Encounters with the Local Perceptions of Global Climate Change in Northeastern Siberia
BY SUSAN A. CRATE
Imagine making a trip to Siberia stereotypically perceived as the Gulag and a frozen wasteland only to discover an extraordinarily diverse part of the world. Not only in terms of plant and animals—just consider Lake Baikal, the deepest, oldest lake in the world holding one-fifth of the world’s fresh water and home to more than a thousand endemic species—but also home to a myriad of non-Russian ethnicities, many who have inhabited the area long before Russians arrived in the mid-17th century. Instantly your stereotypes fall. Then you take interest in a particular people because of your fascination with how they managed to maintain their traditional lifeways and spiritual practices despite Tsarist Russia and Soviet forces period of oppression. Your interest is peaked and you decide to learn their language since much of what they and their people tell you about cannot translate into Russian because it is part of their culture. You probe further and learn that part of the difficulty is that their language is not even in the same language family as Russian—it is a Turkic language belonging to the Uralic-Altaic group. With the language you realize that you are now privy to another unexpected world—for language not only relays what you need to know in an immediate situation but also is a storehouse of symbolic information about a culture itself. You next begin to understand the historical legacy of these people—that their Turkic ancestors came to this part of northeastern Siberia beginning as early as the 14th century from the shores of Lake Baikal, where they had arrived from Central Asia in the 10th century. They are the highest latitude subsistence horse and cattle breeders in the contemporary world. Not only have they adapted this pastoralist lifestyle to the sub-arctic, but have also adapted to Russian colonization, Soviet collectivization and Soviet decentralization. You collaborate with them on projects to investigate the environmental issues of their homelands due to Soviet and post-Soviet diamond mining, the hurdles they are facing adjusting to de-centralization and free-market reforms, and the alienation of their communities as youth leave their rural villages for a more Western life in the city. All of these matters appear in sync with trends in rural areas not only across post-Soviet Russia but also in many rural areas of the world. This is one of the more challenging aspects of 21st century globalization. Through collaboration on a sustainable communities project, inhabitants share their concerns and their confidence that, although they face many pressing issues, they are certain they can work on these issues and in time will realize their goals. Then something unexpected comes at you, while you are working on all your data during the school year to understand what the research is telling you. In amongst the survey data—some of the quantitative data that helped clarify the hurdles to local sustainability and that people believed those hurdles were not insurmountable—you see a new development. In your final, open-ended question asking participants if there was anything else that concerned them, 90 percent expressed concern about changes in their climate—that things were very different than they had been before and they were questioning if they could continue to raise cows and horses and live in their homelands. When you go back for your last summer field research season the next year, to share and check your findings with your collaborators, you also inquire about this concern to see if this is an area they would like to collaborate on—and you get a unanimous yes. You also interview thirty-five elders (because they have observed the daily and annual cycles many years) to get more of a sense of exactly what the changes are, how Sakha are understanding them and how the changes affect their lives.
This is a brief depiction of my research trajectory since 1988. Now it is 2008 and I have just returned from the first summer field season, directing a project that seeks to advance knowledge through partnering with Viliui Sakha communities, Turkic-speaking horse and cattle agropastoralists of northeastern Siberia, Russia, to explore ways to effectively address the local issues of climate change. The project, entitled Assessing Knowledge, Resilience & Adaptation and Policy Needs in Viliui Sakha Villages Experiencing Unprecedented Climate Change, is funded by the National Science Foundation’s Office of Polar Programs/Arctic Social Sciences from December 2007 to December 2010. The four-village, three-year study is a collaborative effort involving the active participation of village inhabitants, native specialists and field assistants, an in-country research community and international collaborators. Trained as an ecological anthropologist, my main research methods are qualitative and include: focus groups, semi-structured interviews, surveys, participant observation, oral histories and secondary data analysis. Here I will share with you our preliminary findings for the first summer field season—they are very preliminary since we just returned from the field on August 12, 2008. To give readers a frame for the discussion that follows, it is important to note that the local effects of global climate change threaten not only Viliui Sakha’s historically-based subsistence but also their cultural orientation.
Viliui Sakha inhabit the Viliui River regions of western Sakha (Yakutia), located in northeastern Siberia in Russia. The major biome of their area is taiga (boreal forest) dotted by alaas, circular ponds bordered by hayfields that transition to taiga. The climate is extreme with annual temperature fluctuations exceeding 100 degrees Celsius from -60 in the winters to +40 in the summer.
