Environmental News

Letter to the Editor: “No mining in Teghut”
By Jeff Masarjian, Executive Director, Armenia Tree Project

Armenian Reporter
July 14, 2007

Thank you for bringing attention to the current challenges and choices which will impact Armenia’s environmental integrity long into the future. The June 23 and July 7 articles about the nation’s environmental policies which allow for destructive mining practices and the newly released study on illegal logging highlight important issues that should be of concern to everyone who cares about the survival of the culture, land, and people of Armenia.

Armenia is a very special place for many reasons, and I would like to bring to your attention a few more that may be less well known. Located at the convergence of 3 major bio-geographic regions, Armenia has within it 7 of the world’s 9 climate zones. Although it consists of only 29,000 square kilometers, amounting to 0.05 percent of the land mass of the northern hemisphere, it is home to 40 percent of all landscape types found there.

As a result, Armenia has enormous biological diversity, including: 8,800 plant species, half of which are at risk of extinction; 13 species and 360 varieties of wheat, which was first cultivated there 10,000 years ago 260 species of trees and bushes; 17,500 invertebrate and 500 vertebrate species of animals, of which 346 species are birds (of the 500 vertebrate species, 300 are rare or declining, and 18 are at risk of extinction); and one-third of the 156 reptile species found in the former Soviet Union.

Today, Armenia’s forest cover is at its lowest point in history, estimated to be at less than 8 percent of its territory. The loss of forests is caused by poverty and unemployment, a lack of alternate fuel sources, legal and illegal commercial cutting and export of wood, and improper management. Forests perform important environmental and socioeconomic functions, and when they disappear, long-term consequences result, such as erosion, flooding, landslides, climate extremes, loss of water supply, reduction of topsoil fertility, loss of plant and animal biodiversity, and severe air pollution. The harsh reality is that all of Armenia’s forests may be gone in as little as 20 years at the current rate of deforestation, leading to irreversible environmental damage.

In the small agrarian village of Teghut in northern Armenia, the Armenian Copper Program, a foreign-owned company, is seeking final approval from the government to begin clear cutting as much as 1,500 acres (the size of 1,125 American football fields) of forest in preparation for an enormous open pit strip mining operation in search of copper and molybdenum ore. The ore will be separated from the soil by adding various toxic chemical compounds to it. The resulting sludge is planned to be dumped in a nearby pristine gorge in Shnogh village.

Given the government’s history of being unable to monitor and enforce protection of the environment, it is highly likely that the toxins and heavy metals will leach into the ground and nearby river, creating a permanent death zone in the area and threatening the water quality for people downstream. Witness the damage being done by the copper tailing dump in Akhtala village, or the unfiltered toxins belching from the smelter in Alaverdi, or the many other examples of damage being done to the land and health of Armenians by the mining industry, as documented in the new film “Poisoning for Profit” produced by Vem Media Arts.

The need for economic development in Armenia, where nearly half the population lives below the poverty line, is enormous. But should economic growth be blindly pursued regardless of the long term cost and damage that will be inflicted on the land and the health of the people?

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. once stated, “People make the argument that the time has come in our nation where we have to choose between the environment on one hand and economic prosperity on the other, and that is a false choice. In 100 percent of the situations, good environmental policy is identical to good economic policy….Some industries want us to treat the planet like it is a business in liquidation, to convert our natural resources to cash as quickly as possible, to have a few years of pollution-based prosperity.”

“We can generate an instantaneous cash flow and the illusion of a prosperous economy, but our children are going to pay for our joy ride, and they are going to pay for it with denuded landscapes, poor health, and huge cleanup costs….Pollution is deficit spending--it’s a way of loading the costs of our prosperity and our profits on the backs of our children.”

If final approval is given to proceed with this mine, eventually the ore will be depleted, and the jobs it created will be gone. The profits will be exported, and left behind will be the legacy of a poisoned landscape unsuitable for agricultural production, the permanent loss of innumerable habitats that support unique plants and animals, and a dump site that will be a blight on the environment and long term threat to the health of future generations in northern Armenia and possibly even neighboring countries.

SOS Teghut is a coalition of 26 environmental organizations in Armenia that is working together to inform the Armenian public and concerned citizens around the globe of the ecological disaster that is looming in Teghut. We are asking the Armenian government to further analyze the costs and benefits of approving this mine and to consider instead other forms of more sustainable economic development possibilities for the region.

More information and photos about Teghut and can be found at Armenia Tree Project’s web site www.ArmeniaTree.org. Anyone interested in supporting the effort to preserve the landscape there and advocate for more sustainable development can participate in SOS Teghut’s Action Alert by sending an electronic letter to the President and other government officials from the website as well.

Throughout history there are many examples of civilizations which flourished, then mysteriously disappeared. The author Jared Diamond, in his book “Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed,” researched and documented evidence of what many of these civilizations had in common--in every case, the demise of the civilization was preceded by an unsustainable use of their natural resources, including complete deforestation of the land, which became unable to support the population.

As Armenians who managed to survive for millennia, we must consider the legacy our ancestors left to us on this precious land, and be responsible to the generations of Armenians to come to do the same for them.

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