Connection vs Awareness

Stabbing, crunching, thinly crusted snow crisps the already sharp air. A long pole -young, of birch- creaks a final sigh as it finds it's center of gravity, resting conspicuously perpendicular to this endless -impossibly so- landscape. The Arctic dusk, florescent, silent, softens by contrast. This is where Andrei has decided to set up camp.

The darkness crawls in like the reindeer-skin-clad figures that have begun to appear, of which the women set themselves to work. Slowly, yet steadily, wooden planks, iron stoves, handcrafted tent poles, and reindeer skins appear. These will soon form the walls of the chums, tepee-like shelters that serve as the mobile homes for the brigade -as the Soviets once called a group of these nomadic herders. Chatter and laughter carry far through the arctic air, and despite the harsh, potentially deadly environment, no one seems in a hurry, for as the Nenet say, "Those who hurry in the tundra are in a hurry to die".

Yet, not far beneath the chatter and seemingly laid-back atmosphere, lurks a growing fear. Though the Nenet have long since learned to adapt to and love their nomadic lifestyle here in the northern most reaches of siberia, at the fringes of the modern world, and despite their certainty that they are the best reindeer herders in the world, a beliefs that, says Andrei Golovnev, director of the ethnology section of the Ural Institute of History and archaeology, "allows them to survive", they know that their way of life is in trouble.

The Yamal Peninsula, the Nenet's summer pastureland, is home to what may be the largest natural gas reserves in world. For all the benefits the industrial age is expected to bring to the people of Russia, it has already brought along a drastic increase in population and pollution in the Nenet's natural habitat. The environment suffers from acid rains. Some reindeer die from eating moss laden with heavy metals, but those that live to the slaughter eventually enter into the human diet. Nuclear tests on Novaya Zemlya are another grave danger to the health and existence of the people of the area.

This is one of the main concepts underlying a sound understanding of sustainability and environmental science, and it is briefly touched on in the textbook I am following along with (Chapter 1: Introduction: Sustainability, Stewardship, and Sound Science).

At first, it sounds almost too obvious to even spend time on. Yet, thinking back, it must not be too obvious, because I clearly remember when, as an adult, I first started consciously becoming aware of just how closely my life is tied to my environment. I was filled with a mixture of awe, inferiority (stupidity), and anger. I felt stupid that I had never really realized or thought about it, and I felt anger that this was not covered in school as I was growing up.

Although (or perhaps because) I never explicitly thought about it, I guess I was under the impression that some people, such as those seen in National Geographic, were "more connected" to their environment than we "modern people" were. Perhaps it will sound like a trivial issue related to semantics, but I realize now that it's not that some people are more connected to the environment than others, for we are all completely, and undeniably connected to their environment, relying on it for everything in our lives, rather, it's that some people are more aware of that connection.

The above account of the Nenet people is probably not so accurate. It's actually just my imagination based on a National Geographic article I came across of stack of old magazines at the local junk shop a few weeks ago. I was particularly drawn to this article after having spent time in Sweden listening to my neighbor's stories from Lapland, fascinated that people could live in such a harsh climate without our modern dependance on fossil fuels. I was fascinated that people could be so in touch with their environment that, as the Blue Earth Alliance writes:

Everything the Nenets need can be roughly covered by one word: reindeer. These half-domesticated, half-wild animals supply almost all their food, clothing, transport and shelter. They Nenets move as the reindeer move, following their annual migration north to the open tundra across Yamal, which they call the "land of the second sun".

Yet, despite an obvious connection, and deep understanding of their environment, the Nenet's also have their own issues. The Yamal Peninsula is not only being exploited for it's richness in oil and natural gas. As the demand for reindeer meat drops due to the high cost to get it to market, the Nenets simply increase the size of the herds. According to Nenets: Surviving on the Siberian Tundra, in the March 1998 issue of National Geographic, land that some ecologists estimate can sustainably support 120,000 reindeer, are currently home to over 175,000. Yet, despite warnings from both russian and western scientists that as much as half of the peninsula is being overgrazed, little is being done. In part, says the article, because Nenet leaders refuse to accept that overgrazing is a serious threat.

The Nenet's close relationship to their environment is obvious. The National Geographic article is peppered with colorfully dramatic one-liners (as only NG can do) illustrating that connection.

As the nomads move north across the melting snow of late spring, they will shift to the lightweight summer sleds that their reindeer can pull across the fields of damp tundra grass.

Aleksei can lasso galloping reindeer with ease and make a sled from larch, without nails or modern tools, in less than a week.

"Give me fresh air on the tundra, not the stink of gasoline in the cities," [Aleskei] told me one night after pursuing a stray reindeer in a blizzard.

Reindeer, also called caribou, are everything to the Nenets: their food, clothing, shelter, transportation, even their sense of identity.

Man and deer become almost related... The first thing a newborn baby touches outside the womb is the deerskin in which it is wrapped by the mid-wife. A dead man is also wrapped in deerskins. And between these first and last encounters, a person lives with the deer [and] thanks to the deer.

A herder relies on the instincts of his lead reindeer. When lost in a blizzard with no hope of finding the camp, he'll look to the lead reindeer to show the way.

Nenet women depend no less on reindeer in their daily lives, making use of every part of the body. One morning I watched Anna Serotetta, the grandmother in our chum, using her teeth to separate a sinewy substance into strands, which she then rolled between her palms. The material came from a reindeer's tendons, and she was turning them into sewing thread. The [reindeer skin] garments are extraordinarily warm, offering protection from winter temperatures that routinely drop well below zero.

One day Anna Serotetta scratched under the snow and pulled up handfuls of straw-like grass she used to insulate her boots. Another substance, a cottony pulp scrapped from under the bark of birch trees, substitutes for toilet paper and is used in diapers.

"Do all people look the same to you?" [asked Vladimer] "No," I replied. "Well," he said in a voice raspy from cigarettes, "neither do all these reindeer look the same to us".

Compared to our* more modern lifestyle, it is easy to see how some people would consider the Nenet lifestyle to be more "primitive", and why we so often forget that our life is just as inextricably tied to our environment. This got me wondering. "Can I come up with some catchy, colorful, National Geographic-ish one liners that illustrate how?" I feel like a little school boy getting his first homework assignment. This will be one of my goals as I ride my bike around Kyushu next week. I'll not only be paying extra attention to how I interact with my environment, but also how the people I come across along the way do as well.

The bottom photo is originally from Bryan & Cherry Alexander, 1996, "The Vanishing Arctic"; Found at this site with caption: Nenet woman and reindeer on the Yamal Peninsula (below). This image shows a Nenet woman and reindeer, part of a "brigade" heading south on the autumn migration. They are leaving the summer pastures of the peninsula's tundra terrain to the west of the Bovanenkovo gas-condensate field and moving south to the winter pastures in taiga (forest zone), southeast of Salekhard. The top photo is from my trip up to the North of sweden.