Summers are short and in order to feed their cattle, Viliui Sakha have to work intensely to harvest two tons of hay per cow. For us this meant completing as much of our data gathering before the haying season began in early July when most inhabitants would be absent from the villages. We worked with an assistant in each of the four villages who organized participants for our first summer methods. In each village we conducted two focus groups (one male and one female, each with two from age groups: youth 18-25; middle 26-55; elder 56 +) and interviewed fifteen inhabitants, five from each of the age groups.
In focus groups, we first asked participants to fill out a seven-column chart so each could get their thoughts and ideas down to next share them in group discussion and also so that we would have additional data for later analysis. They wrote the changes they have noticed, how long they have noticed each, what they believe the cause of each is, how each affects their lives, ranking in order of most destructive to least, how they have adapted to each and what time(s) of year each occur. Once focus groups finished writing, we created a group chart on the board. In semi-structured interviews we asked the same information with additional questions to tease out finer points and details. Although we have not had time to analyze individual written interviews or the individual focus group charts, we were able to transcribe all recordings and code them in order to use them to illustrate our main preliminary findings. Here I will share those findings, put together rather briskly in the field. In the winter we will analyze individual charts to get a more precise analysis.
By both gauging how much each participant wrote on change and then the level of agreement in group discussion, we found there to be strong consensus on eleven observations:
- Winters are warm
- The land is water
- Lots of rain
- Summers are cold;
- Floods;
- Seasons arrive late
- Lots of snow
- Temperature changes suddenly
- Less birds and animals
- More frequent and stronger winds
- New birds and insects have come.
After consolidating the individual charts into one on the board, we asked several questions to discuss as a group. First we asked what people thought it would be like if these changes continued for the next ten to twenty years. Overall the outlook was sombre. Many expressed a fear that they would go under water. Some commented that if the permafrost melted, the land would turn to a marsh and they would have to go elsewhere. Still others said that this was the price of progress, with some blaming Russia and other countries for the effects. Although they need progress it has to occur correctly so as not to ruin nature in the process. Others clung to the idea that all the water and climate changes that come with it are part of a cycle that the Sakha have lived with for centuries. The elders say that the climate changes every forty years—from dry to wet and vice versa. They explained that before it was warm here and mammoth lived hence like fashion changes, so does our climate. A few commented that they would all turn into fishers and depend on fish instead of horses and cows.
Our discussions were lengthy and there is much to say but I fear I am running out of space in this short article. However, an important point to know is that Viliui Sakha have limited knowledge about the global process of climate change. Those who are avid readers see only an article or two a year on it. There are also increasingly news stories about other areas within the republic flooding and having similar effects as Viliui Sakha, but the news does not make a connection with global climate change. One constant source of inaccurate information is the regular showing on prime time TV of the “Day After Tomorrow.” In interviews with the village heads, it was clear to me that even they know little or nothing about global climate change. Despite this paucity of awareness at the local and regional level, the Sakha government has begun to pay attention to the effects of global climate change. I would guess that this is because in the last few years of flooding and excessive snowfall, the evacuations and resettlement has cost them billions of rubles.
In addition to working in the Viliui regions, our team is also collaborating with several scientists in the capital city. We have found that Sakha specialists are doing quite a lot of high quality research. For example, one of our natural science collaborators has been measuring climate changes in the republic for the last thirty years and is involved in many international projects. His findings will provide much of the regional-scale data that we will share with communities. Another is a social scientist who is working with us on both researching Sakha’s historical adaptations to environmental change and contemporary cultural perceptions of global processes.
We have much work to do this winter to analyze the summer data and prepare for our next field research in summer 2009. But we feel confident that our work is addressing a gap in the knowledge that not only could make adjusting to 21st century environmental change less uncertain and unknown for one group of Siberia’s diverse population but also provide a window into a much unknown reality for inhabitants of the Western world.
Susan A. Crate (scrate1@gmu.edu; http://mason.gmu.edu/~scrate1/) is Assistant Professor in the Department of Environmental Science and Policy. This article has first been published in print and citations have been removed due to space limitations, but are available from the author. She has published a edited volume entitled Anthropology and Climate Change: From Encounters to Actions, Walnut Creek: Left Coast Press, 2008.
