What are we going to breathe tomorrow?

There is an organization named League of Nature Friends in Tokmak district, Zaporizhia oblast. The league’s president Serhii Ivko, who came up with the project “Clean Backwater Is Clean River”, which helped remove three unauthorized garbage dumps in the river Kurkulak’s backwater, has won the program Space of Changes launched by the Open Ukraine Foundation.

The League of Nature Friends also has other projects, such as, for example, “Protecting and Restoring the Chunhul.” The activists of this organization recently planted a small garden in the Chunhul river backwater. Ivko says there are a lot of organizations like his in Zaporizhia oblast — several in every district. They are all busy cleaning the environment. What the populace is still lacking is the culture of dealing with nature. Ivko visited one of the cleaned-up places the other day, only to find a dump again. On the way home from their summer retreats, city residents continue dumping garbage there.

You are really gasping for fresh air on a sweltering summer day, especially in big cities. People keep complaining: look what they’ve done to the environment — we can’t possibly breathe! The Day is asking a counter-question: but who has done this? Perhaps those who signed instructions to put up markets instead of parks? Or those who do not take the trouble of disposing of garbage after an outdoor party? Or those who find it hard to plant a tree next to their house?

We decided to make a nationwide analysis and see where new greenery has appeared in the last while and where there are people like Ivko and his friends who are not indifferent to what all of us will be breathing tomorrow. This is what The Day’s regional correspondents reported.

Construction sites pose danger to green areas

Andrii ARTOV, deputy chairman, Ecology and World association, the Crimean Autonomous Republic:

“We have been strictly controlling the condition of parks and urban parklands, the city ‘lungs,’ in Simferopol for three years now. Our main goal has to see to it that the Simferopol City Council marks out, on maps and on the ground, all the city’s 13 parks and several parklands. This would guarantee that the green area will not be shrinking any more and parks will not be used, bit by bit, as construction sites.

“However, we have managed to achieve this only in part. So, on the one hand, the Crimea has seen a steep rise in the very number of greenfield sites but, on the other hand, this does not diminish the danger of reducing the area of these sites and using them for construction purposes if parkland boundaries have not been documented and marked on the ground.

“For example, some apartment buildings and a community center have been erected in Gagarin Park at the place of the unfinished Ice Palace, and a bowling alley has been set up in Children’s Park. But construction is most active now in the parklands on the city’s outskirts. For instance, a shopping center is being built among the trees on Yaltynska Street, and green areas are shrinking on October 60th Anniversary St., and in other parts of the city.”

A true masterpiece of park art is rising around Donbas-Arena

Donetsk is implementing the most ambitious park art project in this country. It is a new park which is gradually coming up around the Donbas-Arena stadium, which is being built by the Shakhtar soccer club. The building of this sports facility on the territory of a city park once sparked a protest among environmentalists and the populace. But now, by all accounts, this is no longer a problem because a rather neglected park is supposed to give way to a “green masterpiece.”

The very philosophy of the park’s planning is based on a concept called “Donetsk Diamond.” The diamond is the stadium itself which seems to be emitting rays of light. These rays will be shaped as alleys and trails in a new recreation park. What is more, the designers also intend to put up sort of aureoles around the diamond. They will be made from various species of trees.

Donetsk residents will not have to wait for seedlings to grow up and show all their beauty. The creators decided to “jump the lights” and present the residents with a finished park. The best trees of some valuable species are now waiting in two German nurseries for a journey to Donetsk. The trees, aged 20 to 45 years, are pines, maples, oaks, cherries, and lilacs.

There will be a total 94,700 square meters of lawns in the new park. The green lawns will be sprinkled with 6.750 sq. m. of flowerbeds uniformly distributed across the park. There will be glades of roses — real pearls in the huge collection of flowers. The builders are also planning to place 4,200 sq. m. of fascines, a kind of cascaded artificial lawns on the slopes, from which creeping roses will be hanging.

