I shot the following videos at Lake Azabache and in Bistrinsky Nature Park in central Kamchatka during a mid-July trip with my colleague Igor Goldfarb.
Here you can see a spawning stream filled with sockeye salmon as they complete the final leg of their journey to the spawning grounds. When I took this video, these fish had already traveled from the ocean, up two rivers, across a lake, and up several miles of this stream. The white fish have already spawned, and are beginning to die. The media portrays post-spawn salmon mortality as a romantic sacrifice, but the truth is far more gruesome: after completing their “duty,” the salmon literally begin to fall apart. The upshot is that the nutrients the salmon bring to Kamchatka’s rivers feed entire villages, an enormous population of bears, and even fertilizes the surrounding forest. (more…)
Back in July, Igor and I went to visit a partner who conducts anti-poaching patrols in the Nalichego Nature Park, not far from Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky. We had to take a boat to his home within the park and, after a day-long tour, rode back to the truck to head home. As we turned a corner we saw the following image:
Right there, in the middle of a federal park on waters where any fishing equipment beyond a spinning rod is banned, we caught two men stringing a net across the mouth of a key spawning river.
I realized just how complacent poachers can be on Kamchatka, but it also revealed how a little support in the right places can significantly ameliorate the problem. Our partner in this park will likely catch several similarly complacent poachers this season. And if we can find more committed partners like him to conduct similar work, we can show poachers that their illegal work will not be tolerated by the locals who care the most about healthy salmon populations.
I have never seen so many insects in my life. Tiny black flies, quarter-sized mosquitoes and enormous horseflies competed to distract Tatiana Indanova as she crouched at the edge of a spring-fed creek in the 90-degree afternoon heat, using one hand to collect aquatic insect larvae, or benthos, while swatting the biting insects with her free hand.
Tatiana is a 21 year old college student and member of the Even tribe from the remote, indigenous town of Anavgai, where she is universally known as “Tanyushka.” Many college students Tanya’s age would look forward to spending their summers in dance clubs or at a lakeshore resort or pretty much anywhere but a mosquito-infested wilderness crawling with bears. But for the third consecutive summer Tanya is using her free months to mount one- and two-week expeditions to remote waterways in Bistrinsky Natural Park on Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula, where she collects samples of aquatic insect life that she later analyzes at her university’s laboratory to detect changes in water quality. Tanya’s project is supported by a grant from the Lach Ethno-Ecological Information Center, which conducts an annual minigrants competition with Pacific Environment aid. I was fortunate enough to accompany Tanya on the first of this year’s expeditions, which had us visit a reindeer herders’ camp, cross high mountain passes, camp at a riverside fishing village, swim in natural hot springs, and twice get chased by bears. (more…)
In early April, 34 Chinese environmental NGOs wrote letters to 29 IT companies regarding members of their supply chains violating Chinese environmental laws and regulations. The list included suppliers for global brands like Apple, IBM, Intel, Sony and Lenova.
Ten days of mostly silence on the part of these companies led to a press conference that attracted widespread media attention and finally some responses. According to an insider source, some companies claimed that these violations took place before they became buyers; others made vague promises of investigations and redress. Hundreds of letters and phone calls are being exchanged between the parties and much work is still needed to be done. (more…)
It’s the 14th day of my 28-day trip backpacking around China to help seek out, investigate, and report on sources of water pollution. I’m in a village in Bengbu, trying not to breathe as factories around me belch black smoke into the air. With me is Zhouxiang and Zhangjun, Executive Director and Operations Director of Green Anhui, respectively. Next to us a group of local construction workers are in the middle of re-plastering the walls on someone’s decrepit looking house.
I arrived in Hong Kong, China thinking that I had packed a perfect amount of clothes. The weather was warm and humid but also slightly breezy at times. Weather.com was once again reliable until the Chinese government decided to shoot some silver iodide and dry ice into the sky, to induce rain to relieve the drought in the north. It set off a snow storm and extreme weather conditions across the country that was to claim 40 lives and billions of dollars in lost agricultural and industrial productions. Luckily, all it gave me was a cold that lasted for weeks. When I arrived in Guangzhou it was as if I had walked into a freezer. I scrambled to a nearby mall and filled up my suitcase with new winter clothes. By the time I sat down at Green Eyes’ office near Zhongshan University, I was appropriately bundled up.
On 16 November 2009 a panel of Kamchatkan activists from the Lach Ethno-Ecological Information Center awarded first, second, and third prizes in a photography contest held during this summer’s salmon spawning season. The panel selected 34 finalists from 70 entries addressing the topic “The salmon in the life of the native peoples of Kamchatka” before whittling the group down to three winners. The top three submissions are displayed after the jump. All 34 finalists can be viewed here.
I looked around, and through the grey fog of cigarette smoke I could just make out an outline of the man who was talking at me in a gruff voice with a dialect of Chinese I couldn’t understand. He gestured animatedly, not noticing in his excitement that I was nodding without comprehension. The smoke swirled around him like incense. A few feet away another man was also talking at me, giving his version of whatever story was in the works, talking over and under the first man in that same incomprehensible dialect. I didn’t know who to pay attention to so I bobbed my head at each in turn, to keep them talking. A dirty lightbulb hung between us, slightly above our heads, illuminating the dirt walls and the dirt floor. I was in a dirt house on the side of a dirt mountain in the frozen winter of a small village in China’s Gansu Province. Outside was the kind of primordial silent black that only still exists in places where people continue to wake and sleep with the sun. I should have been a bit scared, freshly plucked as I was from my apartment in downtown San Francisco, now wading through the developing world with my developed-world ways and thoughts and expectations of what life should be; but Zhaozhong was with me, so was Liping and Chenyang, and sandwiched between my Green Camel Bell friends I felt safe enough to enjoy the delicious strangeness of the situation. (more…)
David Gordon and I spent the last few days at the Wild Salmon Center’s annual “Sustainable Salmon Fisheries in the Russian Far East” conference in Portland. Still in my first month on the job, I boarded the plane last Sunday both excited and anxious. I was thrilled at the opportunity to meet my American and Russian colleagues and learn from their experience, but I was also nervous to be a neophyte among so many respected and experienced conservationists.
I was born and grew up along a tributary of the Pearl River, the Fenjiang in Foshan. In the early 90s, one of our favorite pastimes during the warm summer nights, was to get “yeshao” or “midnight snacks” at the dozens of outdoor eateries that sprang up along “Fenjiang”, the Fen River. These eateries would cook up greasy but tasty fried noodles, fried rice and various seafood stir fries. Vegetables and dishes were washed with water directly pulled up in buckets from the river. No one thought much of it.
By the time I returned from my first trip home after immigrating to the US, in 1998, things had turned badly. The Fenjiang smelled like the Soy Sauce factory nearby and had many different colors similar to the textiles coming out of another factory. In my most recent trip last year, the river didn’t smell as bad, but still look dead, if not poisonous. People had different ideas as to which factories caused the pollution, but everyone accepted the situation as inevitable and never bothered with finding out the truth. Then this week came a timely and well investigated Greenpeace report on the companies that are poisoning the Pearl River and the larger political context which are allowing the situation to deteriorate. It answered so many questions and highlighted the urgency to speak up.
Posted by Evan Sparling
Posted by Xiu Min Li
Posted by Yang Chu
me belch black smoke into the air. With me is Zhouxiang and Zhangjun, Executive Director and Operations Director of Green Anhui, respectively. Next to us a group of local construction workers are in the middle of re-plastering the walls on someone’s decrepit looking house.
Posted by Evan Sparling
