Visitors to a 100-year-old oil refinery in southern Poland, near the town of Katowice, are asked to step inside if they get the urge to smoke.

To western ears, the request sounds at first like a lame joke. But the polite hosts are serious: A careless toss of a dying match or Marlboro on the oil- soaked grounds could set off an inferno. Coursing through the 250-acre site are shallow ditches filled with oil- and gasoline-slicked water, dug to keep the worst of the volatile run-off from several hellish-looking sludge pits contained.

But contained from what? Scientists who've studied the site have found the ground to be contaminated to depths reaching dozens of feet. Groundwater sampled from nearby wells stinks of oil and other gunk.

"In some places, the topsoil is so saturated (with oil) you could almost mine it," says Mike Kuperberg, a researcher at Florida State University. Last May, Kuperberg was part of a Florida State team that coordinated a U.S.-led project at Katowice to demonstrate clean-up technologies now applicable to such monstrous messes. Should it ever find the money, presumably the Polish government will be inclined to use such western know-how to reclaim the refinery and the dozens of sites just like it which make Poland's Upper Silesia region one of the most frightfully polluted corners of the planet.

As the world now knows, Poland is hardly alone in its environmental misery. Since the collapse of communism and Soviet dominance of the region in 1989, conditions in Poland's sister states-principally Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Romania and Bulgaria-still shock reporters and scientists who visit the region for the first time. From the Rhine Basin flanking East Germany to the northern shores of the Black Sea, scientists have now documented a swath of environmental carnage that holds 100 million central and eastern Europeans in its depressing grip.

"What we're up against here are problems of, in some cases, unprecedented scale," says Dr. Roy Herndon, whose Florida State institute Kuperberg works for. "Considerable progress is being made to address these problems, but frankly, some of these won't be solved in our lifetimes, if ever."

To fairly characterize the environmental woes of Central and Eastern Europe, says Herndon, one must imagine a vast region where postcard scenes of sunny, mountainous countryside and hurtfully beautiful villages lie scattered amid pockets of truly nightmarish pollution. If such pockets somehow could have remained isolated during the past 50-odd years of production-at-any-cost central planning, world opinion on the region surely would be something other than what it is-typically a blend of contempt and pity.

Finland, for example, blames the region's grossly inefficient and high-sulfur coal-burning power plants for producing fully half of its polluted air. Such migratory headaches stem from backward municipal as well as industrial operations that plague the region-every day, roughly half of the human and industrial waste from the two million inhabitants of Budapest slides completely untreated into the Danube, which also serves as the city's primary source of drinking water. Downstream in the Romanian capital of Bucharest, the city's daily raw deposit to the same river is closer to 100 percent.

Herndon is not unlike dozens of other western European and U.S. scientists who have become professionally intrigued with the monumental clean-up and containment challenges now faced by the former Soviet satellites-not to mention the former Soviet Union itself. A nuclear physicist by training (Ph.D. Florida State), for more than 20 years Herndon has directed an applied, hazardous waste research program within the university's Institute for Science and Public Affairs. He believes, as do other specialists in dealing with assorted toxic substances turned out by industry and the military, that only a coordinated effort by political, scientific and industrial leaders throughout the world-not just on the European continent-has any chance at all of making headway toward solving the region's woeful environmental debacle.

"We should view this as a world problem, because clearly, that's what it is," he said. "This is not just an environmental problem-it's an economic and political problem that can pose serious global consequences for years to come."

What sets Herndon apart from other like-minded researchers in the West is his stature within a growing, international community of scientists and corporate leaders whose interests finally are dovetailing in a region desperately in need of help from all quarters. Since 1992, Herndon and a small group of researchers and graduate students have been at the helm of a multinational effort to focus scientific and technical attention on the crisis.

That year, Herndon's 20-year collaboration and friendship with Dr. Peter Richter, a physicist within the Technical University of Budapest (TUB), culminated in the first, comprehensive forum for the exchange of scientific and technical knowledge on environmental topics ever held in Eastern Europe. Held in Budapest, the three-day symposium attracted scholars, corporate leaders and environmental policy-makers from 40 countries. A second meeting in 1994 drew 400 participants who gave scholarly presentations on subjects ranging from aflatoxin to zinc poisoning. This September, the biggest of the series is set for Warsaw. Already more than 550 manuscripts have been accepted for presentation from researchers representing 57 nations, including the Republic of China.

