Authors: Neal Ascherson
' . . . But tell me —why is he kicking his heels around here? What is he after?'
'He's studying marine life.'
'No, no, that's not it, old man,' sighed Layevsky. 'From what I gathered from a passenger on the steamer, a scientist, the Black Sea's poor in fauna, and organic life can't exist in its depths owing to the excess of hydrogen sulphide. All serious students of the subject work in the biological stations of Naples or Villefranche. But Von Koren's independent and stubborn. He works on the Black Sea because no one else does.'
Anton Chekhov, The Duel'
It is a happy world, after all. The air, the earth, the water, teem with delighted existence.
William Paley,
Natural Theology
THEY SAY
: 'the Black Sea is dying.' I open an American newspaper and read: 'The Black Sea, the dirtiest in the world, is dying an agonising death.' I am told, on the authority of a UN document, that the Black Sea constitutes 'the marine ecological catastrophe of the century' because
'90
per cent of the basin is now anoxic'
Here are treasures in the museum of self-accusation, the international gallery of eco-doom. It is entirely true that the Black Sea is nine-tenths dead, and that its waters below the
200
-metre oxycline are poisoned with hydrogen sulphide gas. But they always were.
When the
Argo
fled back from Colchis to the Danube delta, with the navy of King Aeetes in pursuit, she was flying over a lifeless gulf nearly half a mile deep. Had she sunk on the journey, her timbers and the Argonauts themselves would still be sitting intact on the blue-grey bottom mud, for there is no oxygen in the water which would allow them to rot. Down there, only metal is consumed. Their bronze swords and helmets, the studs on their belts and the rings on their fingers, would have been dissolved away to nothing. As for the Golden Fleece, it would have lost all the bullion glare that made it worth the voyage from the Pagasaean Gulf in Greece to Colchis. It would lie there to this day, across the laps of dead Jason and Medea, but now returned to its old innocence, whiteness and sheepishness.
This death or near-death of a sea was not caused by the human race. It apparently annoys some fanatics that an ecological catastrophe can be achieved by ecology itself, without any need to call on expert human assistance. All the same, it was the natural action of natural forces which brought about this huge act of pollution: the decay of billions of tons of up-country mud and leaves and living ooze and dead micro-organisms, poured onto the sea floor since the last Ice Age by the five great rivers of the Black Sea.
It was not our fault. That is a fact, but a fact which might excuse the human race many other sins if it were too widely known. In consequence, journalism and propaganda about the condition of the Black Sea seldom mention hydrogen sulphide. If they do (as in the case of that UN document), they slip in a hint that the anoxia is in some way connected with human crimes against the environment.
What is dying, or rather being murdered, is not the Sea but its creatures. What is being polluted by human agency is not the main body of water (apart from the tipping of drums of toxic waste by Italian ships), but the surface layer whose abundance has shaped the whole prehistory and history of the Black Sea littoral. These are not small distinctions. Something terrible and perhaps final really is taking place. But there is no way to appreciate the scale of this threat without drawing back and surveying the precariousness of the entire Black Sea system: a surface film of life stretched over an abyss of lifelessness.
Out of twenty-six species of Black Sea fish being landed in commercial quantities in the
1960s,
only six now survive in numbers worth netting. The
hamsi
anchovy provided
3 20,000
tons of fish as recendy as
1984;
within five years it has fallen to a mere
15,000
tons. The fish catch from all species is less than one seventh of what it was ten years ago, and some species are now almost certainly extinct. In the Sea of Azov, where all the Black Sea problems are multiplied, landings of sturgeon which averaged
7,300
tons a year in the
1930s
had been reduced to
500
tons by
1961;
almost all Azov sturgeon are now bred on fish farms. As for the mammals of the Sea, the monk seal is now extinct, reputedly because a Bulgarian hotel-builder dynamited its last cave-refuge, while the three species of dolphin or porpoise have been reduced from almost a million in the
1950s
to anything between a third and a tenth of that number today.
Monstrous plankton blooms have begun to appear on the shallow north-western shelf of the Black Sea, where the bottom is above the anoxic level and where many of the important fish species spawn. 'Red tides' formed from dying phytoplankton began to occur with regularity in the early
1970s.
The worst of these, in the Bay of Odessa in
1989,
reached the horrifying concentration of one kilogram of plankton for every cubic metre of sea-water. Hydrogen sulphide, generated in the shallows rather than rising from the depths, began to reach the surface so that the stench spread through the city streets and the bay was covered with dead fish; much the same happened that season off Burgas, in Bulgaria. The penetration of light in these increasingly turbid coastal waters has dropped by anything between
40
and
90
per cent, killing off bottom-living creatures like flatfish, molluscs and crustaceans and destroying almost the entire pasture of sea-grass. At the other end of the Black Sea, in the Bosporus, bottom marine life has declined so steeply in the last few decades that one of the main food sources — molluscs, urchins, marine worms — needed by the migrating fish shoals on their way to breed in the Sea of Marmara is disappearing.
