Fire in the Forest

Siberians raging over burning taiga

In the public mind, Russian forests have always been an unlimited resource, as vast as many of the world’s countries combined, with as many trees as there are grains of sand in the desert.

Perhaps it was this sort of thinking that pushed the government in 2015 to declare most of the forests in Siberia, the ones in the North that are far from human settlements, as areas where wildfires don’t need to be extinguished. These “zones of control” were simply too expensive to cover for the cash-strapped fire prevention services, the Environment Ministry decreed.

This summer, however, the decision seems to have backfired (literally), as out-of-control fires inundate large cities like Krasnoyarsk with smoke. Some plumes are even visible from North America.

Although public discontent has caused the government to intervene, by August the fires were too strong and vast to be extinguished even if the entire Russian army got involved. At press time, the forest service, military, and Emergencies Ministry were battling 161 raging fires, while 295 more were declared too “distant or hard to reach” for action.

Some officials enraged citizens with their callous statements, such as Krasnoyarsk Governor Alexander Uss, who claimed that putting out the fires is economically unreasonable, and that residents are being over-dramatic, just because the wind is carrying smoke into their homes.

When Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev finally flew into Krasnoyarsk to discuss the fires, locals made fun of him for holding talks at the airport. “It’s become fashionable to hold meetings at the airport – they must be afraid of breathing too much clean Krasnoyarsk air,” one comment said on the popular Instagram account @nebo.community.

Medvedev concluded after the meeting that “there is nothing ultra-sad going on,” though he advised health officials to monitor people with chronic illnesses.

Internet users, meanwhile, have mounted campaigns to attract official attention to their predicament: a change.org petition demanding declaration of a state of emergency for all of Siberia had gathered over a million signatures by early August. Celebrities appealed to the government to “save Siberia,” and artists made new works to raise awareness about the issue.

“Our ancestors saved the Motherland from the Golden Horde, Poles, Swedes, Turks, Napoleon and Germans. Was that economically reasonable?” the St. Petersburg artist @loketski wrote when presenting his work.