When nature lovers are used against nature

A few days ago, a group of residents from Nikaj-Mërtur appeared in public, angry and alarmed, presenting themselves as part of the wider national protest movement for the environment. Their complaint was that the government was interfering with the river by building three mountain check dams.

They looked genuinely upset. So much so that they seemed less like people acting in bad faith than people who had been misled.

The Albanian Power Corporation has begun work on a project to build three check dams along the river. These are engineering structures built across the riverbed. They act like filters or barriers, trapping sediment and debris before it flows into Lake Koman.

Lake Koman does not receive only alluvial deposits. It also receives plastic waste from the villages of Nikaj-Mërtur and from tourism activity in the area. Rubbish thrown into the river eventually ends up in the lake. Every year, self-declared lovers of nature post shocking pictures from Lake Koman, showing plastic waste floating on the surface. Some of that waste comes from the mountain rivers and streams that flow into it.

A similar problem can be seen on the Vjosa, often described as Europe’s last wild river. After the rains stop and the water level falls, the famous Vjosa Valley can look less like a protected natural treasure and more like a polluted riverbank, with plastic bags caught in branches and roots, hanging like flags of Albania’s environmental shame.

The World Bank has allocated 80 million euros to a project designed to stop waste and sewage from rivers and streams in the area from flowing into the Vjosa. The sooner that work is done, the sooner Albania can begin to remove the disgrace of turning one of Europe’s most important wild rivers into one of its dirtiest-looking landscapes.

It is bad enough that we turn rivers and streams into open drains and dumping grounds. But protesting against measures designed to stop that waste from reaching lakes or the sea is worse. It is not environmentalism. It is backwardness dressed up as a cause.

The Curraj River flows down from Upper Curraj, passes through deep valleys, and near Lower Curraj joins the Nikaj River. After passing Lekbibaj, it eventually flows into Lake Koman.

Mountain check dams have long been among the most environmentally useful measures on mountain rivers. They help control erosion, trap sediment and stop waste from ending up in lakes.

To manipulate large groups of people in the name of the environment against a state project that is itself pro-environment, and that also helps tourism in the area, is to insult those people by treating them as fools.

An environmental cause is being turned against a project that protects the environment, all in the name of protest.

If opposition to every intervention becomes a trend, used to feed the protest with false causes, without distinguishing between a project that harms nature and one designed to protect it, then the protest becomes a populist machine with no logic. It invents causes and keeps alive the dogma that every investment is a threat to Albania.

Populism does not live on facts. It lives on symbolic conflict. It needs a visible enemy, and it has found one in the government. It also needs an investment project to present as evidence of that enemy’s plan. What it never does is take responsibility for the long-term damage caused by this kind of politics.

This is what happens when environmental causes are used against the environment itself.

I do not know who is making fools of the men and women who gather in the meadows of Nikaj-Mërtur in the name of nature, while rejecting an intervention designed to protect that same nature. They have every right to oppose the government. They have reason to be angry about roads, electricity, infrastructure and the lack of proper conditions for tourism.

But they cannot gather as if a disaster has struck simply because the government is trying to protect Lake Koman from sediment and plastic waste carried into it by the river.

This is exactly the kind of work a government is supposed to do.

During communism, stream barriers were built through voluntary labour to protect land from erosion. Back then, there was no plastic waste. Now that the government is doing the work with public funds, manipulating people into protesting against it is one of the dirtiest ways to damage the environment, which remains the only real wealth that area still has.

I hope the government does not retreat from the project under pressure from uninformed people who have been convinced by political scare stories that the state is taking their river away.

The river is still there. But it needs to be protected from erosion and from the waste people throw into it.

Above all, it needs to be protected from the political debris carried into the protest by those who want the river damaged, and nature damaged with it, all in the name of defending nature.

Originally published in Albanian as: Kur "dashnorët" e natyrës përdoren kundër natyrës