Black ice

From the author

It passed almost a year from the loud (after the French agents of the Rainbow ship undermined Warrior ) events in the life of Greenpeace - from the moment I, together with 29 people, activists, team members, cook, physician and journalist, was arrested on September 19 in the Barents Sea after the protest in defense of the Arctic that I covered. Then we spent two months in jail, and the UK accused us of piracy.

The meaning of the protest on the Prirazlomnaya platform was to attract attention to the problem of the development of the Arctic, the impossibility of drilling without a clear plan for eliminating the consequences of oil excesses in the extreme conditions of the north. Most depressed the fact that oil companies did not want to produce oil in a civilized one on the mainland of Russia, where the working conditions are more comfortable than at sea in the Arctic. I took off the oil spills in the Khanty-Mansiysk district and in the Komi Republic hundred times. But behind the false words of the representative of the UK, people did not want to see anything more and once again believed the propaganda of state media.

So now - we do not see what is hiding behind a beautiful marketing offer at a new gas station. It seems to us that in oil fields scattered through the taiga and tundra, the same purity reigns as in the offices of oil companies. Unfortunately, this is not so.

For a whole year, Greenpeace worked on a campaign that would help the widest spectrum of Russia's residents to look at the problem of oil production in the Arctic deeper. Such a campaign was to be positive in the eyes of the public. Citizens of Russia do not accept a direct action. And such a campaign was an oil camp in the Komi Republic.

In 1994, an oil spill occurred here, which fell into the Guinness Book of Records. They are still engaged in the elimination of the consequences of that spill. It seems that all the locals remember this. The current deputy minister of natural resources, being a child, flew with his father a 50-kilometer breakthrough of the pipe, oil from which fell into rivers carrying their waters into the Arctic Ocean, and, perhaps, therefore occupies a tough position in matters of nature protection. The Republic of Komi is not the worst region for oil pollution, it is ahead of the Khanty -Mansi Autonomous Okrug. Komi is not the first in the list, perhaps because the Pechora preservation committee, the local Ministry of Natural Resources and the prosecutor's office actively work here. But spills are still hundreds. Every year, the inhabitants of the village of Kolva say, they observe black ice that walks during ice drift.

It was here that volunteers from 14 countries came to hold an oil patrol of places that are suspicious in space pictures. In order to try to clean one very small oil barn, thrown 15 years ago, and most importantly - to draw attention to the problem of oil production and ask oil companies to be responsible for the environment.

The face of this campaign, conceived as “positive in the eyes of society,” was actress Ekaterina Volkova, playing in the series “Voronins”. And the oil patrol itself did not imply protest shares, but rather worked in close cooperation with environmental departments. Most of the 15 legislative proposals Greenpeace were supported by the Ministry of Natural Resources.

Appeal Denis Sinyakov and Greenpeace to the oil industry