Clearly, the initiative has found an eager audience, namely a core group of scientists, engineers and industry leaders starved for information on how best to attack pressing problems in a region beset by environmental emergencies on all fronts. Already the exchange has set in motion a number of government/university/industry partnerships that hold promise for relieving some of the region's most vexing environmental maladies.

"For nearly five decades, the free exchange of such information between East and West just didn't exist," says Herndon. "Now that it does, the response has been tremendous. This effort now is institutionalized, with a life of its own."

The Florida State University Institute for Central and Eastern European Cooperative Environmental Research (ICEECER)-the team's full name-is now an internationally recognized forum for the exchange of scientific and technical knowledge on environmental issues of critical importance to Europe's former communist states. In 1993, the effort caught the attention of DOE officials who had been trying to forge links to the region since the mid- '80s. Impressed with Herndon's bootstrap efforts in Hungary, DOE signed a five-year cooperative agreement-worth up to $10 million-with Florida State, directing Herndon's group to spearhead the agency's initiatives in identifying and testing clean-up technologies in the region's most contaminated areas.

DOE's primary interest in working with Herndon's team is directly tied to the agency's mission in research and development related to environmental clean-up operations in this country, says DOE Deputy Assistant Secretary Dr. Clyde Frank. The agency, which runs the nation's nuclear weapons processing and manufacturing complex, is faced with enormous challenges in dealing with radioactive and chemical contamination-Uncle Sam's own coast-to-coast Cold War keepsake.

Frank says DOE also shares an interest with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in finding the best, most cost-efficient methods for cleaning up non-nuclear waste problems that pose health threats both here and abroad. The terrible environmental insults inflicted on Central and Eastern Europe during the last 50 years present a unique opportunity to test assorted clean-up technologies, Frank said, which for a number of reasons can't be duplicated anywhere else.

"One of the main incentives is cost-saving," he told Research in Review. "Over here in the U.S., everything is much more expensive to do. Working in Poland, for example, we can get a lot more research done for a lot less money."

Florida State's primary role is to serve as a catalyst between scientists, inventors, manufacturers, environmental managers and the like to meet and form problem-solving partnerships. Pollution control companies in America, England, Western Europe and Japan thus get a formal entrŽe into a market that-at least from a standpoint of need-has no limit, while DOE stands to benefit by stretching its R&D dollars and getting tailor-made technologies that can be put to work in the U.S.

"Let's face it," says Frank. "Contamination is worldwide. Mercury in one country is just like mercury in another. The mechanics of remediation vary only with the chemistry and physics. So, what we do in Poland or Hungary or South America is directly applicable to the U.S."

Surveying the Mess

Make no mistake: The Cold War had-still has-its very real casualties. As the Iron Curtain began to rise across Europe's midsection seven years ago, a scene never imagined by Marx, Engels, Trotsky or Lenin materialized before a stunned worldwide audience. On the European continent, the most disturbing legacy of a 45-year-old ideological stand-off between the USSR and the U.S. may be seen in the ruined topsoil, polluted lakes and rivers, fouled air and dead and dying forests that scar 11 Eastern European countries stretching 1,200 miles from the Gulf of Finland to the Adriatic Sea. To be sure, the arms race and its concomitant pell-mell scurry to industrialize took its toll on the environments of Western European countries as well. But by the early 1970s, such nations as England, France, Italy and West Germany largely had woken up to the consequences of their nest-fouling activities, picking up a cue from a steamed-up environmental movement begun in the U.S. By 1975, the governments of all EC (European Community) countries had adopted a "polluter pays" principle that put the brakes on most of the worst kinds of pollution in those nations, and in the process sparked a major growth industry in pollution control technology that remains bullish today.

But the green revolution died quickly at the borders of the Soviet puppets. For obvious reasons, the "polluter pays" principle didn't sell well in systems where all industry is owned by the government. As a consequence, whole regions of what was then East Germany, Hungary, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Yugoslavia, Albania and Bulgaria resumed a descent into environmental hell.

Hidden from world scrutiny within their sealed, communist cocoons, the captains of central planning throughout the region largely ignored fundamental laws of science and economics in their continued rush to exploit their countries' natural resources to meet industrial and strategic objectives sent down from Moscow. Huge areas traditionally given over to farming, for example, became subject to gigantic factory-building schemes, while other areas ill-suited for agriculture were exploited for that purpose.

