at KYUBZ, he managed to become a member of the circle’s bureau, responsible for field trips and expeditions. Immediately upon entering KSU, he joined the student nature conservation team and two years later headed it. Having returned to Moscow and having barely dealt with the hassle of transferring, he again finds himself in the nature conservation squad and at the beginning of 1985 he becomes its commander.

In retrospect, it looks like an exceptionally focused career. However, let us remember that in the first half of the 80s there were no professional environmental organizations in the country at all - neither state, nor even public (except, of course, the All-Union Society for Nature Conservation, staff positions in which served as places of employment for failed or elderly apparatchiks, and the work consisted mainly of collecting ten-kopeck coins from schoolchildren). The real environmental movement was precisely the student squads, of which there were almost hundreds in the country at the turn of the 70s and 80s. Initiative, self-governing, absolutely voluntary, fueled by the energy of their members, they achieved amazingly much (using for this, for example, the same VOOP - at least as a source of official “crusts” of public hunting and fish inspectors) and, in addition, were an excellent trainer for socially active people, especially potential leaders. But there was nowhere to apply the developed skills - by the end of the Brezhnev era, the incompatibility of the state with any spontaneous social activity became almost absolute. At the biology department of Moscow State University, the party committee and the Komsomol committee at least recognized the activities of the DOP as “social work,” which relieved the activists of the squad from the need to imitate Komsomol activity. However, this “social work” practically did not contribute to my future career, and on occasion it could even hinder it. This was especially true of the BSB sector - “the fight against poaching”, in which the main part of Chestin’s squad activity took place - sometimes a very influential poacher in the Tver and Moscow region forests came across. So why would an ambitious fifth-year student (and Chastin’s ambitions, his focus on high results and the impeccable quality of any work he did were known to everyone who dealt with him) hang such a millstone on himself in the midst of working on his diploma?


The struggle for the restoration of the State Committee for Ecology united non-governmental environmental organizations and intensified their actions. (Photo: Pavel Gorshkov )

In fact, he didn’t hang it. Or he didn’t think he was hanging. There are simply people who, participating in a common cause, inevitably turn out to be leaders. (They are the best indicator of the state of the organizations in which they work: if they become the bosses, it means that the “office” is alive and concerned with its goals more than with its internal life.) They find themselves because they instinctively sense possible directions for the development of work - and immediately begin to move there, dragging the others along. When Chestin became the commander of a squad in Kalinin, it was a squad of the Faculty of Chemistry and Biology. In two years, it expanded its activities first to other faculties, becoming university-wide, and then to other city universities - polytechnic and medical. Although no one ever demanded that she “expand” and “involve”...

Chestin spent a year as the commander of the biology department squad - according to the regulations, the squad was a student squad, and this requirement could not be violated for too long. However, by this time, perestroika had already begun in the country, and ecology turned out to be exactly the field in which the first attempts to legalize public activity took place. In 1986, the struggle to stop the "river diversion" project begins. The following year, the informal leader of this campaign, writer Sergei Zalygin, creates the Green World organization under the Soviet Peace Committee. Today Igor recalls with some irony this attempt to “unite into one fist” the then rulers of the thoughts of the environmental community - the writers Zalygin, Rasputin, Astafiev, Yablokov... It turned out that even with the best relations among themselves, these people can only write a collective letter sign. However, in that glorious time, the absolutely impossible often suddenly turned out to be possible: the highest decisions were made to stop work on “turning the rivers”, to repurpose the Baikal Pulp and Paper Mill (to this day, however, poisoning the “glorious sea” with waste from production that no one needs), the work to create a union environmental department. And then 1989 arrived with semi-free elections to the Congress. Chestin organized a meeting of voters at the university, which overwhelmingly nominated Academician Sakharov as a candidate, and was a confidant of candidates Alexei Yablokov and economist Mikhail Lemeshev. However, Yablokov hardly needed his help - he became a deputy on the “Sakharov list” of the Academy of Sciences, while Lemeshev lost in his constituency to Sergei Stankevich.

Chastin is not used to suffering defeat. In addition, the people he supported were already irreversibly divided into “democrats” and “patriots” by the beginning of 1990, and being with one meant working against the other. He retires from public politics and goes to study at the Victoria University of Manchester.

