Requiem for Baikal as a warning

Moscow State University of Civil Engineering (MGSU), 129337, Yaroslavl sh. 26, Moscow, Russia

^* Corresponding author: dagaev.yua92@gmail.com

Abstract

Baikal, the “sacred sea”, a unique natural phenomenon with fresh water resources for the entire planet, is threatened with turning into a muddy puddle. In recent years, the shores of Lake Baikal have become more and more accessible for exploration by tourists from the center of Russia and abroad. Tourists and entrepreneurs from China, who compensate for the economic vacuum in Siberia, providing the local population with work in the absence of a state system of economic integration of the region into the general economic structure of the country, are especially actively populating the south of Baikal. Travel companies that have reached Lake Baikal provide guests with minimal comfort in primitive coastal houses and do not care about neutralizing household waste flowing into the lake. The most dangerous source of pollution is the pools with poisonous sludge located on the very shore of the lake, which were left after the closure of the Baikal Pulp and Paper Mill in 2013. In the near future they can be washed away by mountain mudflows. It is necessary that the central and local authorities, when creating the programs to prevent the destruction of Lake Baikal, should be guided by the simplest form of survival developed by nature to extinguish the phenomena that threaten its existence. This is the concept of METABOLISM, which means a system of living in the regime of the circulation of substances, the real preservation of the ecological balance even by tough measures of educating the consciousness of a person.