DME ranked 85th on a rating of the world's airports.  Is anyone shocked?

Guess who ranked #1?  ICN!

Second year in a row.  It came in first in all four categories in which it qualified.

I love Icheon Seoul airport.

This is actually an optical illusion, but wouldn't it be creepy if it were literally true?

Inuit seek answers to Arctic sun quirks


I have a lot of photos and some video to post from a recent visit by Russian environmentalists to Oregon and the SF Bay Area, but for now this is all I have time to do.

Pacific Environment is proud to present some of Russia's top environmentalists in two Bay Area events, on March 6th and March 8th.

Please join us!

======================
Tuesday, March 6, 2007
======================

The World Affairs Council of Northern California COSPONSORED BY
PACIFIC ENVIRONMENT AND GLOBAL EXCHANGE
Presents:

________________________________________________________

Russia's Sakhalin Island: Environmental Politics and Oil
________________________________________________________

with

Dmitry Lisitsyn, Board President, Sakhalin Environment Watch, from
Sakhalin Island, Russia, and

Irina Bogdan, Board President, Ecodal,
a Russian Far Eastern environmental community organization.

In September 2006 the Kremlin wrested majority control of Sakhalin II,
the world's largest oil and gas project, from Royal Dutch Shell and
gave it to Russia's gas monopoly Gazprom, citing environmental
violations among other reasons. In the wake of these changes Dmitry
Lisitsyn and Irina Bogdan, internationally recognized environmental
leaders of the campaign to improve Sakhalin II, will offer their
perspectives on the domestic and international implications of
Russia's shifting energy policy, and ways to ensure that the Kremlin
addresses the negative environmental impacts of Sakhalin II and other
oil and gas projects.

Registration 5:30 PM, Program 6:00 PM
World Affairs Council Auditorium
312 Sutter St., 2nd floor, San Francisco
Nonmembers $15 Student Nonmembers $5, World Affairs Council Members FREE

To buy tickets please visit here.




======================
Thursday, March 8, 2007
International Women's Day
======================

PACIFIC ENVIRONMENT PRESENTS:

________________________________________________________

An Intimate Reception with four of
Russia's most renowned environmental activists
________________________________________________________

Please join Pacific Environment for appetizers and wine to honor four
leaders of Russia's environmental movement.

Guests of honor include:

Dmitry Lisitsyn, Board President of Sakhalin Environment Watch. Leader
of the campaign to improve the largest integrated oil and gas project
in the world, Sakhalin II.  Winner of a 2006 Whitley Award for salmon
and forest conservation efforts on the island of Sakhalin.  The
Sakhalin II Campaign also won a Business Ethics Network award in 2006.

Irina Bogdan, Board President of Ecodal. One of Russia's top
environmental lawyers.  Involved in a number of legal cases that are
seeking an end to illegal actions by Russian and foreign operators of
resource-extraction projects in Siberia and the Russian Far East.
Irina was a Runner-Up for the 2004 Conde Nast Traveler's Environmental
Award.

Marina Rikhvanova, Co-Founder and Co-Chair of Baikal Environmental
Wave. In 2006 she won the Conde Nast Traveler's Environmental Award
for her outstanding work defending Lake Baikal against the massive
Siberia-Pacific oil pipeline.

Sergei Bereznuk, Director of the Phoenix Fund. In 2006 he celebrated
the re-routing of the terminal for the gargantuan Siberia-Pacific oil
pipeline away from sensitive Amur Leopard habitat, a result of a
campaign that he helped coordinate in Primorye, along the eastern
coast of Russia. Winner of a 2006 Whitley Award for his efforts to
save the endangered Amur Tigers and Leopards in Russia's Far East.

6:30 PM – 9:00 PM
Delancey Street Restaurant
600 Embarcadero Street, San Francisco
$30 - $100 sliding scale donation

Appetizers and wine provided.

Space Limited: RSVP recommended.
RSVP to Sarah Kagan at skagan@pacificenvironment.org or 415 399 8850 x 309, or visit here.

Orange snow in West Siberia not toxic (RIA Novosti, 02/02/07)

http://en.rian.ru/russia/20070202/60081891.html

The yellow-orange snow that fell in a West Siberian region Wednesday contains no toxic substances, experts said Friday. "Experts have established that the substances in the snow are not toxic, but the iron content in the snow samples was four times above the norm," the press service of the local emergencies situations department said.

A priceless but creepy headline.

Russia probes smelly orange snow

I just did my first radio interview as an environmental campaigner! It will air tomorrow evening on the national environmental radio show "Ecotalk" on Air America, the AM liberal talk radio channel. I was asked to talk about the Sakhalin Campaign.

In the San Francisco/Bay Area you can hear me at 11 pm tomorrow night on your AM dial at KQKE 960.

Elsewhere, check for your local station. The show is on 11 pm Western and around 9 pm in other time zones.

But if you miss it, I think it'll be available as a downloadable podcast.

I got the longest segment of the hour-long show- 15 minutes. I hope to go back with a follow-up on the story in a month or so. I really could hardly scratch the surface in this little segment.

I hope my impression of Kissinger goes over ok.
(Just kidding. I did the whole thing in a Pee Wee Herman voice.)

They are about to go under financially, so if you want to visit their site and do a Pay Pal donation, they might stay on the air long enough to interview Dima Lisitsyn in March when he's in town.

