Greening Pancevo

Strolling along a tree-lined boulevard, past classic old buildings and people sitting drinking at street cafes, this could be one of any number of tourist destinations. But, this is Pancevo in Serbia.

Looking beyond the immediate town, the skyline is dominated by heavy industry. The petro-chemical plant has new owners who have fitted modern filters, so it is now much cleaner than it was (so I am told) but the fertilizer plant continues to spew smoke into the sky forming an orange cloud that hangs over the town.

The community and industry existing cheek by jowl makes you stop and reflect on priorities. Pancevo has the potential to be a lovely town, and the people could not have been more welcoming for my visit, but it seems odd that a community tolerates pollution so close to home.

A representative of a local NGO explained that they had arranged a protest march but very few people had turned out. The concern seems to be over jobs. People want to work and the industry provides jobs so they do not want to protest too much. The risk of losing income is seen to be worse than the risks to health from the pollution. This seems to be the world’s industrial society in a microcosm.

At the global level, we are locked into economic progress based on industrialisation. Conveniently for many of us, the dirtiest and most polluting processes can be pushed so far away from our immediate area as to seem irrelevant. China, for example, where much of our stuff is manufactured is half-a-planet away from Western Europe, out-of-sight and out-of-mind.

Closer to home, in Pancevo, the consequences of industrialisation are there for all to see. It seems unfair that they have to endure more than their fair share of pollution on the argument that the industry has to go somewhere. There is another solution; we can clean up industry to work as an integral part of the natural ecosystem so living with production facilities is not a risk to health. We already have the technology to achieve this in many cases and the capability to invent new processes – but it will cost more.

I reflected from my visit to Pancevo that perhaps we need more industry collocated with towns, rather than less. If all of us were brought face-to-face with the consequences of our consumption we would demand cleaner processes. I am sure that people will respond positively when they face the issue in their own lives, and are given a real choice, not between a job and destitution, but between paying more for goods and services in exchange for a clean and healthy environment.

My final hours in Pancevo were at an outdoor restaurant serving delicious food under warm spring sunshine with the industrial complex screened from view. It was easy to forget the industry and put it out-of-sight and out-of-mind. In Pancevo, this convenient ignorance is an obvious delusion.