Nearly 300 years ago, one of the first researchers of the Kamchatka Peninsula, George Stelleronce wrote:

“Kamchatka lives almost solely on fish. If you hit the water with a spear you rarely miss a fish.  Fishing nets or seines are useless in Kamchatka for that reason.  It’s impossible to drag them ashore, they tear because ofthe abundance of fish.”

Many years ago, it seemed that the salmon would last forever.  However, today we know that all natural resources are limited, and Kamchatka’s salmon need protection.  So what is the current state of Kamchatka salmon?  The Kamchatka Branch of the Pacific Institute of Geography has published extensively on the topic. (more…)

I first met Arina Shurygina at the Keepers of the Salmon festival. It was amazing to see how much love she put into teaching about the salmon life cycle, its constitution, and peculiarities. It seemed that there was nothing more important to her than to teach each student how many fins a salmon has and the locations and names of each fin. Later, I learned that containers set throughout the town to collect plastic caps were another of Arina’s initiatives, but not the only one.

It was interesting to learn how it all began. Arina explains that, “One spring, at the outskirts of town, I realized that I was walking on a carpet of garbage. Snow cover was gone and garbage brought from nearby dumps had begun to surface. It was a very unpleasant feeling, but I wanted to fix it. I began to learn about different approaches to the problem that existed worldwide, and the possibilities available in the region. I discovered that in Kamchatka, and Russia in general, there is no general practice of sorting and recycling of household trash. I started to learn more about the issue and wrote articles to newspapers and journals. They were published but the situation still did not change.” (more…)

Almost every culture has a celebration to give thanks to nature for the previous year, the harvest, and the supplies stored for the winter. The Itelmen, one of the most ancient peoples of Kamchatka, call this holiday Alkhalalalai which is traditionally celebrated on the last weekend of September.  Recently this holiday has been celebrated in the Itelmen village of Pimchakh, after taking place for many years in Kovran, the spiritual and cultural center of the Itelmen people. This year, Alkhalalalai became an official holiday on Kamchatka’s calendar, a natural move, since the holiday unites all of the peoples of Kamchatka on one field, with no attention paid to population, age, or religious faith.

The celebration’s motto – “Here there are no guests, only participants” – came true from the very first minute of this year’s event. All of the guests were involved in the ceremonial cleansing of the hardships of the past year, and in the ritual feeding of Khantai. Khantai is the aboriginal god worshipped by the indigenous peoples of northern Russia and the Russian Far East. Aboriginals bring gifts to him since he rules the catch of fish.  Then they give thanks to him for the abundant catches.  The spirits were kind to the celebration’s participants and granted them a perfect, sunny day, even though the forecast predicted cloudy rainy weather, and it rained on both the day before and the day after the celebration. (more…)

A few years ago, experts came together to discuss potential scenarios for the Arctic.  They discussed what the Arctic would look like in 50 years in the face of climate change and intensified resource development.

The experts developed several scenarios, ranging from a race by countries to extract natural resources to armed military conflict, from protecting the Arctic for its natural wonders to a vision of sustainable development that brought economic wealth to local peoples.  After Russia planted its flag on the North Pole, news outlets trumpeted the likelihood of a new “cold war” with conflict brewing in the Arctic.

This week, Russia held a conference to try to dispel this myth.  The conference, called “The Arctic:  A Territory of Dialogue,” Diplomats and scientists from around the Arctic talked about the importance of working together to address the challenges facing the Arctic.  Speeches by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, Prince Albert II of Monaco, and Icelandic President Olafur Ragnar Grimsson provided an official air to the discussion.

I was fortunate enough to be invited to the conference by the Russian Geographic Society, which organized and hosted the event.  In many ways, the conference was organized to showcase Russia’s long-term commitment to exploration and research of the Arctic.  Although hosted by Sergei Shoigu – Russia’s Minister for Emergency Situations and the President of the Russian Geographic Society – the most visible participant was Artur Chilingarov, Russia’s colorful Arctic explorer who planted the Russian flag on the bottom of the North Pole. (more…)

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…)

Hearing news every day about forest fires in central Russia and the casts of smog choking Russian cities, villages, even more so– the city of Moscow, I could not ignore this subject.  I wanted to look at the reasons behind this natural disaster and discuss ways such disasters could be prevented, and if not, at least made more manageable.  Recent reports say that the mortality rate in Moscow has risen to 700 per day, which is double the normal rate. It has been reported that 22 out of the country’s 83 regions are now affected by the wildfires, and that there is no end in sight to the extreme heat wave that hit Russia this summer.

Over the past two years my family and friends in Russia all complained about unusually cold winters and hot summers. When I traveled to Altai in January I experienced the abnormally cold winter myself – temperatures there dropped down as low as -57 degrees Celsius, which is -70.6 degrees Fahrenheit. On my recent trip in June, when I stopped for a day in Moscow, temperatures were up to +41 C, the equivalent to + 105.8 F. My conversations with Russian scientists and environmentalists have all pointed to the scientific phenomenon called extreme temperature oscillations, which are believed to be caused by climate change. The notion of climate change has always been scorned by the Russian government and thought of as a hoax invented by the West. But recently, it seems to be that Russia is finally changing its stance. On July 30, Russian President Dmitri Medvedev said the following: “What’s happening with the planet’s climate right now needs to be a wake-up call to all of us, meaning [including] all heads of state, all heads of social organizations, in order to take a more energetic approach to countering the global changes to the climate.”

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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.

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 2^nd, 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. (more…)

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…)

Kolya is the kind of boss that everyone at once prays they will have and dreads they will end up with. As a leader he is nearly flawless; knowledgeable, experienced, and deadly calm under pressure. As a teacher, he is all of these things, but also impatient, short-tempered, and sarcastic.

Kolya is the indigenous Even hunter and mountain man who led me, Tatiana Indanova, a PE partner who monitors water quality, two Muscovite botanists, his son Zhenya, and a local friend on a week-long expedition through the Kamchatka wilderness to conduct Indanova’s water quality monitoring project, collect samples of Kamchatka’s flora, and find some escaped reindeer.

From day one, I knew what kind of leader Kolya would be: as we packed our belongings into our saddlebags, I found myself standing around, unsure how to pack and not wanting to get in the way. As Kolya packed some of my things, he stopped for a moment to pull off his jacket. “Too hot?” I asked, hoping to strike up a conversation. “Yeah,” he replied with a grin, but looking me dead in the eyes, “because I’m not just standing around.” I still chuckle when I remember how he scolded his son’s friend for pulling in a net too slowly: “Pull harder, dammit, you’re not undressing a girl!” (more…)