ABSTRACT

Russia’s human population has interacted with Russia’s environmental diversity and vastness to create several ironies, many of them tragic. On the one hand, Russia still contains some of the world’s largest expanses that have barely been impacted by humans. On the other hand, Russia contains some of the most environmentally degraded and polluted air, water, and landscapes anywhere on the planet. Accordingly, Russia’s environmental policy challenges for the twenty-first century are legend and physically, spatially, and institutionally exacerbated by the legacy of decades of Soviet policies, priorities, and practices that placed low value on the rational use of the environment and its resources, including the protection and preservation of ecological health and diversity. In this chapter we present and discuss many of the major geographical dimensions and ideological, political, economic, and various institutional factors that have generated the myriad of Russia’s current and future environmental policy challenges. The evidence strongly indicates that the current situation and trends are not sanguine for the health of either Russia’s physical environment or her human population.