Russian Launches Baikal Petition

摘要

A Russian scientist at Iowa State University has started a petition to save Siberia's Lake Baikal. Evolutionary biologist Dennis Lavrov says he felt "an obligation to speak about it," after Prime Minister Vladimir Putin in January overturned a 2001 ban on disposing of toxic waste in the lake Russia calls the "Sacred Sea."rnThe change allows the Baikalsk Pulp and Paper Mill, which closed in 2008 after 42 years when it couldn't comply with the ban, once more to dump its waste, including cancer-causing dioxins, into the largest, deepest, and oldest freshwater lake in the world.