Trail Log 1995-1997 - Lamar at Colorado State University

Guide, p. 695).
The Russians pushed into Siberia something like the European-Americans pushed across North
America, displacing the natives.
Many Russians were exiled there, some fled there; many died in the mines and work camps, which
were virtual prisons. But some, freed, found freedom in the open spaces.
Fydor Dostoevsky, Leon Trotsky, Joseph Stalin, and Lenin were exiles here.
Siberia has 53,000 rivers and more than a million lakes. (Lonely Planet, p. 701).
The main rivers of Siberia are:
Ob
Yenisea
Lena
Amur
nicely shown in Classroom Atlas, pp. 70-71.
Though arable land is in short supply, Siberia is rich in resources--oil, gas, coal, diamonds, bauxite,
gold, fish, timber, in a hostile environment. But to whom will the benefits go? The Russians, the
locals, foreign investors. Siberia is still a frontier.
Siberia has the perennial problem of colonies. When they export the raw logs, or ores, or whatever,
since a raw log represents only a fraction of the value of the finished products that industry will
produce from them, they are exporting the jobs they need to lift themselves out of poverty. The
Japanese and the South Koreans, or the Americans, who import the logs wish, of course, to retain
those more skilled and productive manufacturing jobs for themselves, since they are the secret of
their wealth.
There is a mad rush to cash in on Russian's natural resources at a time when their collapsed
economy makes them especially vulnerable to exploitation, whether by the mushrooming
transnational corporations, or (as for so many centuries before) by Moscow. They are naive about
capitalism and the need to regulate it.
Taiga - dense, swampy forests of birch, pine, spruce, and larch. Siberia is the world's largest
forest, and 25% of the world's wood reserves.
Northern Eurasia contains the largest intact tracts of wilderness on Earth, boreal forests (taigas),
bogs, tundra, and mountains. About one third of the area is boreal coniferous forests, the largest
forest in the world. Russia has 54% of the world's coniferous forests.
Northern Eurasia has over 22,000 species of vascular plants, 1,100 species of bryophytes, almost
200 species of amphibians and reptiles, 765 species of birds, and 360 species of mammals. About
10% of animal species are endangered are threatened; many are endemic to Russia.