Environmental threats that the development of the Planerskoye andesite deposit will cause to the Karadag Nature Reserve and the Koktebel settlement are less important than the prospect to make Crimea a self-contained region. The “head of the Ministry of Natural Resources” Gennady Naraev said that at the meeting of the “Committee” of the State Council of Crimea on Agrarian Policy, Environment and Natural Resources, the “parliament’s” press service reports.
“On the one hand, we understand that Crimea should be environmentally safe, but at the same time, there is a task to make Crimea self-contained, and we understand that Crimea won’t be self-contained without the development of mineral resources base,” Naraev said.
According to the “Minister”, if objections of public representatives are considered, then Crimea won’t develop at all.
“Today public attention can be attracted by the fact that construction materials that can be produced on the territory of Crimea will cost less expensive than the imported ones, but the efforts of public representatives are aimed at preventing the development of all quarries. In this way, we can reach the point where Crimea is ecologically clean, the air is clean, but we have no possibilities to develop Crimea,” Naraev said.
In 2013, the Crimean government completely abandoned the idea to create a quarry in the area of Karadag, canceled the land allocation and promised that the territory for the quarry would be included as the reserve territory. Experts expressed the unanimous opinion that rock blasting in the area of 630 meters from the silent volcano Karadag would lead to environmental disaster and economic benefits from the crushed stone extraction was not to be compared with the damage to the Koktebel resort.
