Russian national park to bridge US-Russia divide
RUSSIA: Russia on Thursday decreed a national park in its remote Far
Eastern Chukotka region, paving the way for a joint US-Russian nature
reserve spanning the Bering Strait, an idea first proposed by the last
Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev.
Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev signed the decree to create the new
national park called Beringia, Russia's World Wildlife Fund said. The
park will eventually be part of the first US-Russian nature reserve
spanning the Bering Strait area, it said.
The 86-kilometre-wide strait separates Russia and Alaska but an
earlier land bridge is believed to have once served as one of the
earliest migration routes between the two continents.
The plan to create a US-Russian national park originally came from
Gorbachev, WWF Arctic expert Mikhail Stishov told AFP.
Gorbachev was the Soviet Union's last leader, presiding over the
breakup of an empire, abandoned Cold War rhetoric and sought to promote
cooperation with the United States.On the US side, the Bering Land
Bridge national reserve in Alaska, one of America's most remote
protected areas, has existed since the 1970s.
The bilateral park project has taken this long because Chukotka
needed to upgrade an existing nature reserve to national park status.
By the time Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and US Secretary
of State Hillary Clinton shook hands last September and agreed to
"bridge" the parklands on either side of the Bering Strait, relations
were at one of their lowest points since the Gorbachev years.But for the
migrating polar bears, huge bird colonies and walruses of the Bering
strait, political issues are not a priority, Stishov said. "We just
wanted the national park," he said.Linking the two parks will facilitate
conservation, preserve ties between indigenous peoples and allow tighter
cooperation on environmental monitoring, according to the US-Russia
agreement signed in September.
AFP
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