PRINT/ONLINE The New York Times Kirkus Reviews BBC Focus Magazine Nationalgeographic.com Publishers Weekly Natural History Magazine Library Journal The Boston Phoenix SEJournal Savannah Morning News Booklist The Moscow Times/The St. Petersburg Times Russian Life The Greensburg (Indiana) Daily news *NEW 8.08* Rain Taxi Review of Books   November 25, 2007 Armchair Traveler By RICHARD B. WOODWARD Russians sing patriotic hymns about Lake Baikal, and with good reason. Their “sacred sea” is the oldest lake on earth (more than 25 million years) as well as the deepest (more than one mile) and the largest by volume, holding so much fresh water it could swallow Lakes Superior, Michigan, Huron, Erie and Ontario and still be thirsty. Situated in southern Siberia and surrounded on all sides by mountains, this crescent-shaped wilderness remained isolated from civilization until the early 20th century, when the Trans-Siberian Railroad laid track along its southwest flank. Even now, the doughty tourists it attracts have to overcome a gimcrack travel network. What few paved roads exist are cratered with potholes. Villages of log cabins along its shores have never known automobiles. The journalist Peter Thomson knew next to nothing about Baikal before reading a seductive article praising its pristine wonders in a 1992 issue of National Geographic. Eight years later, recently divorced and living out of boxes in his father’s house in Boston (“even my cat was in foster care”), he quit his job as an environmental news producer for NPR and talked his younger half-brother into joining him on a round-the-world trip to a place where neither of them understood the language or the culture. The result is this superb paean to a unique and bizarre ecosystem. A laboratory of evolution, Lake Baikal is home to hundreds of plants and animals found nowhere else. Mr. Thomson investigates the biochemistry behind the myth that the lake’s water purifies itself. (Russian scientists think the secret lies with a miniature shrimp that filters industrial pollutants, of which tons were introduced during Soviet rule.) Careful not to prescribe development scenarios from the comforts of America (“Baikal, Too, Must Work” is the title of the last section, on the economic history of the region), Mr. Thomson clearly favors low-impact tourism as the optimal model for the future. The lake’s remoteness has so far preserved it from becoming Tahoe or Banff. “Bad roads are good for Baikal,” says a local. Mr. Thomson is a trustworthy companion on these matters, but he has also written a compelling diary of personal discovery that reads like a manifesto about travel as a blessing in itself. Curiosity alone seems to have guided his footsteps. Wagering whim and risk over common sense was in this case the right move, for him and for us. The mottoes that speed him on his way are still valid at the end on his journey: “Good things happen. Kind strangers present themselves. Faith is rewarded.” © 2007 The New York Times Company Return to Top   August 1, 2007 SACRED SEA: A JOURNEY TO LAKE BAIKAL Dreamy, melancholy but ultimately hopeful account of veteran environmental journalist Thomson’s odyssey to an ancient, still relatively untouched lake at the cultural crossroads of Asia. Just north of Mongolia, Siberia’s Lake Baikal is truly one of a kind. Formed when the earth’s surface cracked more than 25 million years ago, it is the world’s oldest body of fresh water and the biggest (roughly 23,000 cubic kilometers). Imagine, the author suggests, a hole so big that it could hold all five Great Lakes and provide earth’s six billion residents with three liters of water per person per day for 3,000 years. Thomson, senior editor of NPR’s award-winning nature program “Living on Earth,” weaves his personal narrative together with the story of the lake, the land and its hardy indigenous people, the Buryats. He depicts a real-life El Dorado, one of the last remaining sites of natural wonder on a planet homogenized by globalization and threatened by global warming. Even as Thomson illustrates what makes Baikal special—the microscopic shrimp that purify its waters; the bizarre scaleless fish called golomyanka, which can withstand depths that would crush a human; the magical nerpa, a freshwater seal—he can’t avoid the portents of imminent loss. Pollutants threaten the shrimp, the number of golomyanka are shrinking and the lake is warming, which means the nerpa have less to eat and don’t give birth to as many pups. Inviting readers to imagine life beneath the lake’s surface, Thomson’s companionable