If you catch it, let me know what you think!

This is not what comes to mind for me when I hear the Russian word for tungsten, but this is apparently the rock that the horse "Volfram" was named after.  How could such a pretty word like Volfram translate to tungsten?  But it does.  I always thought it was just a pretty name for a horse.

Volfram was the draft pony in the stable where I worked for lessons when I lived in Novgorod, Russia.

He pulled the manure cart out to the manure dump, and looked very nice in harness, even given the non-pretty payload.  He was light sorrell in winter, and as big-fluffy-fuzzy as they come.  He had a kind face with a large eye.  He was an intact stallion, and was still being used as a stud.  He was leading a pretty active, full life, as manure-cart ponies go.  He had a great temperment, one of the best in the barn.

One weekend I was out at the stable and was carrying water or something past the end of the barn.  I stopped and caught my breath.  There was a horse hide stretched out on a frame to dry in the sun.  I just stared, as the realization dawned on me that I recognized that hide.

I went to Volfram's stall and it was empty.  I asked.  He had colicked.  They put him down.  This was what was left.  Nothing left to waste- a functional being in a functional place.

I think the kids that worked alongside me (ages from around 9 to 16) put on an extra tough face when they were at the stable, because the atmosphere was tough.  The trainer was a very serious man who kind of scared me.  The horses were big and fast.  We were show-jumping these animals in all weather without any safety equipment.  Just one sour old Afghan war veteran running this rag-tag crew of macha squinty-eyed pre-adolescent and adolescent girls (with two young men as the exceptions).  It was not a place you wanted to be seen crying.

So I didn't.  I stuffed it down. 

Then, just now, I was reading a proposal from a group working in the Altai mountains, and the author mentioned a "volfram" mining operation.  I translated. 

Multitran gave me "tungsten"  for Volfram.  Not a fair trade at all.  Not at all.

Well, RIA Novosti has just published a translated-to-English article that says that the whole mess that is Sakhalin II is no longer a thing of concern.  The state gas monopoly Gazprom has paid a handsome fee to become a majority stockholder, and Shell will retain control through its subsidiary Sakhalin Energy.  All those environmental engineering disasters?  Well, why even bring those up. 

The article "Debates Around Sakhalin II Over" reasons that Gazprom paid a high price for its share because it wanted to compensate for "moral damage."  Apparently that's the only kind of damage any of these oily gassy folks are concerned about.  Nobody is even paying lip service to the long long list of illegal and simply bad engineering and design decisions made by Sakhalin Energy and its contractors. 

I guess we just wait for the catastrophic oil spills and hope when that happens they do more than just compensate for the "moral damage".

Well, at least public money won't be going to the project now, if this Yahoo article's (Gazprom's Sakhalin-2 buy may let EBRD off the hook) prediction is true, that the EBRD can't finance a project that is majority government-owned.

I am confused about why Russia is being such a hardass on the only Former Soviet Republic that wanted to stay in the Soviet Union.

Georgia and Ukraine, I see that, but Belarus?

Actually, it's not quite hard-frozen.  Mostly soggy.  I refer to the frozen tundra between Tug Hill Plateau and Lake Ontario, where I grew up, which looks a LOT like Russia.

My sister works in Manhattan for the EPA, and in the EPA world this region is in fact referred to as "the tundra."  Outside New York State you hear the area lumped into the following categories by people who don't know any better:

1) "upstate" (i.e. the entire state, which happens to be located north of 113th Street so therefore is "up").

2) the southeast Adirondacks, which is the wildest thing in New York as far as urbanites are concerned-- and by the way Lake George is NOT as wild a region and not remotely as remote as where I'm talking about.

3) Buffalo, Rochester, or Syracuse.  Again, the furthest north, wildest places people can think of.  This place where I am is far wilder, far colder, far snowier than those areas.

We are at the place of landfall for a storm system that starts in the middle of Canada, or maybe even the Yukon if you want to go back to the very beginning of where it starts to pick up steam.  There is a lot of exchange of labor force between my home area and Alaska, because the weather is similar.  The trees all lean and point branches to the east because of the literally constant wind off the lake to our west.  The land is mostly cleared for pasture land and corn or alfalfa.  There is a three month growing period.  It literally is a frozen tundra.

The train comes through and the subzero air carries the sound direct to our house's formidable west wall.  It is the loudest thing there is up here.  I mean, besides snowmobiles, the absence of which is the silver lining to the gross snow-less weather.

Even Russia isn't getting the snowfall it usually gets.  Kamchatka was bare of snow until mid-December, though it was in a deep freeze.  It's a quirky winter, that's for sure.

Finally the snow came...

This is the view of the street in front of my childhood home.

There are a few early formative influences that got me thinking about the Soviet Union. One of these was Sting's hit single "Russians," and another was the movie "Red Dawn," and the other big influence was Ursula LeGuin's novel "The Dispossessed." I had quotes from that book all over my walls.

Well, I just read another book in that same "series" (i.e. Ursula's world where the Hainish people populated the universe) "The Left Hand of Darkness." In both novels I saw shades of the cold war, US / Soviet conflicts, socialism versus capitalism.

So I poked around Wikipedia to see what it said about this world and that novel, and found a definition for Ursula's word for the "governing" body of the union of all worlds - the ekumen - a link which also explains the LeGuin universe a bit.

