Samarga River is situated in the northern section of the Maritime Province of Russian Far East across from the southern fork of Sakhalin. Extensive Samarga tributaries with numerous headwaters flowing out of Taiga forests eventually pour into the Sea of Japan. And, the size of the drainage basin is 1.5 to 2 times as large as that of the Ishikari River of Hokkaido which also pours into the same sea, which used to sustain an annual run of well over 2 million wild salmon.
Project Boundaries
Causal Relationships and Subjects
The process of development of a local community is a history of its interactions with the ecological system in which it is situated. This Internet project intends to shed new analytical light on the interactions between rural communities and their ecosystems with particular focus on the impact of exogenous, notably foreign, consumer demand for the natural resources of the Northwestern Pacific on local population in fishery, forestry, and agriculture.
In this study, the coastal areas comprise the northeastern regions of Japan's main island and Hokkaido on this side, and the wide expanse of land from the northeastern region of China through Russia's Maritime Province on the other around Japan Sea. As the indicator of ecosystem, salmon resources will be used because, while they spend most of their lives out in the open sea, their reproduction is critically dependent, due to their anadromous nature, upon upstream spawning bed and habitat of river systems.
Economically important members of the Pacific salmonoid family are to be selected for analysis because of their inevitable interaction not only with local communities, but also with the consumer demand of outside, often foreign, markets.
Local Communities in the Interactive Process
The term "local community" used in this study primarily means the relatively small rural population centers which grew up over time on the shores of the Russia's Maritime Province. They are called "traditional communities" in contrast to those which are artificially constructed in response to modern industrial expansion and economic development. In real life, however, almost all communities fall in between these two ideal types, and we shall treat them as "communities in transition," in the following three categories.
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Impact of industrialization, or modernization, remains minor, and the local community continues to evolve basically by its own internal forces
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Impact of industrialization, or modernization, is considerable, and the local community's process of development sustains a significant impact causing significant sociocultural changes
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Impact of industrialization, or modernization, is profound, and the local community's way of life undergoes fundamental changes in the often destructive developmental process
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Cohabitation of Local Communities and Their Ecosystems
Common yardstick used in the 1999 projects of the Virtual Foundation Japan is the concept of "Cohabitation of Local communities and Their Ecosystems." The target areas include the eastern shorelines of Russian Far East, China, Nepal and the Indochinese peninsula.
Virtual Foundation Japan (VFJ) is now actively involved, working with the Friend of the Earth-Japan (FoE-J), in a long-term project to assist the local community of Agzu in the Samarga river basin anxious to build its own sustainable economic base to create adequate employment and income-earning opportunities.
VFJ's present aim is twofold:
(1) Help identify and develop sustainable local businesses for the Agzu villagers making use of locally available resources, and
(2) develop a distance education system on the Internet which will enable the Agzu residents to directly communicate with the outside world including the communities of northern Japan facing Japan Sea.
(click the picture to see the fish close-up)
The issue to be discussed openly by all participants will be on how the people living in the Samarga river basin can embark upon a sustainable local economic development without damaging the pristine beauty of the Taiga (subarctic coniferous) forests and the ecosystems, and how the Japanese consumers can play a role in making it happen. The nature and extent of the impact of local development, whatever its nature, shall be examined in the following areas.
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What kind of environmental problems is such a developmental process likely to produce in the area?
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What kind of sociocultural and institutional transformations is such a developmental process likely to bring about?
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And as a result, in what political changes such an economic development is likely to result?
In addition to find answers to these questions, we must also ask what impact the development in the Samarga basin might bring upon the neighboring areas and countries.
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What will be the impact upon the country such as Japan which is the principal provider of technology and investment fund needed for the development?
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What will be the impact upon the industry and the consumers at large of the country such as Japan which provided the needed technology and investment in a major way?
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What will be the impact of such a development upon other countries in Asia?
Standing at the end of the 20th century, the outcome of the development and change in the coastal communities of the North Pacific region is becoming all the more important because it will mean a fatal choice between finding a new friendly way of cohabitation between us and our ecosystems on the one hand, and moving inextricably into the direction of destroying the ecosystems for short-term economic and political gains on the other.
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