The meaning of these facts and figures is that, for the first time, mankind is about to extinguish life in an entire sea. Some forms will survive: sterile algae or jelly-like drifting creatures. But the living creatures with whom the human race grew up here - the billions of silvery fish migrating round the same track since the last glaciation, the grinning dolphins whom the Greeks appointed the patrons of Trebizond - these are about to leave us.
The causes are known. AH of them, with a few consciously criminal exceptions like the dumping of toxic waste, derive from human immaturity. At least
160
million people now live in the Black Sea basin - that is to say, in the area drained by rivers which run into the Sea — and among them are farmers, industrial workers, fishermen and seamen. But in the last fifteen or twenty years, their trades have all been overwhelmed with technical innovations, with modern fertilisers, supertankers, industrial processes based on hydrocarbons, dioxin or CFCs, electronic fish-location gear and modern drift-nets. Learning to operate these technologies takes all the mental concentration of Black Sea people, and for the wider questions of what these novelties do to the Sea and its life-systems and even to its human inhabitants they can spare almost no attention. When boats were made of wood, when peasants strewed their own dung on the fields and the worst industrial effluent was chlorine or sulphuric acid, there was at least more time to reflect; more opportunity for estate owners, iron-masters or ships' captains to take a broader and more inclusive view of the consequence of what they were doing. But now the toy has grown so big that it plays with the child.
The biochemical disaster is about 'eutrophication', an excess of organic and chemical nutrients. These are mostly nitrates and phosphates from agriculture and the residues of detergents. The phosphate concentration on the north-western shelf, for example, multiplied by nearly thirty times in the ten years between
1966
and
1976.
The Danube's own phosphate discharge is
21
times greater than it was fifteen years ago, and the river also carries down
50,000
tons of spilled oil a year (worth
$7.2
million at current prices, which would be enough to finance an ecological rescue programme for the entire Black Sea). It is this impossible surfeit of nutrients which causes 'red tides', plankton blooms and the loss of light and dissolved oxygen which is devastating the only area of the Sea's floor where life can exist.
There is also heavy-metal pollution, radio-active contamination since the Chernobyl accident in
1986
and the damage done by reckless use of sophisticated pesticides. The insecticide Lindane, dangerous to human health, is present in the Dniester River at ten times the permitted maximum concentration. In the headwaters of the same river, far up in the Carpathian foothills, an industrial reservoir at Stebniki burst its dam in
1983
and released
400
tons of potassium compounds downstream, traces of which were still fouling water supplies ten years later. And then there is simple, traditional human filth: domestic rubbish and sewage.
The Turkish novelist Yashar Kemal described the Golden Horn at Istanbul: 'that deep well surrounded by huge ugly buildings and sooty factories, spewing rust from their chimneys and roofs and walls, staining the water with sulphur-yellow liquid, a filthy sewer filled with empty cans and rubbish and horse carcases, dead dogs and gulls and wild boars and thousands of cats, stinking ... A viscous, turbid mass, teeming with maggots.' The sewage of a city of ten million people (increasing at the rate of one a minute) gushes almost untreated into the Golden Horn and the Bosporus. Few towns on the Black Sea are any cleaner. Swimming off the north Turkish coast, far from the nearest village,
1
have often had to dive under floating islands of ordure.
The river waters are far worse than the Sea, even though they are still the direct source of water for most Black Sea households. Everyone I met in Odessa boiled their water, or even ran homemade distilling plants in their apartments, to protect themselves against water piped directly from the Dniester. Sometimes it is chlorinated, but so crudely that strange compounds form and make it undrinkable, and these days every summer brings an outbreak of cholera along the arc of coast between the Dnieper and Danube estuaries.
The rivers themselves have been tamed and castrated. The building of colossal dams to control water flow, to irrigate and to generate electricity, has diminished the natural rise and fall of the estuaries, doing fatal damage to the life-patterns of anadromous fish which run upstream to breed. The reservoir at Tsimlyansk on the middle Don has practically abolished the annual flooding of the river's delta, while the barrage on the Kuban River ended the run-up of sturgeon, shad and salmon. The construction of Stalin's monumental dam on the Dnieper submerged under an inland sea the seven cataracts first listed by the Byzantine emperor Constantine Porphyrogenitus, over which the Norsemen used to pull their boats on their way from Kiev to Constantinople.
The Danube delta still survives. Claudio Magris in his book
Danube
describes it as 'an exuberance of plants and animals, reeds and herons, sturgeon, wild boar and cormorants, ash-trees and cane-brakes, a hundred and ten species of fish and three hundred species of bird — a laboratory of life and the forms of life'. Yet its escape has been narrow. The late Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu planned to drain the delta, fell all its vegetation and replace it with rice-paddies.