The Angara River races out of Lake Baikal like a daughter fleeing her angry father for the arms of her lover. So goes the legend of the powerful river that is Baikal’s only outlet. Until the 1950s, you could see a huge rock near the mouth of the river that was said to prove the legend—the rock hurled by father Baikal toward his recalcitrant offspring, hoping to block her way as she ran off to join her beloved Yenisei, the great river to the west. Today, only a tiny tip of what’s known as Shaman Rock is still visible. Powerful Baikal could not block his daughter’s way and tame her energies, but humans could. They captured daughter Angara behind a series of hydroelectric dams and put her to work for the good of the Soviet people. One of the dams raised the level of Baikal by a meter and submerged most of the great rock in the river. Isolated in the middle of sparsely populated Siberia, its colossal depths and unique ecosystem enclosed behind its barrier of mountains, it would be easy to imagine that Baikal remains a world unto itself. But today that would be just an act of imagination. The lake may have stood apart for millions of years, but in the last 100 years, humans have speeded up time and collapsed space, and Baikal can no longer blithely follow its own, idiosyncratic course. Some changes were already evident early in the twentieth century. The Barguzin sable, source of so much wealth over more than 200 years, was on the verge of extinction, its long decline punctuated by Nicholas II’s belated decision to protect it with the Barguzinsky Nature Reserve. The limits of the limitless lake itself were starting to be tested, too—Baikal’s populations of omul and sturgeon were crashing as human populations rose, spawning habitat was disrupted, and new fishing technology was introduced. And along its southern shores, workers were clearing, blasting, flattening, and filling in, laying the path for the needle that would truly puncture Baikal’s bubble of isolation, 250 years after the arrival of the first Russians.
The Strawberry Line’s Breeding Birds and their Biophilic Benefits (Vale of Winscombe Section)
