Clean Air, Healthy Children

The first step, when confronted with overwhelming obstacles, is figuring out where to start. In 1993, when ISC arrived in Nizhnii Tagil, the city was so polluted that the snow fell in a rainbow of colors: orange, brown, black, and grey.

An industrial center on the eastern slope of Russia's Ural Mountains, Nizhnii Tagil (nish-nee ta-geel) had 4,700 sources of pollution emitting 141 chemicals. The city's 440,000 inhabitants suffered the country's highest rates of lung and stomach cancers, and the children had double the incidence of bronchial disease. Acres of industrial waste vied with 800,000 tons a year of household trash to clog the landscape; deadly toxins flowed like the water they poisoned.

As the industrial heart of the cold war era, Nizhnii Tagil was closed off to westerners until the year we arrived. Years of production and a centralized government meant that local citizens and government officials had very little experience working together to solve critical problems. And, with limited resources, the city needed help deciding where to target funds where they would help the greatest possible number of people.

ISC knew from experience that one success lays the groundwork for the next. We set to work helping people assess what they most needed and what would make the greatest difference.

We conducted public surveys and organized meetings with community members, city officials, industry representatives, and a fledgling environmental movement. Together, we identified particulate matter as the most dangerous threat and the most practical starting point.

Every day fine toxic dust from Nizhnii Tagil's 300-year-old mining industries infiltrated homes, schools, shops, and lungs. Every year it caused hundreds of preventable deaths.

Working with the leaders of a newly formed nonprofit, Clean Home, we targeted a 300-acre dump, a moonscape swept by winds that stirred toxic dust into a cloud that overhung the city. By planting vegetation, we prevented 150 tons of the dust a year from becoming airborne.

Next we turned to another major source of particulate contamination. When the mining companies loaded open rail cars with powdered iron ore, "the particulate matter was spread all over the sky-and blown all over the city," said plant engineer Roman Shunin.

Enter the Dragon: a 40-meter-long cyclone collection system know as the "Dust Dragon" that keeps 1,300 tons of dust out of the air every year and prevents an estimated 28 deaths.

With community support on the rise, ISC and Clean Home moved on to tackle water pollution, trash collection, and environmental education in the schools. Young people mapped illegal garbage dumps throughout the city and targeted clean-ups to coincide with a new garbage collection system. City officials were also coming around. "Now," said local reporter Sergei Stunov, "it is a natural part of good management policy to think about environmental activities and to include them into the budget."

And citizens got fired up. Our small grant program helped local groups set their own priorities, imagine new possibilities, and add to the growing list of successes that were chipping away at the pollution and instilling a can-do attitude in the community.

As a result, community members feel that the next generation will have fewer overwhelming obstacles to face. The school curriculum in Nizhnii Tagil incorporates environmentalism, trainers are teaching other trainers, and programs we helped establish have enlisted teachers and students in developing practical ways to detect, measure, and combat pollution.

"Everything was usually solved by one or two people in powerful positions," said Luba Fainentel, who directs Clean Home. "ISC showed us that ordinary people with ideas can also change their community."

Today, Clean Home continues to offer small grants contests each year because they generate the most creative solutions to environmental problems. Fainentel is especially excited about a new Ecobus that gives historical tours of the city, showing what it once was in its industrial heyday, and what ordinary people were able to do to make a healthier community.

The city, once skeptical of ISC's approach, now regularly convenes committees made up of a broad cross-section of citizens to solve a range of social problems.

Today, the air, land, and water in Nizhnii Tagil are measurably cleaner, and the citizens, city officials, and business people can see that well-directed, low-cost solutions add up to major impacts.