Newly created journalists' association to focus on environmental issues (02/25/96)

Newly created journalists' association to focus on environmental issues

by John Dillon

KRYVYI RIH - Ukraine's severe environmental problems demand specialized attention from the print and broadcast media, according to organizers of a newly formed association of environmental journalists.

About 35 media professionals met in this southern industrial city in early February for a conference on regional environmental issues. The reporters and editors - representing newspapers, magazines, medical journals and broadcast media - voted at the conclusion of the meeting to form an organization of journalists dedicated to broadening public understanding of pollution and natural resource problems.

The association hopes to improve the quality and the scope of environmental news reporting in Ukraine, said Valery Kozak of Kryvyi Rih, the newly elected president of the Ukrainian Environmental Journalists' Association.

Journalists who cover complex scientific and economic issues of pollution control need both technical training and support, he said.

"Unfortunately, not every journalist knows the table of chemical elements," he said. Ignorance of basic science means "they can give very funny information."

A professional association is needed also to help journalists as they write controversial articles and press reluctant officials for information, said Mr. Kozak, a veteran newspaper reporter who now directs a Kryvyi Rih publishing house specializing in the mineral industry.

"We have the right to say what we think. But if we say it, sometimes we have problems," Mr. Kozak said. "We don't have an organization that can defend our rights. So our aim is to establish an association for support."

Conference organizers received funding assistance from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the U.S. Agency for International Development. The event was sponsored by the Ecological Television and Public Awareness Project of Ukraine, a joint project of the National Ecological Center of Ukraine, a non-governmental organization based in Kyiv, and the Institute for Sustainable Communities, a Vermont-based environmental organization working in Eastern Europe.

The journalists adopted by-laws for the new organization and elected a seven-member board. Besides Mr. Kozak, the board members are: Andrey Michailik, vice -president, of Kyiv; Edward Bobrovitsky, vice-president, of Zaporizhzhia; Andrey Konechenkov of Kyiv; Igor Malakhov of Kryvyi Rih; Vladimir Berezin of the Donbas region and Ludmilla Cheredarik of Chernivtsi.

The fledgling Ukrainian Environmental Journalists Association will join the International Federation of Environmental Journalists, a Paris-based organization formed in 1993, Mr. Kozak said. The international organization holds annual conferences, sponsors training seminars and assists journalists who are denied information.

The Ukrainian environmental journalists should find no shortage of topics to cover. Ukraine is the most environmentally degraded country in the former Soviet Union with 70 percent of the population living in "environmentally dangerous" areas, according to a 1994 report by the Canadian government's International Development Research Center. The report - which focused on the Dnipro River basin - said the nation's pressing pollution problems include continued contamination from the Chornobyl nuclear disaster to high levels of water and air pollution caused by heavy industry.

While in Kryvyi Rih, the journalists toured the region's open-pit iron mines, part of an industrial complex that has scarred the landscape and polluted local water supplies. They also held workshops on improving local coverage of environmental issues and interviewed government and industry officials in Kryvyi Rih responsible for the mining and metallurgy industries.

Conference organizers included Mr. Kozak and the National Ecological Center of Ukraine, which has a branch office in Kryvyi Rih. The organizers said they chose the industrial city of 800,000 people as the conference site because the area's pollution problems and heavy industry provided a fitting case study for the environmental reporters.

But local government officials were uncomfortable with the media focusing attention on Kryvyi Rih's environmental problems. The mayor of the city, Yuriy Lubonenko, tried to pressure organizers to move the meeting to Kyivi, according to Mr. Kozak. Local officials then contacted the Kryvyi Rih hotel director and asked him not to allow the conference guests to stay in the hotel, Mr. Kozak said.

Authorities also told local news organizations not to cover the conference, he said.

"The local TV and radio said they got calls from the mayor's office saying 'you can be here (at the conference) but you can't write about this,'" Mr. Kozak said. "They (local authorities) didn't say what they didn't like about our conference. They just said it's better to organize it in Kyiv."

Mr. Kozak and other journalists interviewed at the conference said the public's interest in environmental issues has waned since independence due to an overriding concern about the economy.

"People are very concerned about the environment. But the living standards are less than they were five years ago," said Valery Demianenko, a writer and environmental educator from Cherkassy who attended the conference.

"The economy is the essential issue because without money, we can't solve these (environmental) problems."

John Dillon is a Vermont newspaper reporter and freelance journalist who specializes in covering environmental and energy issues. This year, Mr. Dillon is attending the Massachusetts Institute of Technology under a fellowship awarded by the MIT Knight Science Journalism program.)

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