My trip to Olkhon Island
Olkhon is the third-largest lake-bound island in the world, and the largest in Lake Baikal with an area of 730 square kilometers (280 sq mi). On the evening of July 2nd, I arrived in Khuzhir, the administrative center of the Olkhon Island. I planned to spend the weekend finalizing a grant proposal and meeting with local activists.
I went for a run along the lake when I arrived. The last time I visited the island was in 1998, with a crew of filmmakers who I accompanied as an interpreter and a local chaperone. At the time, the island did not have electricity. In fact, the few people that did live there lived off diesel generators which supplied enough electricity for basic lighting, cooking, and an hour or two of TV in the evening. Back then, there were only a few foreigners who used to stride along the streets of Khuzhir, attracting a lot of attention from local kids. There were one or two grocery stores and a couple of tourist guest houses. One of the most famous guest houses was run by the island’s local interpreter, Nikita Bencharov, who had extra wooden cabins and some sites for tents in his backyard.
Since then, everything has changed. As I was running through the village and along the famous beach near Shaman Rock, I saw dozens of new guest houses, cabins and hotels catering to tourists from neighboring regions and abroad. Supermarkets, bars, and restaurants offer a variety of regional and foreign cuisines. The famous Nikita Bencharov has expanded his backyard into a top notch tourist complex with fancy hotel rooms, cafes and bars. Everything seemed great. People have electricity, cell phone coverage, internet access and TV. They have jobs that range from catering to tourism. They are building new houses.
But something was bothering me as I ran along the beach. There was trash everywhere – plastic bags, empty beer bottles, metal cans, old clothes and broken glass. I also noticed hundreds of stumps left from fir trees along the beach, leaving the top soil prone to desertification. These trees are cut by tourists for camp fires. Olkhon Island has a very unique but fragile ecosystem, which features a combination of taiga, steppe and desert. The soil is extremely sensitive to any kind of human and animal impact, and quickly turns to desert. It is impossible not to notice the effects of ever expanding development on the soil on Olkhon.
It was heartbreaking to observe this. The next day, together with Svetlana Irshutova, director of the Khuzhir library, and Irina Sokolnikova, a local activist, we organized a shore clean up. It was not difficult to assemble a group of 11 people, mostly local, for a mission that involved both physical activity and socializing. The one difficulty, however, was finding the right agency on the island responsible for taking the collected trash to assigned locations. To my surprise, I later learned that the trash is taken and dumped in the landfill in the forest near the village without even being sorted.
We collected about 19 bags of trash in about an hour and quickly ran out of bags, which we had to purchase for 50 cents a piece, but still a lot of trash remained on the beach. Fortunately, our efforts inspired a group of students who were camping right on the beach who promised to collect the rest of the trash. Another inspiring moment came when local activists decided to organize and actually take action about this problem on a long term basis.
I would like to point that I am not anti-development. I believe that any kind of development – electricity, tourism, jobs, cell phones, the internet – is good for the island, but island residents and their local government need to also think of ways to preserve their land. They need to think strategically and proactively about how keep beautiful place from turning into a dumping ground. The actions demonstrated by the community as a result of the shoreline cleanup are definitely a good start.
Tags: community partners, environment, pollution, Russia, Russian Far East
