“For in addition to the resort, this town on Siberia’s Lake Baikal—the oldest, largest and deepest freshwater lake in the world—is home to the Baikal Pulp and Paper Mill, which has been belching foul-smelling sulfates into the air and chlorides, phenols and other chemicals into the lake since it was built during the Cold War. The pollution killed plants, crabs and fish and threatened the world’s only freshwater seal, the earless nerpa. Environmentalists have been trying to shut down the mill since 1964, getting precisely nowhere. But where greens failed, the global recession succeeded all too well. In November, the plant ceased production. “The economic crisis,” says Marina Rikhvanova, the head of the environmental group Baikal Wave, worked “like magic.”