Crossing Continents

Lucy Ash visits Russia's new energy frontier in the Arctic Yamal region and explores the impact oil and gas extraction is having on the indigenous people there. Gradually but inexorably, reindeer give way to railroads and gas rigs. She goes to stay with a family of herders near the base of the Yamal Peninsula, whose name in the local Nenets language means "the end of the earth." Yamal is home to the largest single area of reindeer husbandry in the world and unlike many indigenous people of the north in Canada, the USA and other parts of Russia, the Nenets herders have proved remarkably resilient. They survived both collectivisation in Soviet times and the chaos of the transition to a market economy in the 1990s. But now there is a new threat as Vladimir Putin has vowed to "turn Yamal into the new oil and gas province of Russia." Lucy's host in the tundra, Nikolai Khudi, is philosophical about the changing world around him and wary of criticising the state monopoly Gazprom. The flow of oil and gas revenue to t