Defending Russian Wilderness

From the Fall 2010 Issue

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<p>I thought you would be interested in this article from <em>environment: YALE</em> magazine, the Journal of the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies.<br />
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<h3 style="color:#666;">Defending Russian Wilderness</h3>
<em><p>By Fred Strebeigh
</p></em><p> <span class="dropcap">P</span>resident Dmitry Medvedev of Russia, glancing to his right on May 27 at a high-level government meeting, said, “Let’s listen to the environmentalists.” He looked at Igor Chestin, head of the Russia office of WWF (known internationally as the World Wide Fund for Nature), a guest among the high-government officials of the Presidium of the State Council. Not since 2003 had the president of Russia, then Vladimir Putin, convened the presidium to discuss environmental initiatives. That meeting, which produced almost no results, left Russian environmentalists fuming.</p> <div class="img left" style="width: 180px"> <a href="http://environment.yale.edu/magazine/uploads/10fall-russia-09.JPG" rel="facebox"><img class="magnify" height="16" src="/assets/icons/magnify-16x16.png" vspace="1" width="16" /> Enlarge This Image<img src="http://environment.yale.edu/magazine/uploads/10fall-russia-09_thumb.JPG" style="width: 180px; height: 149px" /></a><br /> <span class="credit">© Igor Shpilenok</span></div> <p> If the government in Moscow—heir to a history of Soviet environmental mismanagement that helped desiccate the Aral Sea in Central Asia and melt down the Chernobyl reactor on the edge of Europe—begins listening to good environmental counsel, the global environment may reap huge benefits. Russia controls one-eighth the land surface of the habitable globe and one-fifth of its forested areas, which may store more carbon than the forestlands of any other country. It is also the world’s largest exporter of natural gas, second-largest exporter of oil and third-largest emitter of carbon dioxide after China and the United States.</p> <p> Russian efforts to manage forestlands to maximize their ability to store carbon, rather than permit their destruction by fire or by sloppy logging, could significantly reduce the world’s emissions of carbon dioxide and related impacts…

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Defending Russian Wilderness

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