When I was preparing to move to Russia for a year I actually wrote Ursula LeGuin a fan letter, thanking her for getting me thinking about the Soviet Union, which served to help me decide to visit the USSR when I was 15, and then to learn Russian and eventually go there to live. She wrote back a nice letter where she said that she had a Russia connection, and had indeed been inspired by the USSR for "The Dispossessed." And much more, I'm sure.

Anyway, I just noticed at the end of the Wikipedia definition a list of "other planets" from Ursula's world, and they include the planet "Gde."

That is Russian for the question "where?"

A friendly little in-joke.

No, I don't mean Pinochet, I mean that ultra nutjob Saparmurat Niyazov - "Turkmenbashi" - dead of heart failure at 66.  He didn't name a successor- so what's next for Turkmenistan?

Another chaotic Central Asian country that most US Americans don't know exists... and what a twilight zone.  People were fined $50,000 if they ever left the country.  Even other Central Asians don't know what the hell is going on in that prison of a country.

One of the founders of Google was born in Russia, but Google is still having trouble breaking into the Russian market.

http://www.threadless.com/product/383/The_Communist_Party


Woo hoo!

Still available in "girlie tee"!

has been waylaid due to a flare-up of tendinitis related to a grad school application deadline. We will return to your regularly scheduled updates soon. Thank you - The Management

Bummer!

Skype’s free phone call plan will soon have annual fee (New York Times, 12/13/06).


"The new annual fee for unlimited calling, while still nominal compared with other Internet calling plans, is part of a broader strategy by eBay to expand Skype’s product offerings and revenue."

Our operations depend a lot on Yahoo IM and Skype-- I hope it doesn't get priced out of our Russian partners' range!

I was aware of the Kamchatka indigenous Itelmen people's fall festival of Alkhalalalai, a sort of thanksgiving festival, and I had been encourged to attend it, but I only just now found out what the name means. 

"We want women with big breasts."

Apparently, the traditional response by the women, after the men shout "Alkhalalalai":

"We want men with nice moustaches."

(Nietzsche would have been very popular among the women on Kamchatka.)

(Now THERE'S an Itelmen moustache to tell your girlfriends about!  Image from a Kamchatka travel company.)

Learn more about the Itelmen people, including photos of Alkhalalalai.

Learn more from the indigenous Russian organization RAIPON about the indigenous peoples of the Russian North.

I am very entertained by what word Abby Lingvo 11 came up with when I went to it for help with a word I was trying to pull out of some messy handwriting by one of our otherwise impressive partners in Koryakia.

The word looked like poligia, but all I could come up with was polygyria.

Полигирия which translated in Abby Lingvo as polygyria.

The actual word I needed - which my native-Russian-speaking coworker helped me deduce- was just наличия - the genitive form of the familiar word наличие -  "acquisition." 

So, what the hell does it mean if you have an "excessive" number of convolutions in the brain?

 

I was reading the Economist from a week ago and there was an article about Bolton (who has now resigned at the UN as US Ambassador) -- the article mentioned that one impact he had was uniting the G77 against the "developed" world.  I had never heard of the G77, but apparently it formed in the 1960's, and it has its own website. 

My first question is, since Russia is sometimes and sometimes not considered developed, and so floats in and out of the G7 or G8, would it include itself also in the G77?  Well, according to the country member list, it is not.

When is Russia not in the G8? 

Wikipedia says:
--------------------------

In 1991, following the end of the Cold War, the USSR (now Russia) began meeting with the G7 after the main summit. This group became known as the P8 (Political 8), or colloquially the "G7 plus 1", starting with the 1994 Naples summit. Russia was allowed to participate more fully beginning in the 1997 political summit, marking the creation of the Group of Eight or G8.

Russia was not included in the meeting of financial officials as it is not a significant economic power; "G7" now refers specifically to the meeting of the respective Finance Ministers and Governors of the Central Banks.
--------------------------

So, the G7 -- France, West Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, the United States and Canada -- are the only ones considered "significant" economic powers.

I wonder who on earth would say Russia is an insignificant economic power.  They must mean that Russia is not floating the developing world the way the G7 nations are.  Well, what can you say, Russia didn't create significant colonies overseas, so it doesn't have to apologize and back away slowly throwing wads of loan-money at its former colonies. 

So who IS in the G77 who doesn't really belong there anymore?

China!  Who is the new number one world superpower in about 15 years.

And, Romania!  Who is entering the EU in January.

It's been a hard couple of days for a number of reasons, primarily because of stress from the upcoming deadline for my grad school application, which has me pretty overwhelmed, and I was so happy to find out:

1 - my friend and sometime fling Vlasta from Zagreb is coming to visit in March!  And, maybe, during a week when I'll be performing at a big bellydancing festival.

2 - I have enough frequent flier miles not only for a trip to Europe (read: Croatia and Slovenia), but enough for a FIRST CLASS ticket!  Whoo hoo!

This is where I want to be RIGHT NOW:

The Terme Palace

Waaaay in the back is where the little hot tubs are.  Vlasta and I had a little fun in the little hot tubs some three years ago.  She took a bus up from Zagreb just for the night, and then we took the bus back to her place in the morning.