prose voices a deep love of nature and great affinity for the region’s rich cultural and natural history. Exhaustively researched and lyrically written—a welcome addition to any library. © 2007 Nielsen Business www.google.comMedia, Inc. Return to Top  BBC Focus Magazine, October, 2007   Where would you find a lake containing one fifth of all the world’s liquid fresh water? Outside of Russia, few people have heard of Lake Baikal, and yet it really is one of the wonders of the world. This great gash in the Earth’s crust contains enough drinking water to last every human on Earth for 3000 years. At over 1600m deep and 25 million years old it holds the crown for being both the deepest and oldest lake on Earth. Peter Thomson takes us on a journey to this spectacular place. His personal thoughts, encounters with local people and understanding of this mysterious lake are all woven into his travelogue. The first half of the book covers wanders around the lake itself. Interspersed with Thomson’s personal experiences we learn about everything from the lake’s geology and formation to the weird and wonderful creatures that live in its depths. Meanwhile, the second half of the book is about the journey that took him to Lake Baikal, and the draw that kept pulling him towards this spectacular place. The book is beautifully written and his descriptions make the landscape come alive: I couldn’t help shivering when he jumps into the lake. As you travel with him you’ll be transported far, far away – the perfect antidote to a dull day at the office. Rating 4/5 --Kate Ravilious is a science writer specialising in physical and environmental sciences © 2007 BBC CUSTOMER PUBLISHING Return to Top  Nationalgeographic.com Ultimate Travel Library—Asia "Absoliutno blagopoluchnoe ozero Baikal!" a Russian scientist tells environmental journalist Thomson. "Lake Baikal is perfect!" But Baikal's famous self-cleansing ecosystem isn't so perfect anymore, and Thomson wants to find out why. He meets with everyone from environmental scientists to a community of Raskolniki in Ulan-Ude, in pursuit of the ecological and cultural importance of Baikal, one of the world's most mysterious lakes. © 2007 National Geographic Society Return to Top Publishers Weekly, July 9, 2007 Environmental journalist Thomson, founding producer and senior editor of National Public Radio’s “Living on Earth,” combines introspection with objective reporting in this engaging account of his six-month pilgrimage to Siberia’s Lake Baikal, the deepest, oldest and supposedly purest body of fresh water on earth. Thomson includes everything from thoughts about his failed marriage and his relationship with his brother and fellow traveler James to colorful impressions of the people he meets as he documents his quest, shattering the myth of the lake’s reputed capacity to cleanse itself. Researchers tell him that the air and water are full of thousands of tons of pollutants and contaminants from Baikal’s paper mill and nearby farms, industry and power plants. Tiny filter-feeding shrimp do cleanse the water, but in the process they move the contaminants into the food chain and concentrate them, so the fish eaten by the people living around Lake Baikal now pose a serious health threat. Nevertheless, many Russians continue to believe that the waters of the Sacred Sea are pristine. Thomson’s book is a lucid and sobering reminder of the destructive effects human activity has on the planet. © 2007 Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. Return to Top  November, 2007 Bookshelf By Laurence A. Marschall Siberia’s Lake Baikal, like so much that is Russian, is riddled with contradictions. Halfway between the Urals and the Pacific, the lake is so remote that few Russians have seen its shores, even though they regard it with a mystic reverence far surpassing the American devotion to Yellowstone or the Grand Canyon. As for non-Russians, few foreigners appreciate Baikal’s uniqueness—if they know of its existence at all. Yet Baikal surely ranks among the greatest natural wonders of the world. Its crescent-shaped basin, though outranked in surface area by Lake Superior and a few other bodies of water, is far deeper and far greater in capacity than any other lake: Baikal, by itself, holds a fifth all the freshwater on Earth. Formed 25 million years ago, the “blue eye of Siberia” is thousands of times older than the Great Lakes. And because Baikal is so isolated, a kind of watery analogue to Australia or New Zealand, its aquatic ecosystem has evolved in unique directions. Among more than