Most timbering of the forests is done with clear-cuts, with as much as 70 percent of the cut timber going to waste. According to one estimate, acid rain is killing more than 500,000 hectares of forests in northwestern Siberia. The most polluted reservoirs in the U.S.S.R. are along the rivers and lakes on Kola Peninsula and along the Bug, Dnyestr, Danube and Don rivers. There is no such thing as an environmental impact statement in the Soviet Union, although there are informal efforts to establish something like one. And no one can be certain who is responsible for most of the polluting because so much of it is associated with secret military enterprises.
Soviet agriculture is especially vulnerable, with much of the topsoil eroding.
Farmlands have been heavily doused with pesticides and fertilizers. In the western Ukraine, thousands of square miles of farm land remain contaminated from the Chernobyl nuclear accident. Once the world's fourth largest inland body of saltwater, the Aral Sea has lost two- thirds of its original size since 1970 and is expected to vanish by the year 2000 because massive Stalinist irrigation projects have diverted the waters of rivers that once flowed into the Sea into enormous cotton spreads. The Aral Sea fishing fleets are a thing of the past, with rotting hulls of the boats thrown up on a shrunken shore of the sea which looks increasingly like a brackish mud puddle. The salt and silt from the dried up Sea blows across the cotton fields, requiring an immense effort to keep them in production.