Woman Challenges Putin and Saves World's Oldest & Deepest Lake

Fri, 02 May 2008 18:36:17 GMT

clipped by: urbanlife
clipper's remarks: Environmental activism is growing increasingly hazardous in Putin's Russia. With growing limitations on freedom of speech in Russia, if you oppose a state company, you can expect to come to the attention of the state security services. But Rikhvanova, a biologist and veteran environmental crusader, was devoted to saving Lake Baikal, she won even Putin's ear after organizing protests, petitions and flash mobs. (Last year her adult son Pavel was one of 20 people arrested after an attack on her group's environmental encampment).

Baikal, also known as the "Blue Eye of Siberia", is the world's oldest and deepest -- and largest -- freshwater lake, home to more than 1,700 species of plants and animals, two thirds of which can be found nowhere else in the world.

Rikhvanova is now organizing to block the expansion of a state-run uranium enrichment facility at Angarsk, just 50 miles from Lake Baikal, where the Russian government is planning to import nuclear waste from around the world

Clip Source: www.irkutsk.org

Clip Source: www.csmonitor.com

Concerned with plans to route a major oil pipeline within 900 yards of pristine Lake Baikal, Marina Rikhvanova and her Baikal Environmental Wave advocacy group led thousands of people into the streets

collected over 20,000 petition signatures

After two months of protests, President Vladimir Putin pointedly asked the chief of state-owned oil company Transneft on TV whether an alternative route was possible

The pipeline was subsequently rerouted

In recognition of her work, Ms. Rikhvanova will on Monday receive the Goldman Environmental Prize

she has spent her life battling to save Siberia's "sacred sea" – which holds over 20 percent of the world's fresh water reserves – from the depredations of Soviet industrial planners and unregulated Russian businessmen

Lake Baikal is a unique ecosystem

2,000 endemic plant and animal species

400 miles long and more than a mile deep

it is a vast reservoir of pure water – the world's largest – collected in an ancient rift valley at Asia's heart

Clip Source: www.irkutsk.org

Tags: environment, actvist, russia, lake baikal, protest, ecosystem

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Woman Challenges Putin and Saves World's Oldest & Deepest Lake