Two women fight to save world's deepest lake

BOLSHIYE KOTY, Russia: The world's oldest, deepest and biggest freshwater lake is growing warmer, dirtier and more crowded.

Lyubov Izmestieva is charting these insidious changes. Marina Rikhvanova is fighting them. And the fate of one of the world's rarest ecosystems, a turquoise jewel set in the vast Siberian taiga, hangs in the balance.

For centuries Lake Baikal has inspired wonder and, more recently, impassioned defenders. With more fresh water than America's Great Lakes combined, and home to 1,500 species of plants and animals found nowhere else in the world, Baikal has been called the Sacred Sea, the Pearl of Siberia, the Galapagos of Russia.

But these pristine waters, well over a kilometer deep (a mile deep) in some places, are threatened by polluting factories, a uranium enrichment facility, timber harvesting, and, increasingly, Earth's warming climate. The struggle has turned nasty, with Rikhvanova, an environmental activist, claiming the authorities even dragooned her own son into a violent attack on her group.

http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2008/08/10/europe/EU-FEA-Russia-Defenders-of-the-Lake.php

The few environmentalists there get little to no media attention and
have no financial resources. A friend of mine was chief correspondent for
German radio news there for 5 years and got to visit Lake Baikal extensively.
He said was a wonder of the earth.