Traditional centers of industry-hearts of the region's extensive mining, power-generation and metallurgical operations-were scaled up dramatically, with virtually no thought given to controlling hazardous waste. As a rule, dams and other water management operations were built willy-nilly, in ill- planned attempts to support ambitious new agricultural and industrial projects. Adding heavily to the region's environmental burden was a far- flung Soviet military complex, representing thousands of sites where fueling operations, weapons testing and troop training were practiced in total absence of environmental protection measures of any kind for four decades.

By 1980, cracks in the Soviet sphere of influence in the region were becoming plainly visible to outsiders, partly a result of a terribly befouled environment that had driven living conditions to intolerable lows in the more industrialized countries. Poland, for example, with its massive, non-stop coal-fired industries, had become one of the most polluted countries on the continent, with a population forced to breathe a self-generated, poisoned atmosphere five times dirtier than anything seen in EC countries. Such environmental wretchedness-a symptom of a worn-out, unworkable economy-ultimately played a significant role in the rise of Poland's Solidarity free trade union, which helped bring about the complete collapse of the propped-up Soviet state in 1989.

Since then, journalists of every stripe have documented the environmental horrors that continue to plague the region. In some cases, entire villages in Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic (Czechoslovakia split into two countries in 1991) have been abandoned because of poisoned water supplies or contaminated farmland. Acid fog and rain-distilled poison from countless sulfur-belching smokestacks-are turning hundreds of square miles of mountain forests into barren rockpiles. In the Czech Republic alone, such atmospheric contamination has damaged or destroyed fully 70 percent of that country's woodlands, according to a recent study by the Worldwatch Institute. A 50,000-acre tract of devastated forests in Poland's Sudety and Beskidy Mountains, downwind of 12 soot-spewing power plants, has been declared an ecological disaster area.

From East Germany to Bulgaria's border with Greece, nothing a visitor sees or smells is more emblematic of the region's environmental dilemma than bad air. The worst offenders are power plants and enormous steelworks, some of which still operate on technology born in the 1930s. Trips to highly industrialized cities as Katowice, Poland and Ostrava, in the Czech Republic, can be "like walking into a time machine," says John Moerlins, an economist and associate director for Herndon's Florida State institute.

"What you see in many places over there looks just like Pittsburgh did 40 years ago," he said. "We've had the benefit of two decades of environmental regulation in this country. They've had virtually none."

Compounding the lack of controls (for the most part, devices such as electrostatic precipitators and emission scrubbers-technologies that keep smokestack companies in the U.S. operating-are still rare commodities in the region) is an industrial base built by a socialist system in which there was never an incentive to save energy or collectively owned resources, said Moerlins. As a result, both the methods and machinery of manufacture tend to be grossly inefficient and thus highly polluting.

For example, a 1992 study found that up to 40 percent of the energy used by Polish industry was wasted-representing the unnecessary burning of up to 35 million tons of (typically high-sulfur) coal annually. As a case in point, the study showed that producing one ton of rolled metal in Poland took 22 man- hours, compared to only five in such highly developed countries as West Germany.

Cities throughout Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic-generally regarded as the most progressive states in the region-still lack rational systems of energy distribution and consumption. Centrally controlled coal- or oil-fired boilers feed hot water and steam heat directly to homes and apartment houses, regardless of demand. Individual metering of residences is rare-the only way to control temperature in many Budapest apartments is to open and close windows. Lack of insulation in underground pipes and in buildings themselves adds volumes to the waste: An energy audit of a city boiler plant in Krakow in 1992 showed that it took more than 1,000 calories from the central boiler to produce one calorie of heat in a nearby building.

As if the airborne assault from factory smokestacks wasn't enough, adding to the tainted air hanging over cities is a noxious bouquet of chemicals supplied by automobiles, said Moerlins. In Budapest, for example, fumes from the city's antiquated fleet of Lattas, a popular, Russian-built car that runs on a two-cycle engine akin to that of a lawnmower, contribute to a choking smog that often envelops the entire city, home to 60 percent of the nation's population.

"On weekends in Budapest, when most people are off the street, the air is generally OK. But by noon Monday, car exhaust is typically at such a level that it burns your eyes."

Many of the town's citizens routinely carry face masks, to ward off the worst effects of officially declared "sulfur dioxide alert" days. A health feature frequented by those suffering from respiratory ailments are "inhalatorium" booths, where patients sit in clouds of clean steam mist, in hopes of purging their lungs.

Smoke and ash from chemical plants and coal-burning factories throughout the region do much more mischief in the environment than make the act of breathing occasionally hazardous to human health. Fallout from pollution thrust into the atmosphere includes an assortment of heavy metals, notably cadmium, zinc and lead, all of which can cause serious health problems at high or moderate levels.

