Monday, November 29, 1999
WRITER: Larry B. Dendy, (706) 542-8078
CONTACT: Tom Jackson, (706) 542-8090
GORBACHEV EXPECTED TO BRING ENVIRONMENTAL MESSAGE TO
UGA
ATHENS, Ga. -- Mikhail Gorbachev made his mark on the world a decade ago by helping bring down Communism in the Soviet Union and end the Cold War. Today he is a man with another mission: saving the earth from environmental disaster.
As founder and president of Green Cross International, a non-profit organization that focuses on global ecological law, Gorbachev crusades for clean air and water, and against toxic wastes and chemical weapons, with the same fervor he used to promote perestroika and glasnost in the late 1980s.
"Man has exceeded nature's allowable limits," the former Soviet president told Time magazine last year. "Civilization must adjust to the laws of the biosphere. We have little room for maneuver--and little time."
Gorbachev is expected to bring his campaign for environmental action to the University of Georgia when he speaks in Stegeman Coliseum Dec. 3 at 7:30 p.m. The speech is free and open to the public. There will be no tickets, and except for a small reserved section, seating will be first-come first-served. The coliseum doors will open at 6:30 p.m.
Matt Petersen, executive director of Global Green U.S.A.--the American affiliate of Green Cross International--said Gorbachev likely will tell the UGA audience his ideas for keeping the planet healthy for future generations.
Among those ideas: a "Legacy" project to eliminate military toxic wastes and chemical weapon stockpiles left over from the Cold War; and the Earth Charter, an international legal code based on a list of "environmental Ten Commandments."
Gorbachev, who led the Soviet Union from 1985 to 1991, founded Green Cross International in 1993. With chapters in 21 nations including the U.S., Russia, Japan and Switzerland, the organization works with businesses, industry and governments to make sustainable environmental policy a top global priority.
Pat Mitchell, a UGA graduate and CNN executive who is president of Global Green U.S.A., will introduce Gorbachev at UGA. Mitchell was instrumental in arranging the UGA speech.
UGA's University Union and the Peabody Broadcasting Awards program will offer a historical background on Gorbachev's visit by sponsoring a free showing of three episodes from the Peabody Award-winning CNN documentary on the Cold War. The screenings will be Nov. 30 and Dec. 1 and 2 at noon in the Tate Student Center theater.
The episodes cover such historic events as President Ronald Reagan's proposed Strategic Defense System; Gorbachev's efforts to reconstruct the Soviet economy; the break-up of the Soviet Union and East Europe; the fall of the Berlin Wall; the reunification of East and West Germany; and Russia's challenge to rebuild its post-Communist economy.
Gorbachev has warned that the earth faces an environmental crisis stemming from overpopulation, pollution, depletion of natural resources and over-reliance on technology. He says humans must find a "new paradigm of development" that doesn't violate natural laws and downplays rampant consumerism.
In a 1997 essay for Time magazine, he traces his environmental concerns to his work as a young man on a Soviet collective farm where he saw problems created by soil erosion and water and air pollution. Later, as a Communist party official working for a natural resources commission, he saw how poor construction and operation of irrigation and hydroelectric plants ruined fertile land and damaged rivers and seas.
Then came the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear accident, which Gorbachev terms a "watershed" event that led to a ban on new nuclear power plants and the closing of many industrial facilities in Russia.
The Green Cross organization grew out of a package of environmental initiatives Gorbachev presented to the United Nations in 1988. "Our main goal," he explained in the Time essay, "is to help set in motion a value shift in people's minds. Our environmental education programs...aim at helping people understand a simple truth: man is not the master of nature but just a part of it."
Gorbachev, who won the 1990 Nobel Peace Prize for signing nuclear disarmament treaties with the U.S., warns that nations may go to war over fresh water and clean air instead of political or economic power. Wars themselves are environmental nightmares, he says, citing the irreversible oil pollution of 40 percent of Kuwait's strategic water resources and widespread radiation damage resulting from the bombing of Yugoslavia.
He has called for an international conference to draw up laws to prevent the disastrous environmental and medical consequences of war. His suggestions include not bombing nuclear power stations and chemical plants, and banning weapons that contain depleted uranium.
One of Green Cross International's major projects is "Legacy," described by Gorbachev as "environmental healing" in the aftermath of the Cold War. The program focuses on eliminating toxic wastes and stockpiled chemical weapons from military bases and ensuring that all nations have access to clean water.
Gorbachev also heads the Earth Charter Commission, which created a document he describes as an "environmental Ten Commandments." Among the 18 points in the charter, which Gorbachev plans to present to the United Nations in 2000: "Do not do unto the environment of others what you do not want done to your own environment;"and, "Adopt modes of consumption, production and reproduction that respect the regenerative capacities of the earth."
While Communism was not tolerable, neither is the western free market system the answer for a sustainable environmental future, Gorbachev argues. He says the world needs "a new kind of economic cooperation, based on increasing interdependence of nations," and "a new scale of values and action" that favor health care, education and population control over commercialism and consumerism.
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