Government Disregard for Environment Harming Czech Industrial Area : Bohemia: Lawmakers begin to see the need for clean energy in a town where acid rain is 10 times the national average. Yet families continue to be attracted by promises of housing.

The vista from Most is one of dead trees, gouged earth and electric power pylons against a blackened landscape.

In a country where much of the environment is blighted, the people of this town in northwest Bohemia believe that they inhabit an ecological catastrophe.

One culprit is soft coal, scraped from the surface of a 460-square-mile swath of open cast mines and burned to satisfy heavy industry’s voracious need for electricity.

Another is the complex of chemical plants placed in the area by Communist governments since World War II in an effort to build a socialist prosperity that would rival that of the West.

Between them, the sulfurous chimneys of power stations and chemical factories dump 250 tons of acid rain a year on every square mile of the region. The national average is 25 tons.

“There is no proof that the government really cares,” said Eva Janeckova, 34, an expert at the Institute of Landscape Ecology in the town. “In every case, economic and political interests take precedence over the environment .”

Careless destruction of the environment has proved to be a powerful factor in the buildup of popular resentment that has cost the ruling Communist Party its political monoply.

Most is at the heart of a mining area stretching from Usti, 50 miles from Prague, almost as far as the elegant spa town of Karlovy Vary.

Before the mines opened, it was a wooded region of outstanding natural beauty and playground for the aristocracy of Europe before World War I.

“Nobody has the courage to estimate the cost of the damage to Bohemia,” said Dr. Ladislav Blazek, a spokesman for Czechoslovakia’s fledgling environmental movement.

“It would be like trying to work out how much you would have to spend to turn the moon into an orchard.

“Our health and life expectancy are the worst in Europe and worse than in many developing countries,” Blazek added.

Jiri Kunes, a pediatrician at the district hospital, said the rate of stillbirths is more than 10% and of premature births more than 7%.

About 15% of children up to age 15 suffer from respiratory or skin disease.

The life expectancy for men is only 52, 10 years less than the national average. Heart disease and cancer are rife, Kunes said.

The irony is that instead of fleeing, people are attracted to Most, and the population is young.

Czechoslovakia has a housing crisis and the authorities lure young families to Most with the promise of apartments. Those who accept, sign promises to stay for 10 years.

Karel Dittrich, director of one open cast mine near Most, interviewed in his plant-filled office, shrugged: “You cannot avoid the devastation. It is inevitable.”

But there are signs that the government is taking the situation more seriously.

Frantisek Martinec, head of the environmental department at the Interior Ministry, said plans to continue producing as much as 100 million tons of coal in northwest Bohemia every year until 2030 could be revised.

“If there is no further increase in the demand for electricity from industry, we hope to reduce soft coal output by half by 2000,” he said.

The Czech Socialist Republic and the Slovak Socialist Republic, which make up the country’s federal state, have just agreed to appoint their first environment ministers, although there are no plans to have a federal environment ministry.

Like other Communist states, Czechoslovakia has suffered for decades from the influence of its powerful heavy industry lobby, which has shouldered aside competition for scarce resources from weaker government sectors.

It now has a loss-making steel and engineering industry that uses twice as much energy as equivalent plants in the West, Martinec said.

The solution, according to environmentalists, would be to reduce electricity demand by closing the most wasteful factories. Blazek said the resulting savings in state subsidies could be used to compensate workers for losing their jobs.

More efficient energy use would allow the gradual closure of the open cast mines and liberate investment for the repair of Bohemia’s scars. He envisaged the region devoting itself to tourism, attracting hard currency from Western visitors.

The need for clean energy has reconciled Czechoslovakia’s environmentalists to the need for nuclear power stations for the immediate future. Two already provide 20% of electricity needs and two others will raise output to more than 30% during the 1990s.

Environmentalists intend to be a force in Czechoslovakia’s future if opposition demands for multiparty democracy become a reality.

Newspaper editor Josef Velek, an environmental campaigner for 20 years, accused the government of hiding the extent of the crisis.

He believes that the output of Bohemian mines could be reduced by 50%in five years without affecting the electricity needs of existing industry, if it were less wasteful.

Velek said a non-communist federal environment minister should be appointed with as much economic muscle as the industry ministries. One of his priorities would be to formulate tough pollution rules for industry and enforce them.

“At present, we produce 700,000 tons of solid toxic waste every year and no one knows where most of it goes,” Velek said.

Some of it turned up recently in a huge dump at Kladno, only 6 miles from Prague.

Children who became ill after playing there were found to have come into contact with poisonous materials dumped illegally.

The dump, almost 200 feet high and with a perimeter of two miles, is a famous eyesore beside one of Europe’s most beautiful cities.

Velek said another major problem was misuse of chemicals and disposal of sewage by the state’s collectivized agriculture, which contaminates soil and water supplies.