Unfortunately she gave me a humongous headcold during that little fun in that little hot tub.  The rest of my trip was fairly miserable because of it.  Yet, the memory of the times I have had at Terme Palace transcend that consequence.  It is a MARVELOUS place to unwind.  Right beside the Adriatic, using Adriatic slightly-desalinated water, heated to different temperatures, and flowing in a current around the pools and waterfalls (which you can stand under) on a 10 minute timer, so the "tide" changes regularly, keeping people from bogarting the best spots.

Sigh...

My first trip to Siberia was in July 2000, when I was celebrating my 27th birthday and Saturn Return by going on a horseback mountain trek through a new ecotourism company that needed to experiment with a foreigner (they have since become a successful business).  I went up the mountain alone with a local guide.

I just discovered some old photos from that trip that I scanned years ago.




The Road to Biisk, between Barnaul and Chemal.

Our crappy car fell apart at the rate of about a part per 20 km.  The usual drive of 6 hours turned into 13 hours.  But the company was good- students a little younger than me working for the ecotourism company for the summer.





The first day, rain.

I was photographing this part of the trip with a crappy disposable camera that I kept in a pouch in my windbreaker.  Not bad, for that.






My guide (what was his name?  Sasha?), raised in the wilds there, half Altai and half Russian, was especially gifted at starting campfires in 10 minutes or less no matter whether it was hailing, raining, or blowing and gusty.

This was our last campfire (and warm lunch of canned meat) before galloping back to the main camp.








Our first day out we just did a day trip for six hours and then slept back at main camp.  I think they all wanted to see if I was crazy or if I really could ride in those conditions.

The second day we went out and the two of us slept in tents at a crest.  In the morning I took this photo looking south towards China and Kazakhstan, and then Pakistan.



This photo was taken at the crest we made on the first day.  The horse was named Red:  "Ryzhii" - and the guide sang him a little song - "Ryzhka, Ryzhka maya."  (Little Red, My Little Red.)  He worked very hard for me.  An honest little guy. The horse, I mean.  The guide was a little strange.



I was so sad to leave the main camp.  You see Ryzhii relaxing there, still tacked up after our last ride.

It's amazing how the two horses and me and the guide had become a unit, a team, over three days.  I never expected or expect to see any of them again (even having been back in the area once since then), but it still felt like a heartbreak to be driven away from there.  Like I was leaving a real part of me behind.


Yeah.  The guy I asked to take the picture didn't know what he was doing.  But you can sort of see three of the folks I hung out with on the hellacious car ride to Chemal and then each night back at main camp the few nights I was there.  They helped me celebrate my birthday in fine style the night before, complete with drinking and song.  This photo was taken right before I got in the SUV that drove me back to Barnaul, the day of my birthday proper.

I LOVE the color I had my hair that summer.  It was called "fiery eggplant." 



On the way out we stopped at one of the tourist traps along the way: an artesian well that is a sacred site to the Altai people.  They - and Russian tourists - tie bits of cloth on the branches around the spring.  Each is a tiny prayer.  I guess it must be an offshoot of the practice of prayer flags in Tibet.  A lot of Tibetan Buddhist influence can be seen around there.

A line of little kiosks with gifties of all kinds lined the parking lot.  I remember the outhouse was particularly foul there.

But the beribboned trees around the spring, here framing the Katun River in the background, were pretty.


I'm so glad I found these old scanned photos!  I should scan more of them.  There are some lovely shots-- I keep the prints on my kitchen cupboards to remind me of this little adventure-- the wildest thing I've ever done, probably.

Aha!  I finally found these photos - some nice shots of colleagues at Sosnovka on the outskirts of Vladivostok in 2004.



Ira Bogdan and her dog Gretta.
















Me and Gretta.


Can you believe this is the Russian Far East in September?  It was beautiful.




The beach was pretty garbagey, though.

This is a dumpster.

Painted on the side:

"Keeping the city clean is easy!"






On one of the nights we were in Vladivostok proper I got taken to a local lesbian club by my friend Zhenya (the blonde).  There was a cute DJ (in the red shirt) with an even cuter puppy she had just rescued.  We three plus Zhenya's girlfriend were literally everyone at the club.  So we just doted on the puppy all night, with the club music booming.  Here we are trying to give the puppy some water.

Our cute DJ host named the puppy "Mix."

I just ran across this cool new (to me) Russian phrase.  Сыр-бор.  I
saw it first in the Katzner dictionary and then corroberated it in the
on-line (woohoo!) Ozhegov dictionary.


       СЫР-БОР         откуда (из-за чего) сыр-бор загорелся (разг, часто ирон.) -
из-за чего все произошло, началось. Весь сыр-бор загорелся из-за
пустяков.

Now, the proper translation of the popular (per my recent Googling of
the phrase) version "почему весь сыр-бор разгорелся" would probably be
something like "why the whole damn thing went to hell," or, literally,
"why the whole pine woods was burned down."

But, my first reading of the phrase was much more entertaining.  Сыр =
cheese.  Бор is a root word in сбор which means collection.

So, the phrase in my Russian-as-a-second-language first take:

 "why the whole damn cheese collection was set on fire."

(One of the wonderful images you get if you search "cheese fire.")

