MOSCOW: Chernobyl happened on his watch, and the world is still paying for the consequences. Mikhail Gorbachev, whose country and presidency were devastated by the disaster, has never forgotten the lesson: that mankind tampers with nature at its peril.
And just as the Red Cross was born from the slaughter on a 19th-century European battlefield, so the former Soviet leader founded the Green Cross to save the environment from the wars, catastrophes and exploitation that have so endangered our planet.
Next month Gorbachev turns 75. And at the gathering in Moscow of world statesmen honouring him, he intends to ram home the message that has become his personal leitmotiv: if the environment is to be saved, the world must act now.
Thirteen years since its foundation in 1993, the Green Cross message is taking hold. President Bush made America’s dependence on oil the theme of his State of the Union address. Oil multinationals, car manufacturers and chemical companies compete to parade their environmental credentials. Pollution, climate change and the depletion of natural resources have replaced nuclear weapons as the existential threats that keep voters awake.
Like the Red Cross, its green equivalent wants results, not confrontation. It sees no point in demonising the multinationals or leading the charge against big business.
“The problem is not business; it is the state of the economy, which is decoupled from social concerns and targets,” Alexander Likhotal, the Green Cross president, says. “Business is playing by the rules of the situation.”
Yet those rules are changing, he believes. No company can afford to ignore its responsibilities to the environment. It is not a question of charity, or getting business to do something alien to its core activity. Business is now increasingly involved in cleaning up pollution, managing water resources, searching for safe energy and helping the poor in Asia and Africa because it is good business, he says. Consumers want it. Politicians demand it. Because of investor interest, a Dutch bank recently asked Green Cross to look at how its pension funds could help to promote clean water in developing countries.
Like the Red Cross, the focus is on surviving conflict. Green Cross goes into places where the landscape has been ravaged, the ground poisoned and the infrastructure wrecked - Bosnia or Vietnam or Kuwait, where war has left a savage legacy. People can recover. The environment takes longer.
The aim is to identify what can be done, forge political consensus and win the support of business, local or foreign. “We can’t propose a universal remedy,” Likhotal says. “It’s a matter of sitting around the table.” It is also a matter of commissioning those companies with the necessary expertise. As he says, there is good money to be made: managing water resources, repairing infrastructure or coping with the aftermath of war can guarantee long-term contracts. The La Plata project in South America is an example. An ill-considered dam has brought huge hardship to local people, hearings have been held, the World Bank has released funds to help affected villages and Green Cross is trying to engage experts who can mitigate the damage.
Again like the Red Cross, Green Cross aims to be studiously neutral. “We’re not a militant organisation.” It relies on networks, local supporters and government contacts. This is reflected in its funding - about 30 per cent corporate, 30 per cent governmental and the rest from donors and volunteers. But today the environment is a hot political issue: climate change, nuclear power and oil issues can put thousands of demonstrators on the streets. Green Cross itself was accused of siding with Slobodan Milosevic, the former Serbian President, when it raised the alarm about depleted uranium after the bombing in Kosovo. Its focus on past and future conflict pushes it into other controversies, especially competition for water resources, the disposal of chemical weapons and the future of nuclear energy.
Not suprisingly, given Chernobyl, Likhotal is anti-nuclear, though he insists that, for the moment, it is a “necessary evil”. The world needs energy and nuclear must fill the gap, he says. But energy must not be an instrument of political pressure in the way that Russia has been using its gas reserves of late.
The Geneva secretariat coordinates international operations, but funds are scarce and the scale is small - a team of five or six experts may be the nucleus of any new campaign or project. Countries where the environment is a big political issue have strong supporter networks, with about 100,000 members in Japan. In Britain, Green Cross is barely visible.
Gorbachev has tried to change that. He wrote recently to Tony Blair expressing concern at the slow pace of eliminating nuclear, chemical and biological weapons after the G8 pledge, four years ago, to set up a dollars 20billion Global Partnership fund to do so. The Prime Minister replied two weeks ago, defending the British record on non-proliferation and saying that he wanted to continue to develop “our very positive relationship with Green Cross International”. He said that Britain shared concerns over environmental protection, and was fully committed to its Global Partnership obligations.
Such promises of statesmen are vital, but it is the commitment on the ground that Likhotal is chasing. Here he sees business at a crossroads, having moved from suspicion to ridicule and then on to engagement. The oil majors are an example: BP has won the annual Green Cross environmental award; Shell’s record in Nigeria, he says, has improved substantially since the 1970s.