Sakhalin’s economy depends on fishing.  Take Aniva District, for example:  one fish inspector told me that 70-80% of the local economy is tied to fishing.  And most of that is for salmon. 

So it’s no surprise that one of the major concerns for people on Sakhalin about oil and gas development is its impacts to salmon.  Shell has been roundly criticized by environmentalists and even the Russian government for the impacts to salmon spawning streams from its pipeline construction. 

Under Russian law, companies have to pay for damages to natural resources.  So Shell provided $11 million to the Sakhalin Fisheries Agency as compensation for its damage to salmon.  Regardless of the fact that this amount is too low, I was most amazed about how the Sakhalin Fisheries Agency then decided to use this money.  The Fisheries Agency used the compensation to reconstruct an enormous fish hatchery on the Taranai River.  The reconstruction included building a barrier that blocks fish from going upriver so that all the salmon can be taken at the hatchery.  Essentially, this will destroy the fisheries in the upper part of the watershed.  

Shell and the Sakhalin Fisheries Agency should know better.  It’s much smarter to spend money to protect healthy wild salmon habitat than to build hatcheries that just lead to more threats to wild salmon.  Instead, they’ve just doubled the damage to salmon from Sakhalin-II and oil and gas development.  In the indigenous Ainu language, Taranai River means “Fish River.”  Too bad this fish river is being killed. 

Continuing our trip here on Sakhalin, we traveled north over the last few days to visit indigenous reindeer herders and indigenous fish camps.  The Uilta people in Sakhalin traditionally herd reindeer, while the Nivkh people are fishers.  Both peoples are being impacted by enormous oil and gas projects in Northeastern Sakhalin led by Shell and Exxon. 

We used a Gaz-66 – an enormous Russian truck that can pretty much deal with any road conditions – to drive out to the reindeer herders.  After getting near to the area we hiked for about half a mile through lichen, dwarf birch, and dwarf pine to find the camp.  We saw berries and mushrooms as we walked – this “forest-tundra” area was very rich.  The herders we met had about 60 reindeer.  Only about 17 Uilta continue to herd reindeer.  Indigenous peoples such as the Uilta in Russia have had to adapt to constant changes – from forced collectivization and forced resettlement into large towns under the Soviets, to adapting to the market economy and a collapse of government subsidies in the 1990s, to massive oil and gas developments on their traditional territories over the last several years.  Traditions have been lost, although a number of indigenous peoples in Russia – including the herders who we met – are trying to restore the traditions. 

The herders said that ever since Exxon built an enormous oil processing complex, the reindeer have been forced out of their traditional calving area.  The noise, lights, and constant traffic from this processing facility are too much for the reindeer.  The herders are worried about survival rates among the reindeer calves as they do what they can to increase the reindeer population. 

The Nivkh fishers are also worried about the impacts of Shell and Exxon’s projects on their traditional fishing lifestyles.  They spend the summers in fish camps spread out along the bays of Northeastern Sakhalin and come there year-round to fish saffron cod, char, and salmon.  We arrived in time to see some of our indigenous partners fishing for salmon and then shared a wonderful traditional meal.  But the Nivkh grandmothers we talked with are worried – they say that more and more often, they come across fish that have sores and blisters or that smell like oil.  They don’t know why this is, and the oil companies have refused to study the problem.  

Their frustrations with the oil and gas developments led the Nivkh, Uilta, and other indigenous peoples to blockade roads to Shell and Exxon’s projects in 2005.  As a result, Shell agreed to an indigenous peoples’ development plan that provides a council with $300,000 per year over 5 years.  But what happens after these five years are up?  In our conversations, we learned that many indigenous peoples are concerned that the money from this plan won’t really be used to help with restoring and protecting their traditional culture.  Instead, they know that they’re the ones who will stay in northeastern Sakhalin.  The oil companies will leave Sakhalin, and the native peoples will be left with the mess. 

Vasily, a reindeer herder, told us that all he really wants is “calm.”  He wants a calm place to herd reindeer and restore his people’s traditions. 

Our Executive Director is a real stick-in-the-mud

Sakhalin Island, Russia – Today I had the opportunity to accompany our partners at Sakhalin Environment Watch on one of their trips to inspect pipeline construction for the Sakhalin-II project, which is being led by Gazprom and Shell.  What I saw was shocking – even to me, and I’ve seen a lot of pretty bad places!  Despite an enormous amount of public concern about how the pipeline will affect salmon streams, pressure from international banks to clean up the river crossings, and a huge crackdown by the Russian government on the project’s environmental violations, the pipeline is just causing more and more damage.

We visited a slope that was a focus of the government crackdown against Shell last year.  And it’s now looking even worse.  You can see a hole forming in the middle of the slope from erosion – erosion that’s all going downstream into salmon spawning rivers.  Those are our partners Dmitry Lisitsyn and Zhenya Konovalov at Sakhalin Environment Watch that you can see in the photos.  

They think the problems with the pipeline are because Shell failed to complete a good project design.  Shell clearly still isn’t doing enough – it isn’t planting the slope, for example, which would increase slope stability.  But the problems will continue to get worse – they picked a bad route in mountainous conditions with very poor soils prone to erosion.  Following the construction, it’s even more likely that after strong rainstorms (as we’ve had the last couple of days) we will see landslides and debris flows that could destroy sections of the pipeline.  One geologist told us today, “I pray that the pipeline will be destroyed in a landslide before they put oil into it.  Because once they put oil into the pipeline, and the landslide happens, it will be much worse.” 

Our inspection of the pipeline had its own adventures. We’d had a lot of rain in the last day, which made the roads bad and the mud worse.  At one point, as I was trying to get close to a severely eroded area on the pipeline route, I stepped into some mud and sank up to my knees!  It just goes to show how bad the conditions are in Sakhalin – and clearly the conditions are too difficult for the engineers at Shell.