I spent the morning at the Hard Assets Investors' Conference today, trying to be inconspicuous and pick up info on mining in Russia and China.  Above is a scene from the edge of the Kupol mine.  I didn't learn anything radical about any of the mines, but these gold mines, like Kupol, are in for hard times if the overinflated price on Au goes kerplunk.  I heard one news pundit saying "silver is the new gold."  And then there was the uranium miner talking about how popular nuclear fission is becoming in India, China and Russia.  It's by far more in demand than gold, or will be after we have to abandon fossil fuels.

Hard assets indeed.

I'm chagrined to find out that my understanding of the Anna Politkovskaya murder had left out the fact that she was one of the lead journalists at the progressive newspaper Novaya Gazeta.  This week I wrote to a grantee who is also a journalist at that paper, and bugged her about some reporting on a project that was due in March.  She reacted politely but with more detail than should have been necessary to inform me that her newspaper has been busy with giving evidence to the chief public prosecutor's office in Moscow.  It makes this journalist's tragic end a lot more real and chilling to know that she was a colleague of a colleague.  I just get overwhelmed sometimes-- the ripples of a sadness like this murder were lost in the day to day waves of effort/ success/ disappointment/ renewed effort.  But now the ripples hit my shores a little harder.

On this Thanksgiving I'd like to give thanks for the teachers of language who have paved my way to near-fluency in Russian, especially my first second language teacher, Kitty Cook (then Frau Williams).  I'd like to thank the patient friends and colleagues who have tried to support and improve my Russian.  Thank you to my parents for letting me take Spring Break 1989 in the Soviet Union, at age 15.  Thank you to the academics who have come before me to produce good translation aids like Kenneth Katzner's dictionary, the only American English /Russian dictionary (of which I have so many copies I've lost count-- I'm not sure quite how they have accumulated the way they have-- everywhere I turn there's one within reach).  Having Russian in my life has made this small town girl's world incredibly worldly.

Thank you.

I've been wrangling the data from a report on a $45,000 small grants program being administered by an indigenous group on Kamchatka called "Lach."  They are doing a good job, I just have to be nit picky.  I'll be dreaming in Excel again.

It's exciting to see how much the Itelmen people are doing to get involved with ecosystem management, together with cultural preservation.




Meanwhile, I found this cool website of photos from Kamchatka, taken for National Geographic.

I'm sorry I probably will never make it to Kamchatka.  It's ridiculously expensive to get there, and I don't have any direct reasons to go.  Other staff at my organization are more focused on the region, so they get to go all the time.

Sigh.

I never got around to finishing posting about the September conference we call "Sosnovka" - the confab of about 30 environmental leaders from around Siberia and the Russian Far East.  This photo picks up from where I was in my post on 28 October 2006.  Soviet Street.  Chemal Province, the Altai Republic, south central Siberia.





We took an afternoon excursion to this island in the Katun River.  Here is the Katun through the trees.













Some of us crossed the richoty bridge to get better photos of the monastery on the island.

Some of us just hung out on a landing overlooking the river and cliffs.

Here is Oksana Moiseeva, the young and talented environmental leader from Kamchatka, and Misha Jones, my coworker, who is living in Russia as a Russian, but who is a US citizen from Eugene, Oregon.




Here is a view with the zoom lens, taken from a shaking suspension bridge of wood planks and wire... the Orthodox monks are having a service of some kind-- you can see them in a little cluster of black robes.









Another shot from the shakey suspension bridge.

The Katun, and part of the monks' island.











A rare sighting of the Siberian Tiger.  Or, one of its shy little descendants.  And a pink rose.














I am not sure-- zinneas or baseball mums?  Anyway, this is late September in Siberia.  All you who think Siberia = frozen tundra, take heed.  It's lush and beautiful.

And the air is SO clean.







After photographing their gorgeous flower garden I wanted to photograph the Altai people living in the house.  I asked permission.  She didn't say no, but the lady of the house hid, embarrassed by my attention.  Look carefully on the porch and you'll see her.










I think you can see the lady of the house and her husband a little better in this shot.













Here is Irina Fotieva, the director the alternative energy project you see behind her.  They are trying to create a little self-sustaining tour-base that is run off of solar and micro-hydro. 








Here is Sasha Yermoshkin - from Defenders of the Taiga, Khabarovsk, out on the Pacific coast, and Zinaida Altukhova, from the Sakha/ Yakutia Republic.

Behind them you can see the straw-bale house Irina's group (Fund for the 21st Century Altai) built.  On the right you can see the solar panels that power the house.







Here we all are, piled into the straw bale house to hear about its energy efficiency.












Look!  Straw!  A window on the bales that are in the walls.













The solar panels, in the setting sun.











And--- the next morning, back to work.

In the foreground on the right you see Richard Aishton from the Ford Foundation, a remarkable US American from Maine who has learned Russian (as an older adult) and lives in Moscow with his wife, managing a large portfolio of grants to good Russian organizations.  The Ford Foundation just made a major grant to support the Sosnovka Coalition, so it was great to have him at the annual meeting to see- as I put it to him- "into the belly of the cow."




Zinaida Altukhova was making a presentation about her organization's work in Sakha.  Aitalina Efimova, to her right, seated, is enjoying a joke she made, as is Danil Mamyev, from the southern part of the Altai Republic, to her left.









Next, Aitalina gave a presentation about her amazing work at the Sakha Public Environmental Monitoring Network.  She supervises over 100 "cells" of organizers working to monitor and clean up polluted or industrial areas of southern Sakha.









