Word: primorski
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Dates: during 1995-1995
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...expanse and the magnitudes of Siberia are mesmerizing. Officially Siberia is the territory east of the Ural Mountains and west of the Russian Far East, which includes the maritime provinces of Khabarovsk and Primorski on the Pacific coast; however, convention has labeled as Siberia all Russian lands east of the Urals--an area that covers more than 5 million sq. mi. Within these boundaries are nearly the entire lengths of four of the longest rivers on earth--the Yenisey, the Ob, the Lena and the Amur, which constitutes most of Siberia's border with China. Yakutia, now designated the Sakha...
...order in the former U.S.S.R. has led to a tremendous increase in poaching, particularly of the Amur tiger. Tigers once roamed Russia from the Caspian Sea to the Pacific and from the Chinese border to the Arctic. Now only the Amur subspecies remains, hemmed in to the forests of Primorski province by the Pacific Ocean and the Chinese border...
...knows how many tigers are left, but today Primorski province is estimated to have between 180 and 200, down from 350 in 1990. Vasili Solkin, the head of the Russian environmental group Zov Taigi, which means Roar of the Taiga, estimates that in 1993 alone, 75 to 80 tigers were killed, representing more than one-quarter of the remaining population. When traditional East Asian apothecaries ran out of sources for tiger skin and bones, which are used as medicine, among the places to which they turned for new supplies was Siberia. At the same time enforcement efforts collapsed as budgets...
Perhaps the most vivid example of the complex demographics comes from Primorski province in the heart of a vast and pristine watershed. When told that the outside world views their forests as empty, four Udege hunters laugh uproariously. They argue that too many people are already using the forest. A study shows that only half the watershed's nearly 5,000 sq. mi. of forest produces enough sable, deer and elk to support hunters. And a single tribal hunter must roam a territory as large as 75 sq. mi.--about the size of the Caribbean island of Aruba--to trap...
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...
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