By 1992, five villages in Poland were permanently evacuated because of soil soaked with dangerously high levels of heavy metals, some of which are readily taken up by crops. In 1990, a coal-burning power station in Slovakia was found to be depositing between a half and one ton of arsenic daily into the countryside to a distance of 20 miles. Such contamination is potentially far more destructive than air pollution, because once the stuff settles onto the ground it tends to stay there, until it leaches into surface and groundwater supplies, which scientists say is exactly what is happening throughout Eastern Europe.

The region's water woes defy simple explanation and belief. The World Health Organization, in a report released last year, estimates that 12 percent of the population of Eastern Europe (or about 10 million people) don't have access to safe drinking water. Part of the reason is that for centuries, the continent's lush river system has been taken for granted as an open sewer. For the large part, it still is: As of 1993, upwards of 40 percent of the domestic and industrial waste generated in all of Europe was being dumped untreated into rivers, lakes and nearby oceans, according to one study.

As one of dozens of appalling examples, in Bulgaria, a country with roughly the same area and population as Pennsylvania, nearly all of the country's rivers were polluted by the 1960s. By the late `80s, the country was still dumping 60 million tons of waste (two-thirds of which was pig and other livestock excrement) annually into its rivers and streams. A battery of huge chemical plants, together with uranium mining and gigantic agricultural concerns concentrated in the country's Bourgas region on the Black Sea coast, has created streams of wastes of astounding toxicity. Just last year, Bourgas Bay was described by scientists as a cocktail of organic pollutants that had effectively destroyed traditional fish spawning grounds in the bay. High levels of heavy metals were found at all depths, and even the beaches around much of the bay reportedly were found to be highly radioactive.

Such travesties, says one official from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, stand as mute testimony to the U.S. government's crackdown on polluters in this country years ago. Still irksome to many business and conservative political elements, the regulations didn't come any too soon, as EPA's multi- billion Superfund project, begun in 1980, so ably demonstrates, says Dr. John Haederle, director of international activities in EPA's Region I headquarters in Boston.

Consequently, Americans today "simply wouldn't tolerate" the kind of environmental abuses that he sees as commonplace in Eastern Europe and in Russia, he said.

"People here take for granted the strides we've made in this country. They forget about the days when the Cuyahoga River (in Ohio) would actually catch on fire. In this country, we've largely forgotten about how things used to be and how far we've come."

The Health Question

That Eastern Europe has an environmental crisis of colossal proportions on its hands is now old news. The question yet to be fully answered is how such monumental pollution is impacting human health throughout the region and in neighboring countries. "The health issue is really what this is all about, of course," says Herndon. "Everyone involved understands that the central goal of any effort like this has to be the ultimate restoration of a clean, safe environment for the citizens-and future citizens-of Central and Eastern Europe."

Entire sessions of the two multifaceted symposia Florida State has orchestrated since 1992 have been given over to health-related research. A good deal of time and space is reserved for discussions of Western-style risk assessment, now the cornerstone of environmental clean-up efforts in all developed countries. Basically, the approach is a science-based method of trying to ascertain the degree to which humans can live safely in the presence of various kinds of contaminants, with the view that total eradication of all anthropogenic (human-caused) pollution is impractical if not impossible, both technically and economically.

Risk assessment is hardly without its critics, and from all quarters. Environmentalists balk at the notion of officially sanctioned, acceptable levels of contamination, saying they give polluters too-easy outs, while some conservatives accuse risk assessors of blowing minor problems out of proportion, thereby wasting money and costing jobs. Not a few scientists hold the methodology suspect for what they view as its frequent reliance on assumptions as opposed to scientific fact.

But for all its imperfections, modern risk assessment is the only practical tool available for evaluating the danger to humans obliged to live in less-than- pristine environments, says Dr. Christopher Teaf (Ph.D. Arkansas), a risk assessment expert and chief toxicologist with Florida State's Center for Biological and Toxicological Research, a unit Herndon also oversees. Teaf also serves as an associate director of the European research institute.

"Risk assessment is a way of balancing whatever problems you face against social and economic considerations," he said. "It's the only reasonable, practical way to get to the next step, risk management, which is developing cost-effective clean-up strategies based on what you know about the health consequences of a particular contaminant and what resources you have to deal with them."

