Baikal: Sacred Sea of Siberia - Hardcover

"During a long night spent thinly clad on rocks on a steep mountainside, I have time to consider why I find myself in such hard circumstances after scarcely a fortnight in the Soviet Union. The reason lies below, in great Baikal, which has drawn me since the day, long years ago, that I first learned of a primordial deep lake of diamantine clarity that lay off to the north of the Gobi Desert. Even today, despite serious damage, Baikal remains the cleanest large lake in the world, not because care has been taken but because its enormous depth and volume have absorbed -- so far -- man's efforts to despoil it. Only recently has it been known how swiftly the lake's ancient ecology could unravel, and how close man has come to losing it forever."

-- From The Text By Peter Matthiessen

Until recently Siberia's Lake Baikal, the world's oldest and deepest lake, remained nearly pristine because of its great depth. The construction of a cellulose plant on its southern shore and the advent of other sources of industrial and agricultural pollution, however, seriously threaten the ecological balance of the lake, which contains about one-fifth of all the fresh water on the earth. In the summer of 1990, National Book Award winner Matthiessen ( The Snow Leopard ), composer Paul Winter and a group of Russian environmentalists traveled around Baikal, which had previously been off limits to foreigners as well as to most citizens of the former Soviet Union. During the journey, Matthiessen kept a journal describing the lake, its flora and fauna and the people who live on its shores. Together, the brief text and 50 of Norton's spectacular color photographs make an eloquent plea for the preservation of one of the earth's great natural treasures; the foreword by poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko, who was born in Siberia, is especially moving. The Sierra Club will donate a share of the book's proceeds to Baikal Watch, a nonprofit group dedicated to the preservation of Lake Baikal.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.