Thank you to the American students for help in paying for our e-mail costs. For this report, I will describe some of the activities our Center for Public Education has been involved in. We depend on e-mail for much of our work.
In the last year, there's been a lot going on. One of our main achievements is that we won a court case that had been going on for about 4 years. As a result, we were able to defend the rights of an older, retired woman, whose land was continually getting flooded by her neighbors and their business. For us this court decision was a huge event, since the courts are usually influenced by whoever's in government--and the businesses are who's in power now.
We opened a legal consultation office for indigenous peoples of the north with funds granted to us by the Soros Foundation. We've had a lot of success; as it turns out there is definitely a need for this kind of work. However as a result of a federal assessment (the Ministry of Justice and the Environmental Prosecutor's Office conducted a check of our organization) we had to close the consultation office: apparently we do not have the right to provide these kinds of services. That federal assessment was conducted after environmental organizations across Russia had gathered signatures for a petition against the import of used nuclear fuel. Our organization was the only one in Yakutia that was working on this.
We also took part in the Citizen's Forum in Moscow - again, thanks mainly to e-mail.
We continue our work for biodiversity protection. A decree of the president of the Sakha Republic has called for a large fish acclimatization program in our republic. In the year 2000, 2300 lakes were stocked and in 2001 around 2400 lakes. According to this presidential decree, they plan to acclimatize fish in 8000 lakes. This will damage the genetic basis of many valuable populations of fish. The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) has judged the acclimatization of organisms in new places to be "biologically polluting" to the environment (A World Conserversation Strategy, Second Draft, IUSN, Morges, Switzerland, 1978).
At our request the Director of the Institute for Genetics of the Academy of Sciences, Yuri Petrovich Altukhov, wrote a letter about the inadmissability of that kind of activity, but our president and government did not react. If you are acquainted with any geneticists who could articulate with authority the inadmissability of this program that is leading to biolocally damaging our watersystems, can you let us know? There is an ichthyologist in the US named N. Ryman who is working on this; he wrote a book, "Population Genetics and Fishery Management" Seattle; l.: Univ. Wash.press,1987. 420 p.) with F. Utter.
Thanks again for supporting our e-mail costs. Support like yours encourages us in our work.
T. Kornilova