Word: siberias
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...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...
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...
...SITTING IN THE SPARSELY FURNISHED LIVING ROOM OF AN UDEGE house in southeastern Siberia while the owner tries to sell me a tiger skin and bones. My cover is that I am part of a group of American businessmen here for a week of bird watching. The other "bird watchers" consist of Steven Galster, an environmental investigator, Anthony Suau, a TIME photographer, and Sergei Shaitarov, a Russian environmentalist who works with Galster. My ludicrously rudimentary disguise consists of a borrowed pair of binoculars. If the tiger trader asks me to name one species of local bird, we are sunk...