Author: Anastasiya Tihonova
Источник: Материалы англоязычной конференции «Молодь та суспільство». – Донецк, ДонУЕП.

     Today ecological issues are comming at the foreground slowly but constantly. Humanity begings to realize with a sizeable delay, that the main danger for the world is not terrorism, but pollution of environment. If to count up a number of people, who die from diseases, caused by harmful emissions in the atmosphere and water resevoirs, it will turn out awful. The pollution of the environment in Donbass is not a regional problem, it is an issue of the world.

     Today we could hardly find a person, who is not affected by the industrialization and the urbanization. In the last 100 years about 360 milliard tons of carbonic acid were thrown in the atmosphere, so it's amount has increased at 15 per cent. The content of methane in the atmosphere is increasing all allowable levels and it's influence at the biosphere is also very negative. The hydrosphere suffers a lot from throwing down unpurificated sewage. Water is covered with duckweed. Bacillus Enterici and Salmonella were found in the seas and even in the resort areas. The contamination of the environment with nuclear waste become the main ecological issue.

     Against a background of all this global issues Donbass appears as one of the most unfavourable regions in Europe. In this region the harmful waste in the atmosphere exceeds the demi-ukrainian levels by 10 fold. There are more than 500 objects of elevated danger in the province, more than 4 billard industrial and 400 million consumer wastes has accumuleted.

     Mining damages the nature – open-cast and coal mines cause irreverible changes in ecological situation, and as a result swamping is arising.

     Technological influence causes irreperable changes in nature, rare species of animals and plants become extinct. There is an example: bustard, a kind of bird, was earlier the symbol of Donetsk steppes, now it has almost disappeared. For the last years 34 species of plants have been lost.

     Why did it occur? Everething has started since the time, when Donbass was called All-Union stokehold, and the building of coal mines, metallurgical, chemical mills, power plants and other objects was being started at a rapid pace. And nobody cared much of ecology. There's one more example. During the building of mines provided for purification of underground waters. That contaminated waters were simply thrown into the rivers from settling ponds. Another example is a wet coke-extinguishing, when hundreds tons of phenols, dioxides, nitric compounds and other harmful substances rise with water steams into the air and then accumulate on the ground. But there were slogans: "Give coal!", "Give metal!" and etc. These slogans were fulfilled at any price and with huge enthusiasm. And now we are paying for that foolhardiness.

     What can we do with such a heritage today? Can we reconcile industry with nature? Yes, we can. And there is a sample. There is a city in the USA – Pitsburg, which industry is similar to such of Donbass. Experts, that had been there, claim that there isn't any smoke above the chimneys of metallurgical mills, and there are no smoking waste banks near mines. Metallurgical agregates and chemical plants are supplied with effective cleaning equipment, and rock is laied into emptiness after mine excavation. So, mills and mines can give more production, than our manufacturing and – what is more important – they cannot damage nature.

     There are a lot of ecological issues, the major among them is how to change the consciousness of people, how to turn them to ecology, to show them the horrors we are still making with nature and wild life.