Returning the next year with a master's degree (specializing in environmental pollution control), he immediately defended his PhD in the systematics and biology of the brown bear - squad by squad, politics by politics, and he spent all the field seasons before leaving for England on expeditions. While continuing to work at the department, he actively collaborates in various international projects (the financial crisis of Russian science has already begun, and it is only possible to work normally at the expense of a foreign partner). Since 1994, he has become a consultant for the first programs of the World Wildlife Fund in Russia - studying the illegal trade in wild animals and plants, protection and rational use of the Kamchatka bear. And in 1996, when the foundation announced a competition for the position of director of the Russian representative office, Chestin applied and won.


(Photo: from the archive of Igor Chestin )

A niche
“Back in the friendly times,” says Chastin, “I realized that even if something can be achieved through naked pressure, then such a solution to the problem is temporary and unreliable. A real solution is one that benefits all participants in the process. We must negotiate.”

WWF employees (there are now about 80 of them in Russia - plus thousands of specialists working under contracts with the fund) do not organize protests or theatrical performances, do not block entrances, do not break through cordons and do not chain themselves. They carry out all their projects only with the knowledge and consent of the federal and regional authorities. And they are engaged not only in studying the state of rare species, designing new protected natural areas and helping existing ones, creating and equipping anti-poaching teams, educational programs, but also developing business plans, searching for business partners, training production specialists, even assessing the energy efficiency of public utilities. farms. (Think about it: where is “wild nature” - and where is energy efficiency! But it turned out that the best way to avert the threat from so far untouched territories is to promote the spread of effective technologies.) And, of course, negotiations. The Even nomadic reindeer herders have agreed to change the route of their herds, which now bypass the Siberian Crane's nesting area. The Kamchatka authorities abandoned gold mining in the untouched areas of the peninsula, convinced that using them as hunting grounds and a tourist site was simply more profitable. From Chastin’s point of view, when a potential violator himself becomes interested in protecting a species or territory and takes responsibility for it, then better protection cannot be imagined.

Of course, none of this is Chastin's personal theory. Over the past decades, the global green movement has undergone a significant evolution. It turned out that no more just and perfect world order is foreseen in the foreseeable future, and if anyone really wants to save nature, he will have to do it with the help of existing social mechanisms. That it is useless to talk about environmental problems with a person who has nothing to feed his children, but the “middle class”, the beloved child and the central element of the “consumer society” repeatedly cursed by the “greens”, is ready to pay money not only for clean air in their city, but and for saving some bison or tigers. And that the only reliable way to stop uncontrolled population growth is to make this population well-fed, healthy and literate.

It is not surprising that the most consistent and open new approach to environmental problems is embodied in the activities of WWF, an organization born among the European secular and business elite and relying primarily on professionals. However, someone must always take responsibility for the New Deal - at the risk of developing a reputation as a conformist, compromiser and "agent of the system." Someone will have to smile and present “Giver of the Earth” diplomas signed by Prince Philip to the heads of Russian regions who have established new protected areas - with the full knowledge that tomorrow the newly-minted “Giver of the Earth” could easily sign some crazy project that will immediately devalue it gift. Environmental problems occupy one of the last places on the list of priorities of regional and sectoral bosses - however, in recent years, at the very least, they have learned to at least include them in this list. Such a shift (achieved, of course, through the efforts of not only WWF, but all environmentalists, including those in public service) is worth a lot.

“We proceed from the fact that no one has a conscious intention to destroy nature,” says Igor Chestin. “We met with the Minister of Natural Resources Yatskevich. Instead of the allotted half hour, we talked for an hour and a half and were convinced that Boris Alexandrovich is not a villain at all. He has his own approach to problem, and he is as confident in his rightness as we are in ours."

Nevertheless, today, perhaps, the main task of the Russian office of WWF is to wrest the functions of nature conservation from the hands of the “confident in his rightness” minister, to achieve the cancellation of the May presidential decree abolishing the State Committee for Ecology and Rosleskhoz and transferring their functions to the Ministry of Natural Resources. Ironically, it turned out that the most non-conflict “green” organization in Russia not only actively supported the initiative to hold an all-Russian referendum for the restoration of federal environmental agencies and a ban on the import of radioactive waste into the country (see “Itogi” # 26, 2000 ), but also turned out to be slightly or not his headquarters. Actually, the scandalous phrase with which this text began was taken from an article sharply criticizing the intentions of the federal government in the field of nature conservation.

“So what?” Chastin shrugs. “Yes, we profess a constructive approach. But in the current situation, a referendum is the most constructive and calm way out of the current situation - unless the president himself first abandons his decision. We are not on the barricades.” we call..."


When Chastin is asked why he joined the environmental movement, he usually answers: “I have children.” (Photo: from the archive of Igor Chestin )