THE NATURAL WORLD
The Struggle to Protect a Pristine Mongolian Lake
By MALCOLM G. SCULLY
Philadelphia
The first time Clyde E. Goulden saw Lake Hovsgol, in northern Mongolia, he knew he was looking at a treasure. He also knew that he had, serendipitously, been presented with a unique opportunity to study one of the purest bodies of freshwater in the world.
That first encounter, in 1994, led to the creation of the Institute for Mongolian Diversity and Ecological Studies, at the Academy of Natural Sciences here, and to Goulden's intense involvement, not only in research on the lake, but also in efforts to protect it and other pristine areas of Mongolia from environmental degradation.
For Goulden, the institute represents a chance "to make a difference" in an environment that has not -- at least not yet -- suffered the insults that heavy industrialization and economic development have brought to many other parts of the world. A land-locked country that, at 600,000 square miles, is about the size of the United States east of the Mississippi, Mongolia lies at what the United Nations Development Program calls "a critical transition zone in Central Asia" -- a place where Siberian forests, the steppes, the Altai Mountains, and the Gobi Desert converge.
An aquatic ecologist, Goulden was serving as a curator at the academy's Patrick Center of Environmental Research when the Philadelphia scientific institution received an appeal for help from a Buddhist lama in Buryatia, an autonomous Russian republic just across the border from Mongolia. In the post-Soviet era, Buddhism was enjoying a revival in Buryatia and in Mongolia, and the lama and his followers were concerned about the effects of economic development on lands that the Buddhists considered sacred. "A great deal of development was occurring there because of gold deposits," Goulden says, "and the more traditional people were very concerned about the exploitation of the region. They wanted to see if tourism could be developed as an alternative."
In conversations leading up to that 1994 visit, the lama learned that Goulden's research focused on the impacts of humans on freshwater systems and that he had visited Lake Baikal, the world's largest lake by volume, in Buryatia, in 1966 on a cultural-exchange program.
"The lama said that while I was over there, I should go see Hovsgol," Goulden says. "He said it was so clean, so pure, that you could see fish swimming in the water from an airplane."
At the lama's urging, Goulden and Robert McCracken Peck, a photojournalist who is a fellow of the Academy of Natural Sciences, decided to travel to Buryatia by way of Mongolia. While another team of academy scientists met with Buddhists in Buryatia, he and Peck explored the lake. It was, he reports, all that the lama had said it was and more -- "a gorgeous body of water and a pristine natural laboratory." He realized, he adds, "that this is as close as we will ever come to being able to examine a completely unaltered lake."
The lake itself is about 100 miles long and 20 miles wide. It is ancient -- at least 10 million years old -- and like nearby Baikal, and Lakes Tanganyika and Victoria in Africa, it is known as a tectonic lake, formed by the shifting of plates in the earth's crust.
Unlike Baikal, however, Hovsgol is virtually unknown in the West and has not been subjected to the environmental stresses that Baikal has endured. A report from Goulden's institute notes, for instance, that "many of the Soviet factories along the shores of Baikal were built with little regard for pollution prevention." While some of those factories have been closed, it adds, "coal-burning electric facilities still operate without emission controls, and outmoded pulp and paper mills still release potentially harmful effluents into the water."
On his return to the United States, Goulden applied for and received support from the National Science Foundation to conduct an inventory of the flora and fauna in and around the lake. The survey has been especially valuable for entomologists, who have discovered a previously unknown species of caddisfly that is unable to fly -- it skates on the water -- and more than 100 species of craneflies, 10 of which are new to science.
With the encouragement of colleagues, he also persuaded the Academy of Natural Sciences to set up the institute to stimulate research on Mongolia's ecosystems and to find public and private support for such research. Ultimately, he says, "the goal is to develop an understanding of this land's unique ecology and to encourage ecological tourism as part of its economic-development plan."
The institute and the U.S. Department of the Interior have also received a $300,000 grant from the U.S. Agency for International Development for a joint, two-year project to improve the management and environmental protection of a 1.9-million-acre park that surrounds Lake Hovsgol. Goulden will return to Mongolia next month to begin the second year of the project.
The establishment of Goulden's institute and its efforts to study and protect Lake Hovsgol have been cast against a larger political drama playing out in Mongolia over the past decade. The country emerged from some 70 years of domination by the Soviet Union in 1990, when the first free elections in its history were held. But the transition from satellite state to independence has been anything but smooth.
Morris Rossabi, a professor of history at Queens College of the City University of New York and an expert on Mongolia, outlined the nature of the problems the country has encountered in a paper, "Mongolia in the 1990s: From Commissars to Capitalists?," that he prepared for the Soros Foundations' Open Society Institute.
The post-Soviet government was dominated by reformers within the Mongolian People's Revolutionary Party, the group that had run the country in the Soviet era. They pushed hard to abolish Mongolia's "bureaucratic centralism," he wrote, but failed to prevent a steep economic decline.
"The Soviet withdrawal of economic and military aid truly undermined the government's efforts," he added. "The sudden cessation of such assistance, which amounted to more than 30 percent of the country's gross domestic product, exerted enormous pressure on the government and society. Severe fuel shortages idled factories, and unemployment rose dramatically while production declined."
By 1996, he said, the government "faced a grave crisis. Corruption, inefficiency, and mismanagement plagued the economy. ... Erosion of social services, deterioration in the status of women, intellectuals, and students, and crumbling facilities for medical and scientific research also contributed to disillusionment with the MPRP."
That disillusionment led, in 1996, to the election of a government controlled by the Democratic Union, a coalition of two opposition parties that had received assistance from the U.S. Republican Party's International Republican Institute and had even devised a "Contract With the Mongolian Voter," modeled on the 1994 "Contract With America" that helped elect Republican majorities in the U.S. Congress.
In the spirit of its American advisers, the government has pushed for the privatization of land, housing, and government-run enterprises; tried to create a more favorable climate for business; and stressed the need for economic development and the creation of a market economy.
The changing political terrain in Mongolia clearly will have an effect on the environmental landscape as well. Goulden notes, for instance, that the departure of the Russians a decade ago and subsequent changes in the economic policies of the Mongolian government have led to an increase in the number of sheep, yaks, cows, horses, and goats that Mongolia's seminomadic herders tend near the lake. More livestock raises the threat of overgrazing, which can lead to increased erosion and a decline in water quality.
The institute began to monitor water quality last year, but among the 32 sites it has sampled, only one is "seriously degraded," Goulden wrote in a report from the field last August. Nonetheless, he said, "proper incentives to limit herds and protect streams need to quickly be found and accepted by local people before serious damage is done to the lake."
On a larger scale, the issues that the institute and other environmental groups face in Mongolia represent a classic challenge: how to create a healthy economy in one of the poorest countries of the world without destroying the health of the environment. In a country struggling to move to a free-market system, the environmentalists need to demonstrate that conserving rather than consuming natural resources has an economic payoff.
"The political pressures, the economic pressures are great," Goulden says, "but if the leaders see that alternative forms of development, such as tourism, are working, then the pressures to do the exploitative development are reduced. If nothing is happening there, the exploitative development will move forward."
A member of the ruling Democratic Union wrote recently that his country and other former members of the Soviet bloc "are now trying to achieve what has never been done anywhere in the world: to build a market economy and a democratic polity simultaneously." The challenge for Goulden and the institute he directs is to demonstrate that environmental preservation is compatible with those goals.
Malcolm G. Scully is The Chronicle's editor at large.
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Section: International
Page: B12