Herein lies the rub for the whole of Central and Eastern Europe. Without good data, risk assessment and management efforts are meaningless. A nearly universal lack of monitoring data throughout even the most severely impacted areas-coupled with skimpy analyses of the amount and kind of contaminants affecting a given site-has stymied progress in risk assessment and thus continues to slow up remediation efforts.

Since the fall of communism, health professionals working in the region have been on a campaign to come up with answers, to find links between commonplace diseases-mainly heart and respiratory ailments and cancer- and pollution. Isolated studies of such associations abound- in Krakow, heavy air pollution is blamed for 10 percent of lung cancer cases in women in that city; in Copsa-Mica, Romania, lead- and cadmium-laced fallout from local steelworks is suspected of causing lowered IQ and abnormal heights and weights in children.

But in the main, health officials remain frustrated, unable to get the kinds of exposure data they need to show clear, cause-and-effect relationships. Denied such information, planners are forced do the best they can with what they've got in setting priorities on how best to spend scarce clean-up money.

Even without bulletproof statistics, however, health officials say it's possible to look at broad indicators to judge the relative safety of human habitats. Among the best is life expectancy, an indicator based on generally reliable and fairly accessible statistics.

In its summary report last year, the World Health Organization (WHO) reiterated findings that show a striking difference in life expectancies between eastern and western European countries. This gap, which began to open up in the 1960s, is widening, "mainly because of the rather sharp deterioration of health in most of the newly independent states (NIS) of the former USSR and some countries of Central and Eastern Europe," the report said. Meanwhile, life expectancy in every other European country "shows a further steady increase."

Specifically, the study found that overall life expectancy for both sexes in the west is 75.6 years, compared to 69.6 in the East. In the NIS countries- remnants of the USSR-average life span was found to have "dropped to the lowest levels seen in decades."

In every major cause-of-death category WHO examined, from cardiovascular diseases to cancer, the countries of Eastern and Central Europe, along with the NIS countries, show an ever-widening gap with their western neighbors. More than half the difference is attributed to heightened levels of cardiovascular diseases, possibly aggravated by smoking and exposure to elevated levels of carbon monoxide. Lung cancer is on a steady rise throughout the old Eastern bloc, a phenomenon WHO attributes to a skyrocketing rate of smoking (the region's new free-market economies are paying off handsomely for U.S. tobacco companies).

When the statistics are added up, "premature mortality" (which WHO defines as dying before age 65) is roughly three times higher in Eastern Europe than in the west. The organization predicts that this disparity will continue, and life expectancy in some countries may continue to fall, as it has in Hungary since 1989.

This statistic brings it all home to TUB's Richter. On a recent visit to campus, he talked about the bauxite mining operations outside his native Budapest, and how millions of tons of red mud-a byproduct loaded with heavy metal residues-lie hemmed in makeshift holding ponds, ready to make an already bad situation even worse.

"Our life expectancy is eight to 10 years shorter than what you have in the U.S.-shorter also than in England or France," he says. "There is an indication it's related to our environmental problems. Yet some of these are so very hard to deal with."

Richter believes one of the largely unaddressed problems not only in Hungary but throughout the region is pollution in the workplace-poor indoor air and water quality forced upon workers.

"In some ways, this is more critical than what goes on outside," he said. "You can characterize the soil of a field or the water of a lake or river, but it's very difficult to get into a workplace and do measurements because companies aren't often willing to let this be done. This is a very serious situation, and one thing we're focusing on in our symposia."

About Face

No sooner did the last Russian tank clank out of Eastern Europe in 1990 than the door to an arena of environmental awareness spring wide open from the Baltic to the Black Sea.

Florida State's foray into the plight of the former Soviet satellites-which actually began well before the communist "utopia" collapsed-quickly became one of many Western initiatives aimed at helping the countries of Central and Eastern Europe deal with the burdens of sudden independence.

Even faced with economic disaster from the switch from central planning to market-based economies, such countries as Poland, Hungary, East Germany and Czechoslavakia kept their sights firmly on a common goal-salvation from environmental catastrophe. By 1990, numerous cooperative programs aimed at addressing the region's environmental dilemma had sprung up, linking governments of the East with those of the West. Outside government channels, environmental activists from Albania to Latvia formed dozens of grassroots, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that launched environmental public awareness campaigns. Massive outlays of western capital for various environmental programs began pouring in from such sources as the World Bank, the United Nations, international trade organizations and the U.S. government.

