A new law could not be applied to past crimes but only to future ones. The process of criminalizing ecocide at the Hague would take years, and its practical effect would be uncertain, because some of the world’s biggest polluters, including Russia and the United States, are not members. The campaign aims to treat “ecocide” in the same way as genocide or crimes against humanity, offenses that are prosecutable by the Hague-based International Criminal Court. Norilsk is an example of the kind of systematic and long-term devastation that has animated a global movement to make destruction of nature an international crime. Although Norilsk Nickel maintains that no diesel fuel made it to the Arctic Ocean, the Russian government’s fisheries science agency told Inside Climate News that its testing showed that the contamination in fact had reached that far. It was the largest oil spill in Arctic history. And last year, when melting permafrost beneath its giant complex gave way, a corroded holding tank burst and released 6.5 million gallons of diesel fuel into waters that flow to the Kara Sea. The acrid smoke that pours from its stacks is the worst sulfur dioxide pollution in the world. Its wastewater has turned glacial rivers red. The company’s pollution has carved a barren landscape of dead and dying trees out of the taiga, or boreal forest, one of the world’s largest carbon sinks. The company’s ambitions coincide with those of Russian President Vladimir Putin for greater development in the Far North, which he maintains can be accomplished sustainably.īut Norilsk Nickel, abetted by a lax government, has undermined its own vision for the future through actions that have spoiled a priceless environment, with implications for the entire planet.
Norilsk Nickel outlasted communism, embraced capitalism and now aims to ramp up production to sell the high-purity metals needed for batteries and other technologies of the 21st century clean energy economy. Originally built as a resource colony by prisoners in the Soviet Gulag, Norilsk has been a metal making center for 80 years. The city of 176,000 has long been recognized by environmentalists-and even by the Russian Federation government-as one of the most polluted places on Earth, because of one business: Norilsk Nickel, the world’s biggest producer of palladium and high-grade nickel and a top producer of platinum, cobalt and copper. The channel and its Facebook group, which has about 8,300 members, have become action alert sites, sounding boards and support groups for distressed citizens in Norilsk, the northernmost city in the world. Igor Klyushin has watched pollution grow in Norilsk since moving here with his family as a 7-year-old boy in 1977. The discolored water represented “the latest environmental crime of Norilsk Nickel,” Klyushin said in the video he posted on “Norilchane”- or “Citizens of Norilsk”-the YouTube channel he helps moderate. He began to record video of the clay-colored muck flowing downriver from somewhere beyond a railway overpass that is a gateway to one of the largest metal mining and smelting complexes in the world. He doubted there would be grayling there that night, but if there were, authorities had long warned it was unsafe to fish for them in the Daldykan River.Īnd besides, he wasn’t there to fish. Igor Klyushin went to the bank of the river where he used to fish with his father for grayling, a sleek and dorsal-finned beauty known for its graceful leaps above the water surface.
and the sun was shining, as it does day and night in mid-July in Norilsk, a Siberian city 200 miles north of the Arctic Circle.
#ACTIVE SKY NEXT SUDDEN WIND CHANGE SERIES#
This article is part of a series produced in partnership with NBC News and Undark Magazine, a non-profit, editorially independent digital magazine exploring the intersection of science and society.
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