Here we were enjoying another light moment during a presentation by Marina Rikhvanova (from Baikal Environmental Wave-- in the back corner on the right of the picture) -- you can see Anatolii Lebedev in the left foreground, from the Bureau of Regional Outreach Campaigns in Primorye (on the Pacific Coast).  To his left, Tanya Borisova, from the International bering Sea Forum, and visible to her left was our summer intern Aleksei - a grad student at Cornell, originally from Vladivostok.







Sasha Arbachakov, from the forest protection group AIST in north central Siberia, was the strictest session moderator we had.  Even our fearless leader David Gordon, usually loquacious, is sitting quietly while Sasha conducts the order of affairs.








The next morning was beautiful.  This is the view from the porch right outside my room in the three-story cabin where about 15 of us were staying.

The river is shining in the far distance.
















Ah, the river. 

Yesterday's rain, and the early morning mist and fog, all lifted.





Right there, stumbling-in-the-darkness distance from the shore of the river... our beautiful little banya.  Much happy sweating and oak and birch-branch beating went on here.  And of course planning and confabulating.








Wandering around that gorgeous morning I found the tour-base's picnic / campfire spot.  There was a little monument there.











The monument had a quote from literature:

"It's a lie that friends die--

they simply stop being alongside."










Here is the gorgeosity of the Katun River again.  From the vantage point of that lovely spot with the campfire pit and the monument.











Here is Zhenya Simonov, an activist having a quiet smoke (a gentile little rolly) in the sun.

Simonov was one of the early environmental leaders in the 90's, and then he up and decided to learn Chinese, join in supporting a Chinese environmental movement.  He lives in Harbin, China, and may be one of the most critical players in the new and growing environmental campaigns along the Russia/ China border.






This aluminum Lenin head greets you at the edge of the parking lot of the tour-base.  It must have been put there for camp.  The tour-base was built in the late 80's-- long after this sort of thing would have been compulsory.











This hapless witch on a broomstick was installed in the parking lot with a bumper sticker on the other side that says "don't drink and fly."












Another bit of camp.  "Bar - 40 meters" - "Barnaul - 287 kilometers."

On top of the sign post is a nest with a guy in it.






Настоящая бочка счастия!

Here you see two of our numbers in steam-barrels, on the second floor of the banya.  I took one myself.  You sit on a bench in the barrel, get sealed in there with towels, and a pipe from a little stove heats it with steam from a pot that is full of boiling herbs.

I didn't get a photo of our banya attendant- but she was the real deal.  Knew her herbs, knew her healing lore, and really kind and gentle besides.

On the wall - spare venniki - bundles of branches for getting beaten with in the steam room downstairs.



Later, at the farewell banquet, the toasts were long and -- well -- numerous and long.

Here is Larisa Khamidulina from Kamchatka giving us one of the evening's more entertaining toasts.






I will spare you all the photos of people giving toasts. 



A lovely installation:

"Still Life with Soviet Potlids."













Irina Fotieva again, winged by Leah (left) and Sibyl (right), my teammates.


Not the volleyball team.  The Russian team at Pacific Environment, the organization that founded and continues to keep the annual Sosnovka meetings going.





Natasha Kovalyonok from the Chita (Chinese-border province) area, crooning with some of our more show-tune oriented partners.











There we are!

Before piling on the bus for the six hour drive back to Barnaul.









And that is the 2006 Sosnovka in photos.

1.  I had a bit of interpreting on the job yesterday-- both Russian to English and back again.  It always makes that language gap open up for the falling in.  Later in the day I was meeting with coworkers to talk (in English) about a document I'm drafting.  The question I needed to answer was who the audience was for the document- Russians or English speakers.  I tried to ask if it was for an "Englage" speaking audience.  I tried!   But I just couldn't say "English language."  Then, nobody in the meeting seemed to be able to spit out "English language."  Everyone was saying "Englage." 

2.  I always have a block whenever I try to remember the Russian word for "obstacle."

3. I recently learned of another gorgeous French word that has made itself a home in Russian.  Pissoire.  Писсуар.  (Urinal.)  Love those French imports.

We had some cool visitors to the office today-- some partners involved in our  Altai Program here at Pacific Environment. Or, one who is involved and two we hope to get involved.

These guys are slender Mongolian-esque types with a careful manner.  They hail from a place that I can only describe as the remotest of the remote.

She's pretty content out there in the lupin. (photo credit Jen Castner)



So the three fellows who were here are working to enforce anti-poaching measures on the beautiful snow leopard...
(Photo from Sacred Earth Network, who have been active in the Altai)

And they are also working to enforce contiguous nature parks-- the Ukok, Argut, and Belukha.  It provides a wild buffer zone between Russia, and Kazakhstan, Mongolia and China, along the southern border of the southernmost point in south central Siberia.


(map from Way To Russia .com)

Borrowing a handy photo from Stuff on My Cat .com to illustrate what my day at work was like.  Started with a 5 am international conference call with people in Canada, Europe, the Russian Far East, and the US East and West Coast.  Only one action item and it was tasked out to moi.