At the urging of George Bush, in 1989 Congress passed the Support for Eastern European Democracy (SEED) Act, which among other things directed the Department of Energy to assess Poland's capability of modifying its industries' dirty and inefficient combustion equipment to burn clean fuels such as natural gas. Although vestiges of central planning mentality still linger in Poland, today the country's progress in revamping its industrial infrastructure is being viewed as a model for the rest of Eastern Europe, according to a report in Chemical and Engineering News.

Last May's project at Katowice, coordinated by Florida State and backed by DOE, was the first large-scale demonstration to emerge from the university's early initiatives in neighboring Hungary. More than 100 business, government and university representatives turned out to witness the latest in a variety of U.S. technologies applied to soil steeped in hydrocarbons-oil and its many derivatives.

But as another spin-off of the Florida State-led initiative shows, technology transfer isn't a one-way street from West to East. At the first symposium in Budapest in 1992, the work of a group of Czech scientists came to light and almost immediately caught the attention of American scientists working on the same problem-how to remove radioactive contamination from large volumes of wastewater. The meeting led to a DOE contract, administered through Herndon's institute, with the scientists at the Czech Technical University in Prague. A similar DOE-funded contract soon followed with Richter's research group at TUB. Such work is expected to culminate soon in a European-led demonstration project on contaminated DOE sites in this country, Herndon said.

"These examples typify DOE's interest in the region. The agency is eager to find solutions wherever it can to pressing problems right here at home."

Of late, DOE is feeling stepped-up pressure from Congress to get cracking on the cleanup of dozens of U.S. nuclear weapons research and testing sites, home to tens of thousands of nuclear warheads and millions of cubic yards of hazardous and radioactive waste. On some sites, such exotic garbage taints drinking water at levels well above safety limits. Estimates on the bill for this titanic cleaning job have touched a trillion dollars.

Whatever techniques European scientists may come up with for dealing with their own nuclear nightmares may very well be applicable over here, and cheaper to boot.

"Congress is basically telling DOE that if it can spend $50,000 in Poland, for example, to produce a technology that could wind up saving $50 million in the U.S., then do it."

DOE is banking on its designated "lead horse" in East Europe-Florida State- to tie together partnerships that will benefit the U.S. in other ways, principally by opening doors for American companies to Europe's market for environmental technology, which is potentially boundless. In 1993, for Central and Eastern Europe this market was estimated to be worth $36 billion, with forecasts it would hit $55 billion by the year 2000.

Dozens of U.S. corporations are lining up to pitch their environmental wares, which are obliged to go up against tough competition from England, France, Germany and Japan. Congress has charged DOE, the EPA and other agencies with going after such business in the name of beefing up American industrial competitiveness abroad.

That's one reason Herndon's symposia feature large, international trade shows, which are carefully integrated into each conference. All exhibitors present scientific and technical papers, right alongside academic researchers, and then get the chance to demonstrate their products to a ready-made audience. Such American firms as AMS Corporation, an Indiana-based distributor of environmental sampling and analytical equipment, and Atlantic Environmental Services of Connecticut, already have parlayed their conference participation into new customers in Prague, the Czech Republic, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and Denmark, Herndon said. Both companies are scheduled to exhibit at Warsaw `96.

"The trade fairs are where some of the most exciting interaction at our conferences takes place," he says. "People get to see and hear firsthand how others are dealing with the same problems they are. Then they meet experts who specialize in solving those very problems. In the end, it's always going to be people coming together in settings like this to get things done."

The Long Road Back

In the heart of Europe's greatest wetland, the Danube Delta-a 1.4 million- acre marshland lying mainly in Romania-lies an ugly scar. Healing slowly now, it remains a wretched reminder of the days of Nicolae Ceausescu, the Romanian despot who was finally overthrown and shot by his disgusted subjects in December 1989.

Ceausescu's foul legacy in the delta was his 20-year-long attempt to convert much of this delicate ecosystem into farmland, a purpose for which it was eminently unsuited. He failed, but not before inflicting massive damage to nearly a quarter-million acres of land which Western biologists have long recognized as some of most naturally valuable property on earth-when left alone.

Nothing better illustrates the staggering dimensions of Eastern Europe's environmental crisis than the Danube Delta, suffering from decades of mindless abuse. The traditional nesting-ground for more than 160 species of aquatic birds, the delta's famed bird population is a ghost of what it once was, thanks to drainage ditches, dikes, river channelization and mounting pollution. In just the past 20 years, the delta's once-robust fishery has been cut by half. Recent studies, reported in American Scientist, show that the delta's waters are in an advanced state of eutrophication-the oxygen-sucking process of rot-and the diversity of fish, plankton, insects, mollusks, aquatic plants and every other form of life except algae and bacteria is on a steady decline.

