when you are in Russia, especially outside of large cities, especially toward the East or North, the vastness of your surroundings doesn't let you feel that you can do anything that will make any sizable imprint on the surroundings, and that feeling has been ingrained into the psyche for generations (it also correlates, with some philosophers claiming a cause here, with the Russian approach to politics in particular and the whole worldview in general :). As result you do everything you need or want without thinking of consequences, kind of like a puppy behavior toward large dog (the issue of course is that the "puppy" has long since grown up and possesses a large nuclear and chemical industries among the other things) .