Word: kamchatka
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...rental car. I come over the hill into Idaho, not really knowing what to expect. To my left are the shining Rocky Mountains, sun glinting down through the clouds, a tremendous early spring day. To my right and up ahead it looks like the frozen wastes of Kamchatka...
South and East of Yakutia, jutting 750 miles into the Pacific Ocean, lies the Kamchatka peninsula, the only major piece of the former Soviet Union to survive decades of communism relatively unscathed. A peninsula larger than North and South Korea combined, Kamchatka has stunning treasures to preserve: active volcanoes, wild rivers, hot springs, floating boulders and other natural wonders. It was spared the forced march of Soviet-style economic development. Because of its strategic location, it was sealed off from foreigners and most Russians for 65 years. With only 450,000 people, most of whom live in and around...
...Kamchatka, however, must contend with the same pressures as the rest of Russia. Sinchenko admits that the government is under great pressure to replace the subsidies and remittances that ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Ecologists are worried that the local government will finance those expenses on the back of the environment by opening Kamchatka's rich mineral reserves to development. David Gordon of the Pacific Environment Resources Center, a California-based environmental group that has focused its efforts on threats to Siberia, notes that even now an American-Russian joint venture is preparing to mine gold...
During the Soviet era, the government used coercion, monetary inducements and subsidies to populate Siberia because of the region's strategic importance. Now that the subsidies have disappeared, people are leaving in search of jobs elsewhere. Of the Kamchatka peninsula's 450,000 people, 320,000 live in two cities. The rest of the peninsula has less than one person per 4 sq. km. But still, people are leaving. The peninsula has lost 40,000 people, nearly 10% of its population, since 1985. In Yakutia, the Arctic city of Cherski, near the mouth of the Kolyma River above the Arctic...
Still, the small human populations of Primorski, Kamchatka, Khabarovsk, Yakutia and the other republics and provinces of Siberia are a luxury shared by few other places on earth. They give the region the opportunity to restore the ecological balance. And while it is tempting to draw parallels between the ecological standards of Siberia and those of most of the Third World, there is a tremendous body of environmental expertise and activism among the Russian people. For every profiteer who would make a quick buck off the fire sale of Siberia's assets, there are many who decry the theft...