The so-called garden of stones will be another significant item of the new complex of greenery. It will be designed in the best European traditions of park art and located inside the green area on the side of Myru Avenue. Awesome boulders, high steppe grass, silence, and benches — you will find all you need to take a well-earned rest.

Industrial does not mean drab

Twenty three parks, 135 pleasure gardens, 11 riverside drives, and 17 miniparks, with a total area of 16,200 hectares — this is what industrial Kryvy Rih can boast of.

The gargantuan steel mills, such as the world-famous Arcelor Mittal Kryvy Rih, are also upholding a good tradition. Greenery occupies almost 1,000 ha of the territory of this company’s four facilities. At least 2,500 trees are being planted every year.

Kryvy Rih’s ore processing plants are not lagging behind, either. For example, they are going to apply state-of-the-art technologies and landscape design to lay out a minipark in a housing estate shortly. The list can be continued.

For many years now the municipal botanic garden has been a veritable “pearl” of nature, a recreation place for a lot of city residents. In the spring of this year alone, thousands of city dwellers could feast their eyes on more than 40 varieties of lilacs.

Unfortunately, a lot of people do not value nature. Every time after weekends and holidays, Kryvy Rih’s parks turn into garbage dumps in the literal sense of the word — even within the city limits, to say nothing of the outskirts and recreation zones. At the end of a summer season you will see no delights of nature here for plastic bottles, broken glass, and waste.

Are we going to live comfortably?

Rivne ranks 36th on the list of Ukraine’s most comfortable cities. Environmentalists are sure that the city ranks so low because of polluted air, among other things. This is the most acute problem in the city today. Motor transport is the main pollutant, with 3,437 vehicles passing through the downtown per hour. Accordingly, there is a high rate of hazardous emissions.

Experts from the Ecology Department of the National University of Water and Nature Management recently conducted bioindication: they studied pollen and lichens in the city (lichens absorb toxins and, hence, do not occur on trees in a polluted area). According to a cytogenetic analysis made by Prof. Mykola Klymenko and his assistant Natalia Khomych, the admissible concentration limit for hazardous matter in downtown Rivne is three to four times higher than the norm. Accordingly, this impacts the morbidity rates among the populace.

For this reason, environmentalists recommend planting linden trees along the roads. This tree is the best absorber of hazardous matter. There used to be a linden alley in downtown Rivne, but it vanished into thin air after the driveway of Soborna Street had been widened. Last spring green maples came up in place of lindens — but they are dwarfish.

The situation with parklands is better. Employees at the Rivne Greenfield Trust public utilities enterprise have planted over 600 tree seedlings and almost 1,000 shrubs in Lebedynka, Prosvita, and Basivkutsky parks since last March. But these employees are warning that just a little more than a half of the young trees may survive until the next spring. The rest will die at the hands of the city residents. This is, unfortunately, a frequently-occurring phenomenon. The city authorities also intend to restore Jubilee Park by planting new trees there. But this is a mere intention so far.

The governor himself plants trees

This spring Mykola Romaniuk, head of the Volyn Oblast Administration, planted trees for the second time on the territory that the president had entrusted him. Last year he planted 250 trees and now he has broken his own record, as he put it jokingly, and planted 300 trees.

To go green in Volyn means not so much to lay out new city parks and alleys as to plant new woodlands. Last year the oblast administration planted four hectares of new woods, and this spring they planted oaks, pines, and cherries on a similar territory in the Moshchany forest near the Kyiv—Yahodyn highway. Volodymyr Bondar, Romaniuk’s predecessor as governor, also used to plant trees. But in that case it was not a spot in the woods but an area along the Kyiv—Kovel—Yahodyn highway, where lovely small fir-trees sprang up.

The green belt performs an environmental and an esthetic function and will protect from snow and wind the border segment of the road now being reconstructed to meet international standards.

This spring, too, Volyn residents took an active part in the campaign “The Future of the Woods Is in Your Hands” traditionally held by the regional Directorate for Woodland Management and Hunting. New woods have been planted on hundreds of hectares of lands that are not being used for farming purposes or where preplanned woodcutting was done.

