Ignoring environmental change? On fishing quotas and collapsing coastlines in Bykovskiy, Northern Sakha (Yakutiya)

Abstract

The Indigenous village of Bykovskiy is located 40 km from Tiksi, the administrative center of Bulunskiy District (Ulus), in the northern part of the Republic of Sakha (Yakutiya), Russia. Founded as a Soviet fishing cooperative, it became home to Indigenous Sakha, Evenkis, Evens, as well as to Russian settlers and political prisoners from the Baltic states. Post-Soviet transformations, coupled with escalating environmental change processes, has been altering the local economy and subsistence activities since the 1990s. Although our interlocutors directly observed and experienced such changes, they seemed to ignore the visible problem of severe coastal erosion that was destroying a local cemetery. This article is based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in the study region in 2019, and combines approaches from the anthropology of climate change with reception and communication studies. It examines “ignorance” as a strategy of adaptation to multiple stressors under historically reproduced colonial structures of governance.

Frozen infrastructures in a changing climate: Transforming human–environment-technology relations in the Anthropocene

“…In this location, sand serves as an alternative to frozen water and as an additional stabilizer for foundations when mixed with water. Povoroznyuk and Schweitzer (2023) focus on a paradox observed on the Bykovskiy island in the northern Republic of Sakha, where collapsing coastlines and diminishing fishing quotas coexist in local communities that seem to be unconcerned with climate change as a driver of frozen infrastructure collapse. The paper examines this paradox, concluding that (post)-Soviet legacies and pressing socioeconomic issues overshadow other concerns.…”