Translated material
How to properly start a fire
This is the second time on the pages of my blog that I give the floor to Olga Fedorovna Khokhryakova, the wife of the director of the Kedrovaya Pad nature reserve and the head of the environmental education department of the same reserve. Olga Fedorovna writes well and has the rare quality of a) looking at the root of things and b) calling things by their proper names.
So - about the fire.
As Professor Preobrazhensky said: “don’t read newspapers, they spoil your digestion.” I would be glad to take wise advice, but due to my position I have to monitor everything that is written about us. Our reserve has never lacked publications, but March 21-22 can be noted as a record. Even Ivanov’s arrival at the reserve did not cause such a barrage of information, and there were significantly fewer lies.
To make it clear for those who are not in the know. Due to natural conditions and human lack of culture, Primorye regularly burns twice a year. Everyone who is somehow involved in forest fires has long lived by the formula: “What didn’t burn in the fall will burn in the spring.” At the same time, with the tenacity of maniacs, some burn, others extinguish. There are many more people who want to burn, but there are many more who want to control, instruct and illuminate. For the 35 state inspectors of the Kedrovaya Pad Nature Reserve, in the event of any forest fire there are at least 18 reports to a variety of authorities, not counting the press. And they still have time to prevent cases of poaching, arson, and illegal logging in the area of the adjacent Leopardovy nature reserve. Don’t forget, in Primorye 100 km is not a distance, thousand hectares is not an area. Our total protected area is almost 200 thousand hectares, there are more than 40 land users on it, who love to use it, but are not responsible for it. By law, the land user must extinguish fires, but in practice, state inspectors, cursing and swearing, extinguish them on the approaches to the reserve in order to preserve the most valuable territory. There simply aren’t enough of them for more, no matter what.
Now about yesterday. The autumn was dry and the winter snowless, so this year they started to burn right on New Year’s Day. By mid-March, it was no longer what we were used to; we simply sighed doomedly, jumped into cars and drove to the next outbreak. The ill-fated hill, which became the heroine of the day, was extinguished by the state inspectors of the reserve at night, and when the wind rose and the fire spread like a wall, it was decided to urgently remove people. There is a special question about the special value of the “burning forest”, everything that was valuable there burned out in the last century, now it is covered, correctly speaking, with “herbaceous and shrub vegetation”, or, more simply, with human-sized standing wormwood and reeds with scattered stunted bushes . But even if centuries-old cedars were burning, this is not a reason to lead people into the fire and orphan children. In the morning, it was decided to guard the fire so that it did not spread to the reserve, and to wait until the wind died down, since it was useless to extinguish it manually, not a single tractor would fit into the hill, especially a car.
I repeat, everyone knew about the fire - the reserve, the civil defense, the Ministry of Emergency Situations and all the remaining inspectors and controls; they did not know, apparently only at WWF. And although at least three other places in the area were burning at this time, it was this ill-fated hill that attracted the attention of the valiant “coordinator of projects for the conservation of the Far Eastern leopard,” Mr. Fereferov (by the way, the position has been non-existent for six months). Do you think he threw himself into the fire and began to violently beat and kick it? Or at least call 010?
No.
He started calling, but to the press. Not at all embarrassed, and even proud of himself, he said that the forest was burning and that no one was extinguishing it, and only the valiant WWF employees, risking their cars, were trying to stop the fire. I don’t know who the first journalist received this information, but then it spread with a speed that any fire would envy. Having heard the code word "leopard", the press attacked the news like flies to honey. In the blink of an eye, news spread across the vast country - the most valuable places of the reserve, where the last leopards live, are burning, and the vile employees of the reserve, who should extinguish the fire and have everything to do this, do not want to and do not extinguish it. And if it weren’t for Mr. Fereferov, then everything would have burned down long ago.
I don’t know if there is at least one newspaper left that would not crow this news. At the same time, the village of Filippovka turned into Cherepovka, the director of the reserve became either the director of the reserve or the national park, the reserve itself was transformed into a monster called the Tiger Pad reserve, and Fereferov moved from the position of ecologist (by the way, there is such a profession in the list of professions in Russia, or is it only social activists who proudly wear it?) to animal rights activists, human rights activists and other defenders. Only the lazy didn’t write, and apparently we don’t have lazy people in the media. And only after fulfilling its civic duty of confusing the population, the press decided to find out what was really going on? And the morning began on the collective farm. The first call came somewhere around 18.00. Well, I’m proud of my husband, I just admire him - until the morning he never swore, he very politely and in detail explained to everyone what was what. There were a lot of people willing: the press, immediate superiors, mediocre ones (in the sense of indirect), parties and non-party people. The WWF woke up in surprise towards the night, wondering what the essence of the problem was, why Khokhryakov was sending journalists to disturb their quiet evening. During this time, the wind died down, and by 20.00 the fire at this point was extinguished; it had already caught fire in other places. The angry, sleep-deprived director went to a meeting in the morning, where no less angry and sleep-deprived high-ranking bosses from the Civil Defense, the Ministry of Emergency Situations, the local administration and other officials were waiting for him, who were also tormented all night with calls and orders, and in the morning they were sent to decide what to do with already extinguished fire.
During this time, the information reached the Minister of the Ministry of Natural Resources and the Prime Minister. And as people who care about the leopard, they also did everything possible to save it - they asked the military, the Ministry of Emergency Situations and the governor of Primorye for help. What I mean is that this concocted sensation, inflated to the size of a universal catastrophe, did not allow us, but also people who had a more serious responsibility than saving burning reeds, to go about their business calmly. And at this time, somewhere in Primorye, it was probably burning like a child, but those places were not at all interesting to journalists; every point in Primorye cannot be so interesting. Well, it burns and burns, none of the government members go there, why cover it? We conferred and left to deal with truly urgent matters. At work we were met by the head of security and his deputy, who, in addition to endless reports, responded to the press’s dissatisfaction, which boiled down to approximately the following: how dare you put out the fire, we haven’t written everything about you yet.
The fuzzy chief of the patrol group, who put out that ill-fated fire, wrote explanatory notes, carefully choosing words, stepping on the throat of his own song, entirely consisting of words that were not at all unprintable. Everything was carefully recorded and filed, since the environmental prosecutor’s office was already on its way with another inspection. The phone was red-hot, and the director stared blankly at one point - the monitor, where the next 27-page report was displayed, which, as usual, was due yesterday. As far as I understand, I don’t have to wait for my husband to come home today.
I understand that we have freedom of speech, but we apparently understand it differently. Freedom of speech also includes responsibility for speech. Even criminals advise to “filter the market.” Who will be responsible for the fact that dozens of people and organizations have been feverish for 24 hours? Who will pay for travel and travel allowances for the next wave of inspectors? Who will compensate for moral damage to state inspectors? Who dares to call the Minister of Natural Resources and say that the danger to the leopard was mythical and hypothetical. I would like to see this man.
So far, neither the WWF nor the media have made any attempt to at least apologize for the stream of lies that gave birth to a storm in a teacup. Now everyone is talking about the formation of civil society and assigning a large, almost decisive role to the media and public organizations. I don’t know what kind of society they can form, but I would gladly follow the professor’s advice. One good thing is that we will definitely take first place in terms of the number of publications about the reserve. At least in the first quarter.