Introduction: Ecology Lessons: Community Solidarity, Indigenous Knowledge, Civic Society in Crisis

Abstract

As Russia’s society has been wrenched by the war in Ukraine and civicpolitical divisions at home, one of its most critical problems, the environment, has been pushed aside. Yet ecological values and activism are more important than ever, as Russia’s citizens must contend with the exacerbation of natural resource destruction and climate crisis ramifications on an accelerated and unprecedented scale. The articles featured in this finale double issue of our journal were solicited well before the war began in February 2022, but most have been written and revised since, with each author feeling a sense of urgency and distress. What began as a project to highlight the ecology activist successes in a few high-profile cases illustrating civic society mobilization in Russia has instead moved to analyzing disaster zones in various degrees of devastation. What can we learn from the experiences of valiant ecology activists and besieged civic society leaders? How can Indigenous knowledge gleaned and practiced over centuries help in managing ecological and societal stresses? How can Russia’s urban scientific and rural Indigenous communities communicate productively with each other, especially when some scientists are Indigenous? How could state legal and policy mechanisms mitigate environmental destruction rather than abet it? These are some of the questions asked in this issue. The authors come from diverse backgrounds, Russian and non-Russian, rural and urban, scientific and political, activist and scholarly. Each article qualifies as anthropology in the best, broadest sense of the word. The authors are ethnographic in their descriptions, sensitive to human rights at many levels, and strive to accurately portray the voices of their interlocutors. Each case featured here resonates beyond the local, although their venues and contexts may not be well known or understood in the European or English-language-oriented world. Some have briefly appeared in the international news due to their shock value, whether massive fires that spread smoke from Far East Russia to Alaska in the summers of 2020–2022, ANTHROPOLOGY & ARCHEOLOGY OF EURASIA 2020, VOL. 59, NOS. 3–4, 167–176 https://doi.org/10.1080/10611959.2020.2139534