The New Scandinavians.(Cover Story: Who Is the Greenest of Them All?; SPECIAL REPORT)(Lithuania)

Byline: Owen Matthews and Karin Rives

The legacy of the Soviet nuke program forms the backbone of an environmental comeback.

Lithuania ranks 16th overall and is second, to Latvia, in its income group.

It's hard to love a hulking Soviet-built nuclear reactor--especially if it's the same model and vintage as the one that blew up in Chernobyl more than two decades ago. Yet in a strange way the Baltic states owe a lot to the Ignalina nuclear power plant in Visaginas, Lithuania. For one, the presence of the plant, plunked in the middle of the countryside by the stroke of a Moscow bureaucrat's pen, helped ignite Lithuania's fledgling eco movement in the 1980s by inspiring activists to oppose its planned expansion. Environmentalism blossomed into a resistance movement to Soviet occupation. "The environment was one of the first things to surface during Gorbachev's glasnost because it was a neutral issue, and it was new," recalls Inesis Kiskis, under secretary at the Lithuanian Ministry of Environment. "In Lithuania, environmental consciousness preceded independence."

Paradoxical as it may seem, the Chernobyl-era giant is now a key element in the Baltic states' campaign to reach the world-beating levels of ecological health. The Baltics' green movement may have been born in anti-nuclear activism, but now many realize that nuclear power can also be a valuable source of clean energy. Indeed, Lithuania's high scores in Yale and Columbia's Environmental Performance Index--it ranks 16th overall, and second, to Latvia, in its income group, and does well on air pollution, carbon and sulfur emissions, ozone and so forth--are largely thanks to its reliance on nukes, rather than Russian gas or Polish coal, for its energy.

Other post-Soviet states that rely heavily on nukes fare poorly on other measures of environmental performance--Ukraine, for instance, scores low in agriculture, biodiversity and ecosystem vitality. By contrast, Lithuania and the other Baltic nations have moved to a more Scandinavian economic and social model, with all that that implies for the environment. Lithuania scores higher than average in measures of agriculture, fisheries, irrigation, pesticide regulation and water purity. "We're trying to reach not only the Scandinavian standard of living, but also its environmental standards, too," says Daiva Semeniene, director of the Center for Environmental Policy in Vilnius.

Luckily for Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, their Scandinavian neighbors have been more than just role models. Since the early days of the Baltic states' independence, Nordic countries have poured huge amounts of money into all three Baltic countries to get a massive environmental cleanup underway. Call it a giant ...