It is projected that woods will account for 36 percent of the Volyn oblast’s territory by 2040. During the springtime toloka (voluntary public work — Ed.) in the oblast center, 78 hectares of parks, miniparks, and alleys were cleaned up; 2,710 trees and about 3,000 shrubs were planted. The new lawns and flowerbeds occupy nearly 1.5 ha. The volunteers removed 112 unauthorized dumps, cleaned up the banks of the rivers Sapalaivka and Styr and two water springs. Almost 50,000 people took part in the springtime toloka held on the city council’s initiative.

The Pope joined the greenery planting campaign

There can be no too much woodland. This is the maxim of Lviv oblast’s foresters who have held a springtime campaign called “The Future of the Woods Is in Your Hands” for three years in a row.

Roman Koval, a leading expert at the regional Directorate for Woodland Management and Hunting, told The Day that it is extremely important that this campaign attracts both adult and young Lviv residents to wood planting and urban greening. For example, this year pupils of 196 schools took part in the campaign, as did 230 representatives of civic organizations, 370 officials, and 56 local journalists. There were a total 12,000 people who turned into “foresters” in this campaign. Naturally, there were also 5,000 forestry employees. They all planted trees on 300 hectares of the forest. It is gratifying that all the 5,000 plus seedlings of trees and shrubs to be planted near schools had been provided by sponsors.

Also greened was the manor-cum-museum of Stepan Bandera in the village of Volia Zaderevatska, Stryi district, where a big park of 650 trees and shrubs was laid out. Incidentally, Stepan Bandera Jr., the OUN-UPA leader’s grandson, was a guest of honor and a participant in the campaign. He planted the first oak-tree in memory of his grandfather.

Those who had moved to Lviv oblast from Stary Sambir, have been planting greenery in the Otchyi Lis area next to the village of Lavriv. They have planted 1,500 trees here this year, including an oak seedling that grew out of the acorn blessed by Pope Benedict XIV.

The foresters also honored the memory of the legendary Ukrainian composer Volodymyr Ivasiuk, the author of the song “Chervona Ruta” (“Red Rue”), laying out an alley of about 500 beech trees in Briukhovychi, near Lviv, where Ivasiuk’s body was found 30 years ago.

Every year Lviv foresters also plant woods on the banks of Lake Yavorivske, the territory of a former quarry of the notorious sulfur-making plant. To strengthen the banks and stop the ground erosion, they plant pine, birch and maple trees. This year, for instance, they have planted three hectares of greenery.

Woods are also being planted on the lands of other users — outside the official limits of woodlands and on the plots that belong to city councils but have been neglected or used for wrong purposes. Sixty hectares of new woods have been planted this year. It is promised that this area will have doubled by the end of this year.

Khmelnytsky is green!

Khmelnytsky can be rightly called one of Ukraine’s greenest oblast centers. Last year the city was awarded — and deservedly so — a certificate of honor and a cup as winner of the national contest “The Most Comfortable and Safe City.”

Khmelnytsky has seen large-scale reconstruction and beautification of its parklands in the past two years. In particular, about four million hryvnias have already been spent from the municipal coffers on restoring the downtown Taras Shevcenko Park. Last October and November alone, about 2,000 seedlings of rare trees species — European mountain ash, tulip tree, Savin juniper, box tree, thuja, spirea, weigela, forsythia, and quince — were planted in the city residents’ favorite places of recreation, such as Myhailo Chekman, and Ivan Franko parks and Podillia botanic garden, under a project of landscape designers.

They also remembered to increase the number of such customary trees and shrubs as maple, birch, linden, jasmine, lilac, etc. The city budget earmarked a total UAH 200,000 for this purpose. This year 2,612 seedlings of trees, shrubs, and flowers have been planted on an area of one hectare.

What Khmelnytsky residents can also feast their eyes on is National University’s botanic garden. Laid out last year, it contains the unique varieties of rare plants which not only provide aesthetic pleasure but are also very useful in scientific research.