Considering what the delta is up against, it's a testament to the tenacity of life that anything lives there at all. This vast lowland is the settling pond for the storied Danube River, which courses 1,800 miles through Central and Eastern Europe, making it the second longest river (behind the Volga) on the continent. The river stumbles through 30 dams in nine nations, and dutifully picks up these countries' revolting garbage every day.

Roughly 12 percent of Europe's population, or 86 million people, live in the Danube's drainage area. Upwards of three-quarters of all the human and industrial wastewater this population generates daily is dumped into the Danube, completely untreated. Accumulations mount the further downstream one goes, until the worst of the filth finally fans out in the delta. Samples of delta mud show a kaleidoscope of pollution, including heavy metals, DDT and other pesticides, a witch's brew of industrial chemicals including polychlorinated biphenols (PCBs), solvents and lubricants, plus high levels of phosphates and nitrates-fertilizer run-off from upriver agribusiness.

The problem doesn't end there. Unable to absorb the massive load of nutrients it receives daily, the delta disgorges the overload directly into the Black Sea, the final repository of waste from dozens of other sources. In 1990, scientists found that the depth of the sea's chemocline (the level at which water becomes stripped of oxygen and thus is largely stagnant) had risen from 185 feet to 120 feet over a period of just a few years. This rising dead zone was described as a signal that the entire Black Sea may be headed for a biological "coma."

The predicament of the once-gloried Danube and its delta region symbolizes the profound social, cultural and economic barriers that the nations of Central and Eastern Europe are struggling to overcome in their bids to be welcomed into the world's community of environmentally responsible nations. Since the downfall of communism in the region, unprecedented progress has been made in linking scientific, governmental and industrial interests throughout the Danube basin in a united effort to combat the ecosystem's decline. Toughened environmental laws in Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic are helping, along with increasing progress in selling the "polluter pays" principle to industry. In 1993, for example, five Danube countries reportedly raised over $450 million through fines levied against heavy polluters. With continued subsidies, loans and outright gifts from the West, the wherewithal to mount a serious clean-up campaign throughout the Danube basin is the highest it's ever been.

Still, the river's demise continues, chiefly because of political, social and economic squabbles among the nine nations through which the Danube flows. No one is kidding themselves-the river that stirred the genius of Johann Strauss 130 years ago is forever gone. But the money raised so far toward correcting some of the worst abuses to this cherished resource is a pittance compared to what's needed, scientists say.

"Wastewater treatment is a big investment for any city or country, but it's especially a burden in Eastern Europe where the nations aren't particularly rich," says Richter. "People know these discharges have been going on for hundreds of years, and this has created a feeling that nothing bad happens, so why not go on doing it?

"Nowadays, of course, the burden on the river is orders of magnitude higher than it once was. Still, the fact is that treatment facilities don't bring a profit, at least not right away-and that's the real problem."

The sudden disintegration of the Soviet bloc was cold water in the face of every newly independent nation on the continent. The abrupt end of government subsidies to artificially stable industries touched off unheard-of inflation and unemployment figures throughout the region. Some countries are making remarkable economic recoveries-notably the former East Germany, Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic-but others appear to be still in a state of shock. Inflation in Romania and Bulgaria, for example, has been running in the triple digits since 1993. Poland and Hungary are seen as the brightest hope for economic turn-around, but even these countries are struggling to catch up to EC countries. At the end of 1995, for example, Poland's inflation rate was still hovering at 28 percent, with unemployment at 15 percent.

"Without healthy economies, it's almost impossible for these nations to fund the kind of environmental protection and remediation measures they desperately need," said Florida State's Moerlins. "So, the real problem (for cleanup) isn't how to find a technology to do the job, it's where to find the money to pay for it."

Thus the reason Florida State's initiatives in the region so strongly promote the virtues of risk assessment, he said.

"With the economic transition these nations are going through, money for cleanup is so severely limited that the few resources available simply must be allocated for what we call the `maximum advantage.' Risk assessment helps us define exactly what `maximum advantage' is, so we can rank things in an objective order of priorities."

A tall order, to be sure. Battlefield surgeons have a form of it called "triage"- sorting casualties by type and severity of their wounds. Once established, recovery will still require huge infusions of capital, and that's not likely to come anytime soon from the albeit rapidly mending economies of some Eastern European states, says EPA's Haederle.