Then I dove into untangling some reports from grant recipients - and there's one guy who sent in half of his report, two months after his THIRD report extension, with no subject line and an e-mail address that Outlook can't translate, so I can't see who it's from.  He contacted my supervisor's supervisor to say that he was concerned that I hadn't responded.  I never caught his half-report in the first place.  So now I'm called out for not reading every single e-mail I receive (I get about 50 a day).  Then there's another high maintenance grantee who sends me a full set of reports, but with the wrong grant number on every part of the report, so I don't know what she's reporting on (and plus as usual she didn't meet the reporting requirements- she deletes all the formulae in our Excel reporting form every time, no matter how much I explain it).  I asked her to clarify, and she responded with a Word document with what is apparently a budget for some project, but she doesn't identify which-- and we have four open grants with her, plus one project advance, and a new project we're starting.  So I had to read all her back e-mail to identify what she was sending me and why.  And of course, she still hasn't clarified what report she submitted belongs to which grant.

We want these wonderful little projects to continue, and the wonderful organizations that organize them to continue, but if these people were negotiating with a real foundation instead of a $600K / year small grants program they would be S.O.L.

Sigh.

Today I went to the Cinderella Bakery and Restaurant (in the Russian part of SF, serving Russian food) with my elderly friend Manya.  She is half Japanese and half Russian, and lives in Japantown in the Nihonmachi home, where most residents are Japanese (and the food they serve is all Japanese).  We had beef stroganoff and admired a huge fresh batch of Russian rye bread cooling on the sidewalk outside.
While this veteran waited for his three (lady) friends to come and open a bottle of Maneschewitz to celebrate the veteran's holiday, the 3 young handsome Russian gay guys at the only other occupied table (not seen here) were busy sharing the gossip from Saturday night in the Castro. 

Our middle-aged gay waiter was all respect and warmth for his elderly customers, calling all the ladies "dorogaya" (my dear), bringing a vase for the bouquet the ladies brought for the veteran.  It was almost a contest between waiter and customer  to see who could thank who the more.  I'm amazed how the Citysearch profile (linked above) is full of complaints about the service.  Whenever I go there with Manya we get this lovely waiter, and he makes us feel like long lost family.  I'm betting his English doesn't come across the same way as his Russian.
A few minutes after I took this shot (from inside, a view on the sidewalk) a hole appeared in that wall of bread: a middle aged Russian-looking man, dressed like he was coming from church, snatched one of the fragrant warm loaves as he walked by with a look on his face of pure child-like delight.

Manya checks out the wall of bread on the sidewalk.

This is the beautiful and amazing environmental leader Aitalina Efimova, the leader of the Sakha  (Yakut) Network for Environmental Monitoring.  She is an intelligent organizer but also a fantastic photographer.  She gave the staff at my organization Pacific Environment a set of photographs to remember her by, and to inspire us to come visit her in the Russian Far East Republic of Sakha.





Aitalina captioned this one: Iris in the sunset, Yakutia.





This is a butterfly on pink Sedum (Stonecrop), Yakutia.





This is a Pasqueflower, aka Pulsatilla, which Aitalina describes as "flavescent" - or "turning yellow."  She calls this the "snowdrop of Yakutia."  So, the budding of this flower indicates the return of spring.

This article was brought to my attention today. The teaser passage read like a Jack London novel opener. But it is in fact just another document about the melting arctic. This ice breaker apparently found no ice to break.

Melting Arctic Makes Way for Man (Washington Post 11/5/06)

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/11/04/AR2006110401173.html?referrer=emailarticle

The Amundsen's engines growl low, as if in warning.
The ship steals ahead; its powerful
spotlights stab at fog thick with the lore of

crushed ships and frozen voyagers. Ice floes
gleam from the void like the eyes of animals in the night.  The
Canadian Coast Guard
icebreaker Amundsen weaves in

graceful slow motion through the ice pack, advancing
through the legendary Northwest Passage well after
the Arctic should

be iced over and
shuttered to ships for the winter.
 

 

The Amundsen's engines growl low, as if in warning.

 

I guess they had the usual parade in Moscow this morning, but it's not an official holiday anymore.  Here's an explanation (from the School of Russian and Asian Studies holidays page)

-------------------------------------------

Ex-Holidays:

The Russian Duma passed a bill on Dec 24th, 2004, changing Russia's official holidays.  Two Soviet Era holidays were eliminated:

November 7. Day of Accord and Reconciliation / День Согласия и Примирения (day off)
The 1917 Russian Revolution occurred in October according to the Julian calendar. Although the Russians quickly changed the calendar, the name “October Revolution” stuck, despite the fact that it occurred on Nov 7th according to the new, Gregorian calendar. After the fall of the Soviet Union, the name of the day was changed from “The Day of the Great Revolution of October 1917,” and its official purpose changed to celebrate the unity of Russia. However, in a recent poll some 50% of Russians stated that they didn’t know why they celebrate the day anymore. Some said that they celebrate it to celebrate not having to celebrate the Revolution anymore!  Given the fact that the "Day of Accord and Reconciliation" was so short-lived, perhaps that was it's actual purpose, in retrospect.  

-------------
Here's an old Soviet poster for the October Revolution holiday.  Very space age.


Here's the other holiday that the post-Soviets no longer officially celebrate:

---------------

December 12. Constitution Day / День Конституции (day off)
The date of this holiday changed several times over the course of history, with each new Russian constitution from Lenin to Stalin to Brezhnev to Yeltsin. Celebrated with fireworks, food, and drink.

