Paul Josephson discusses the project he worked on during his Carson Fellowship, from August to December 2011: an environmental history of the Soviet Arctic.
Beginning in 1948, the Soviet Union launched a series of wildly ambitious projects to implement Joseph Stalin’s vision of a total “transformation of nature.” By the time of Stalin’s death, however, these attempts at “transformation” had proven a spectacular failure. This richly detailed volume, In the Name of the Great Work follows the history of such projects in three communist states—Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia—and explores their varied, but largely disastrous, consequences.
The river Zolotitsa is located in what is now Arkhangelsk province and flows into the White Sea. The 1980 discovery and subsequent open-pit mining of a large diamond deposit severely transformed the landscape and is threatening to destroy the ecosystem of the upper Zolotitsa region.
