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'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.

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.

The organization where I work just had its annual three-day work retreat.  This photo is the staff plus a visiting Russian activist (far left, short lady in green scarf) Marina Rikhvanova of the Baikal Environmental Wave, and a couple of brave board members who decided to come frolick on the beach with us.  The place is the Marin Headlands, where we "retreated" at the YMCA Camp Bonita, out by the old lighthouse.

I'm the second person from the right in the back-- not the best photo of me -- I'm always so exhausted at retreats.


Some of my coworkers and our board members are just amazing people.  I think my current favorite coworker is Meerim, who was just hired to our Russia Team (she's front row, second from the right, kneeling).  She's natively from Kirghizstan, but is fluent in Russian and English.  She has the coolest watch-- <a href="http://www.cloudcuckooland.biz/laikaswatch.jpg">a Swatch commemorating the first dog in space, Laika</a>.  Laika was a street dog that was the most healthy of the dogs the Soviets tried to train for a trip in space.  Laika was the first living creature sent into space.  Alas, he died, and the ethical question of whether the scientists knew he would die or not is still a subject of debate.  This is just a sample of the fascinating conversations we had with Meerim these past few days.  She's got mad analysis.

I spent a day with this guy, a real world citizen, WP.  He's done pretty much everything.  At the Russian Consulate tonight, the reception that concluded my involvement in the Russian American Pacific Partnership conference, I finally had to ask him what he HADN'T done yet in his life.  He said he hasn't studied or practiced medicine.  I asked-- how about deep sea diving.  And he treated us to the story of the time he was diving near the Galapagos and had to run away from two big grey sharks, in a place where a fatal shark attack had happened the day before.  That's pretty much the way it goes with him-- anything you can bring up he has an AMAZING story, of adventure of survival of drama of accomplishment.

The day ended with us going to dinner with another friendly friend who knows the Russian beat, and the two of them, both veterans, found their way to the topic of how the government has f*d the country with the Iraq war.  One thing they agreed on that shocked me but which I understood-- the removal of the draft creating a distance between the US people and the military.  The average US person doesn't feel the loss that volunteer military families feel with this deadly war in Iraq.  And while we don't feel the loss, we won't act to stop it. 

I hate to think that the draft could come back, but I understand their point.