Word: siberias
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...world looks upon all these resources and salivates. Texaco, Exxon, Amoco, Norsk Hydro and other transnational oil companies are setting up joint ventures to tap into the enormous oil and gas reserves scattered through Siberia, including the Timan Pechora basin above the Arctic Circle (where the recoverable reserves are estimated at nearly 4 billion bbl.). Canadian, American and other Western mining companies are prospecting for gold and other minerals. Norwegian and Japanese interests are negotiating to increase shipping between Europe and Asia by way of arctic waters north of Siberia...
...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 for ranger patrols disappeared and corruption flourished, driven by stagnant salaries and hyperinflation...
...surge in anti-Western feeling, the very thing Gore hopes to prevent. While communism ravaged the land, the Soviet commissars did leave a powerful legacy: a conviction that forests and other resources are owned by all Russians and not some favored elite. Consequently, the wholesale sell-off of Siberia has aroused great bitterness among Russians. "You own us now," says an official sarcastically. Ordinary people are frustrated by corrupt courts, by self-dealing and favoritism and by confiscatory taxes that force honest businesspeople to become cheaters. Increasingly, their ire is directed against the new order. When asked to name...
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...