-------------------

I haven't seen the movie yet, but since people seem to want my opinion, here's what I know so far, from seeing the promotional interviews, and hearing from people who have seen it:

1. It has nothing to do with anything as far as Kazakhstan is concerned.  His accent is closer to Italian than Slavic.  The movie's "home town" scenes were shot in Romania, a country which doesn't even speak a Slavic language and was never part of the Soviet Union.  Think of Borat the character as a symbol of the developing world + ethnicized whiteness (generic mix of southern Mediterranean, Bohemian / Balkan, Central Asian, Russian, Middle Eastern, Persian, Jewish, etc.). 

2. The artist behind the character is far far less concerned with commenting on the developing world and the social / political / economic issues of the homelands of US America's ethnicized white people (from Italy to Afghanistan) than  he is concerned with amplifying the idiocy of people around him by putting them off balance and puncturing their veneer of socially-acceptible programming by being a huge goofball.

3.  My coworker from Kirghizstan says he was brilliant, and that 90% of the country will not get that they are being laughed at.  They will just sit down -  see "huge goofball" - laugh - continue projecting glory on whosoever they identify with (redneck, frat boy, etc.) - leave the movie - wash - rinse - repeat. 

4.  Everyone should go see it.

5. If you want to learn about the very real and very scary reality of journalists being harassed, censored, and executed in Central Asia, read about it on the websites of Human Rights Watch and the Committee to Protect Journalists. 

I realized the other day I posted about our annual Russian environmental organizational partners meeting and didn't explain the name.  We call it "Sosnovka" because the first year it was held (1998) it was in Sosnovka, Russia.  What's funny is that there is no intention to ever have it there again, and also there are a LOT of little towns named "Sosnovka" all throughout the Russian Far East.  So, the joke runs that the Secret Police go to Sosnovka - or all the Sosnovkas - every year waiting for us to return.

Sosnovka as a word is derived from "sosna" or pine tree.  We refer to participants as Sosnovtsy (one participant = Sosnovets).  The new program we're launching to bring in younger people to mix in with the organizational leaders is being playfully called the "pinecone" program (the "shishki").

Here's the web page of my organization that explains the Sosnovka Coalition (in Russian).

Here we are, in the Altai, in the rain:

This is a photo that was taken in June 2004 in a woods outside of Novgorod, aka Velikii Novgorod, aka Novgorod the Great.

We were having a picnic and roasting shashlyki when these local kids came through on nicely turned out horses, with saddle pads decorated with the shield of the city and other fashionable accoutrements.  I went for a spin (for a small fistful of roubles) and Sveta, in the hat, fulfilled a dream of riding for the first time.  She gave me this photo when I was visiting her and her new husband and new baby in September. 

Her husband Yura is a very kind and thoughtful man.  He made a point of telling me how much it means that I come back and visit my old friends in Novgorod, to remind them that "there is something out there, that we are connected to the world."  I know it means a lot to me to remain connected to that sleepy ancient city where I first learned to live in a city, and the amazing teaching I received at the institute.

I studied in the Russian Department, not a department where people go to study in order to become a jet setter, businessman, or politician.  I studied with genuine lovers of Russian language and literature, the future unemployed or underemployed poetry geeks of Russia.  The new economy of Russia is slowly stamping out their kind.  The Russian Department is a tenth of the size it was when I went there for a year 13 years ago.  There are only 7 Russian Majors, and they are all specializing in journalism, the only employment opportunity available for writers anymore.

The poets, lovers, dreamers... they are struggling in Russia just as they are struggling in the US right now.  In some ways it's a comfort to me-- despite cultural barriers and language barriers, they feel like my people.

I just learned that one of our partners is being evicted from his office in Vladivostok (the university has given him cheap office space and now they want it back), and we don't know what he's doing about it because... he's in the field catching tigers and leopards.  This is dedication-- or madness-- but in either case it's impressive to know that they apparently have now caught one of each.  The cats are to be used to replenish the tainted genetic stock of the captive populations of these tigers and leopards.

This guy runs one of the oldest and most successful conservation groups in the Primorye region of the Russian Far East, Zov Taigi.  The leopard and tiger preservation work in the RFE is done by a host of organizations, including Zov, and they are apparently all bought in to the idea that, left in the wild, the last remaining 30 or so Far Eastern leopards (outside Russia called Amur leopards) cannot survive on their own.



Add that information to the fact that someone mixed a male of a completely different species into the breeding population of the captive Amur leopard population, and suddenly preserving the genetic stock is more important that preserving the habitat. 

This zoo photo above is one we love to use to show off the Amur leopard's unique markings, but the current stud-book keeper for North America recently informed us that this picture actually depicts a mixed breed cat.

The habitat isn't going to be abandoned, I hope, but it sounds like they plan to remove as many leopards and tigers as they can and reintroduce them into better protected areas in Primorye.

Learn more about the Amur leopard from the Tigris Foundation.

The organization where I work Pacific Environment is about to host a visiting group of fishermen from Kamchatka, taking them around for two weeks to various fishing villages, to meet the people who process and market salmon in Washington and Oregon.  I'm helping out my coworker Sibyl tonight (before going trick-r-treating) by putting together beaucoup materials for the English speakers they meet along the way.

Here's a really cool map of Kamchatka we just reproduced for the packets we're making.  I don't know the source!  National Geographic?  The Smithsonian is cited, but only for the data, not the map.