Word: siberia
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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While the liquidation of forests preoccupies Siberia's south, the northern regions are obsessed with the dream of better transportation links to the outside world. In giant Yakutia, officials speak of the benefits of a sea route across the top of the continent that will open their territories. They long to be free of extortionate transportation mafias that saddle the region with what may be the highest shipping costs in the world. The fees are so high that merchants in Cherski often find it more economical to import food products from Alaska than buy from elsewhere in Russia--and Alaska...
...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 is no truly clean technology to extract those reserves, we felt it better to create the Lena Delta Biosphere Reserve...
...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 in an area near two salmon rivers that was once intended to be part of a reserve. He fears that the way in which the project is being rammed through--without proper environmental review--sets...
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...
...outflow from Siberia helps put to rest one of the most enduring myths about the region--that it is virtually empty. The number of humans is in fact low in absolute terms. Currently Siberia has 30 million inhabitants, with the largest concentrations in cities like Novosibirsk (pop. 1.4 million) and Vladivostok (pop. 640,000). The entire Russian Far East, covering 2.4 million sq. mi., has 8 million people, less than the population of Moscow. But Siberia is not empty; it is not even underpopulated...