It's been a discouraging week. Yesterday the Senate passed legislation opening the door to oil and gas exploration in the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge. And today an even bigger and more immediate threat to the Arctic was announced. Lukoil, Russia's largest oil company, second only to ExxonMobile in proven reserves, announced a partnership that will enable it to explore and extract oil and gas from the southeast corner of the Barents Sea. Since Russian environmental standards have as much teeth as a newborn baby, the eastern Barents sea and the adjacent landmass known as the Nenet Autonomous Okrug (NAO), could be at significant risk.
The Barents Sea, Europe's last unspoiled marine environment, is home to one of the world's largest puffin colonies and the largest known cold water reef. It covers 2.2 million km from the coasts of northern Norway to north eastern Russia. This ecosystem has remained relatively healthy in spite of existing oil and gas development, commercial fisheries, shipping and aquaculture. What's even more remarkable is that the Barents has retained it's relatively pristine qualities while abutting the Murmansk peninsula, the most populated and polluted area in the entire Arctic. Lukoil's new facility and pipelines will add risk to this already stressed region.
And it's not just the environment that's under stress.
The NAO is the homeland of the Nenet people. The reindeer-herding culture of the Nenet, who are among the last nomadic people on earth, have survived against tremendous odds over the past 100 years. In the 1930's, Stalin forced them into agricultural collectives. Nenet children were put in state-run schools, losing touch with their native language, spiritual beliefs and nomadic customs. Fortunately, once Stalin was gone, enough of the old way survived that the Nenet were able to rebuild to their subsistence culture.
Unfortunately, around the same time their Stalin-era cultural near-death experience ended, two new threats bore down on the Nenet. Those threats came in the form of thousands of Russians moving north and from the industry and degradation that accompanied them. Russian construction equipment, automobiles, roads, factories and other intrusions tore up the sensitive reindeer grazing land. The NAO marshes and wetlands, where the reindeer bred, were bulldozed and polluted. Wide expanses of tundra and taiga over which the Nenet once roamed were reduced to a strictly defined narrow strip of land. Reindeer herding, which was the only source of revenue in the NAO not so long ago, represents just 10% of the region,s economy today.
In spite of these obstacles, the Nenet hang on, managing to survive with smaller herds of reindeer, as well as by catching fish and hunting game and birds. But the Nenet's days, like those of so many other indigenous Arctic peoples, may be numbered.
6.8 million hectares of reindeer rangeland have been polluted by oil seepage and other spills, destroyed by vehicles, overgrazed, or otherwise lost to the Nenet herders. Year-round navigation of the Yenisey River and the construction of a pipeline have made large areas of rangeland inaccessible. And now Lukoil, which already has dozens of oil and gas initiatives going in the Arctic, wants to build on more, an oil terminal on the Nenet land and oil and gas pipelines near what's left of the Nenet homeland.
It's one more reason The Aujaqsuittuq Project needs to record the Nenet's oral histories and ethnographies. The Nenet have demonstrated how adaptive and resilient they are. But they are up against unrelenting obstacles now. It's a critical point in Nenet history, one which will determine whether companies like Lukoil will succeed where Stalin failed.
