Word: rivers
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...this continent-size region has been grievously wounded, and continues to be wounded today. "Let's say you decide to get away from it all in Siberia," says Alexei Yablokov, Russia's leading environmentalist and once President Boris Yeltsin's top adviser on ecology. "You travel up the Yenisey River toward the Arctic. You look across the empty tundra and think you are alone in nature, miles upon miles from the nearest person, and you decide to stretch out on the riverbank. Unfortunately, you are lying in sands contaminated by plutonium from three upstream nuclear reactors whose radioactive wastes have...
...logging but allowed officials to exempt concessions smaller than 5,000 acres from strict review. Alexander Kulikov, chairman of the Khabarovsk Wildlife Foundation, says that just before they leave office, local officials hand out dozens of concessions, often to friends and relatives. He says that in the Khor River watershed, a region of about 12,000 sq. mi., more than 90 forest enterprises are operating with almost no oversight from the government. "What is the solution?" asks an exasperated Yablokov. "Chechnya? Send troops to Novosibirsk...
Vice President Gore's answer is to send U.S. experts. Were U.S. involvement confined to sound environmental practices, American expertise might actually help. But U.S. initiatives are a tangle promoting contradictory programs: the U.S. is sponsoring a project to protect biodiversity in the Khor River watershed while at the same time giving grants to study the feasibility of logging in the region. Moreover, critics point out that the U.S. has a less than thrilling record preserving its own forests. The U.S. has less than 5% of its ancient forests and suffers from a timber shortage; Russia has roughly...
Yakutia, which suffered horribly from radioactive fallout from nuclear tests and chemical pollution during the Soviet era, has shown itself to be farsighted in dealing with some environmental issues. The delta of the Lena River lies atop reserves of oil and gas. It is also a diverse ecosystem created in part by the meeting of the great tectonic plates that lie under North America and Eurasia. Mindful of Siberia's sorry record of leaky oil pipelines and catastrophic spills, the republic was hesitant to open this vulnerable area to drilling. Says Vasili Alekseev, the Minister of Ecology: "Since there...
...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 Circle, has lost nearly half its population in just the past two years. (Recently, though, it has had a reported influx of Russian mafia hit men who use the town as a "riverbed"--slang for a hiding place--to cool off between assassinations...