"It will take large, multinational sources of money to turn the corner," he says. "Western capital has got to be the solution. All we can do right now is to give them the tools, which they can use if and when they have the money."

One Major Step for Humankind

Herndon, Moerlins, Richter, Kuperberg, Teaf and other members of the Florida State institute have surveyed sites from Russia to Germany's Black Forest. In 1994, they conducted a NATO-sponsored workshop that assessed the environmental messes left by a retreating Soviet army, which in its contempt for its "hosts" dumped untold tons of oily waste and other poisons on the ground on its way out. More than 170 heavily contaminated sites sit in Hungary alone-thousands more lie scattered across the region, representing one of the largest clean-up challenges on Earth.

Last year in Prague, the Florida State team held the first international gathering of experts in the cleanup of manufactured gas plants (MGPs). Such factories, which convert coal and oil to gas often using technology that dates to the 18th century, typically produce coal tar and other byproducts that contain some of the most carcinogenic compounds known.

Most MGPs in the West were shut down years ago-the last one in America went dark in the 1950s. But cost estimates for cleaning nearly 2,500 U.S. sites still contaminated range up to $75 billion, and may take another 30 years to complete, experts say. Across Central and Eastern Europe, MGPs still operate, though not nearly as commonly as they once did. Closed plants, sitting atop piles of toxic waste, are being squeezed from all sides for living space-a possible scenario for a Love Canal, European-style.

All of the above suggests yet another motive for western intervention into the region. Humanitarian aid can assume many forms, none better than what has begun in earnest with international cooperation in the newly independent states of Europe. In what was largely viewed as the first worldwide humanitarian response, in 1993 the governments of 21 nations, including the U.S., adopted a strategic plan for meeting Europe's environmental crisis head-on, and pledged $30 million in aid specifically earmarked for environmental programs. This summer, the U.S. DOE, together with the EPA and several other federal agencies, are scheduled to launch a clean-up project in Ukraine aimed at reducing levels of radioactive strontium and cesium-fallout from the 1986 nuclear accident at Chernobyl-from milk supplies, a problem that continues to seriously impact the health of Ukraine schoolchildren.

Most everywhere they look these days, Herndon and Richter are seeing signs that humanitarian and economic aid are beginning to make positive environmental impacts, particularly in Hungary, the Czech Republic and Poland. Because of their remarkable progress in adopting market economies, these three countries are n ow in a "horserace to see who can get ahead quickest," says Herndon. Richter's hopes for his native Hungary have good reason to be buoyed-right now, the country is receiving upwards of 50 percent of the total western investment in Eastern Europe, he said. A raft of American and Japanese companies, including Ford, General Motors, IBM and Suzuki, have opened up all-new factories in Hungary, helping to fill gaping holes in the Hungarian economy left by now-bankrupt smokestack industries of the communist era. Each of the new arrivals comes equipped with the latest in pollution control gear, setting standards for older industries and for those yet to come.

"All of these new industries are being built with environmental safeguards designed to meet standards for admission into the EC," Herndon said. "This is a tremendous incentive for these countries to clean up."

Admission to the EC is a bonafide ticket to a world market that includes potentially huge pay-offs not only in private investment but in tourism as well. Already evident is stepped-up competition in the region for the tourist dollar-Herndon's next symposium being a case in point. The Warsaw meeting in September will be the first time the conference has stepped outside Hungary, evidence of a steadily improving regional infrastructure and an aroused marketplace now willing and able to compete for the tourist trade for the first time in half a century.

"It's not environmental idealism doing this, by the way," says Herndon. "This is being driven entirely by economics. People are simply tired of being poor. They want more money and a better life."

Both Herndon and Richter are optimistic that's where life is finally headed for millions of Central and Eastern Europeans, although it's likely to be a slow process for most.

"In correcting all the region's environmental problems, we're just not going to see anything change much overnight," Herndon said. "But we're already seeing incremental improvements that eventually will result in major, long- lasting changes for the better."

Within 20 years, Herndon believes the region's industrial base will include components that match some of the environmentally friendliest found anywhere, thanks to a new paradigm in environmental consciousness rapidly developing between industry and government.

He's gratified to know, too, that Florida State University is helping to make it happen. Richter, for example, said the conference series directly influenced the passage last January of what many believe is the strongest environmental bill in Hungary's history.