Mount Olympus of water pollution?

While we're riveted to the screen for Olympic skiing, snowboarding, and ice dancing, the back story of the Winter Games in Sochi haunts like a missed gate on the slalom course. On February 12 in Krasnodar, Russia, environmental activist Evgeny Vitishko was sentenced to three years in prison after being convicted of spray-painting a fence. Vitishko is part of Environmental Watch on North Caucasus, which has been monitoring the environmental impact of the development of Olympics facilities and infrastructure.

Significant devastation has accompanied Sochi's rapid development and has been widely reported in news outlets around the world. It's destroyed well water for a village, buried a migratory bird wetland, and polluted the Mzymta River -- the largest river supplying the Black Sea and its complex ecosystem.

Activists who've drawn attention to the devastation face intimidation and arrests in a region without an independent judiciary and where freedom of the press is ranked as nonexistent. Refugee families from the Krasnodar region who fled persecution and settled in Pennsylvania cities such as Lancaster and Scranton a decade ago likely can relate. While the Games have brought international attention to human rights and environmental violations, the problems will persist well after the Sochi torch is doused.

Here in Pennsylvania, we are no strangers to water pollution, with 16,000 miles of impaired streams, and mine drainage, stormwater and agricultural runoff affecting our water all the way to the Chesapeake Bay. But the Games' avoidable ecological cost should give us pause, as activists are jailed even while world attention is on the region. After the Games end, environmental and human rights groups are going to need lots of help to keep the spotlight on this and how to begin to recover.

Kate Gibbons is northeast Pennsylvania outreach coordinator for PennFuture, based in Wilkes-Barre.