twenty-five species of fish that live exclusively in the lake, the most abundant are weird creatures called golomyankas, whose bodies are translucent. No more than a foot long, they swim with their heads up, like seahorses, and bear their young live. The lake is even home to a singular species of mammal, the nerpa, the world’s only freshwater seal, which can spend as long as three-quarters of an hour in the frigid depths before coming up for air. What makes Baikal even more remarkable is the purity of its water. No cities abut the lake, only a few towns with low-five-figure populations, and the only roads of note, along with the Trans-Siberian Railway line, lie along the far southern end. Scarcely 80,000 people make their homes along the 1,200 miles of shoreline, most in tiny settlements accessible only by boat. The only major sources of pollution come from a pulp and paper mill on the southern shore, and from effluent dumped into inflowing rivers by cities and farms in Siberia and Mongolia. At first glance, the world’s greatest lake seems an astonishingly pristine and untroubled place. Peter Thomson, the founding editor and producer of National Public Radio’s ecology news show Living On Earth, made his first trip to Baikal in 2000. In part, his goal was to find out for himself whether the Edenic character of Baikal was fact or myth. His account of that journey is a hybrid of environmental reporting and personal travelogue, the product of a six-month respite Thomson took after his marriage ended and his mother died. Casual readers will enjoy his accounts of meandering across the Pacific on a container ship with his younger brother, camping among Siberian aspens, and feasting on reindeer meat under the northern lights. But the focal points of his narrative are Thomson’s vivid encounters with activists, scientists, and residents of the Baikal region. Just how pristine was the lake, he asked them, and how likely was it to remain that way? The answer, it turns out, is as murky as Baikal’s waters are clear. Baikalian optimists view the lake as a self-cleaning ecosystem, constantly filtered by tiny shrimplike crustaceans called Epischura baicalensis. According to one local scientist, those zooplankton, endemic to Baikal, "consume every molecule of any substance that comes to its waters," making it impossible to overload the lake with pollutants. Others, equally eloquent, see glowering clouds on the horizon. They reasonably fear increased development, swelling amounts of effluent from distant cities, insufficient preservation of the national reserves and parklands along Baikal’s shore, and the disruption of Baikal’s ecosystem by global warming. Whether the optimists or the pessimists are right, they do agree on one thing: the choices made and actions taken in the coming century will determine whether or not Baikal will remain one of Mother Russia’s most timeless treasures. Laurence A. Marschall, author of The Supernova Story, is W.K.T. Sahm Professor of Physics at Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania, and director of Project CLEA, which produces widely used simulation software for education in astronomy. Copyright © Natural History Magazine, Inc., 2007 Return to Top  Sept. 1, 2007 When his marriage headed south, environmentalist Thomson, a senior editor of NPR's Living on Earth, headed north to Russia's Lake Baikal—the largest freshwater lake on Earth—a place of extreme beauty, unexplored marine wonders, and a unique "self-cleansing" ecosystem. More travel journal and personal exploration than hard scientific text, Thomson's account nevertheless presents his findings and his journey in a way that keeps both lay reader and scientist interested and entertained. Exploring the big picture of Baikal's impact on the world (it holds one-fifth of the world's liquid fresh water) and on the people who live along its shores, Thomson also permitted himself during the journey to explore the effects of his own life on those immediately around him and on those he met during his travels. Recommended for public libraries and undergraduate institutions with environmental history disciplines.—Susan Brazer, Salisbury Univ. Lib., MD © 2007 Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. Return to Top  The Boston Phoenix, November 19, 2007 Deep Thinking Peter Thomson’s cleansing journey By NINA MACLAUGHLIN Lake Baikal fills a fracture in the surface of Siberia that’s 25 million years old, 395 miles long, and a mile deep. It’s the world’s largest, deepest, most ancient body of fresh water, and a mythic spot in the minds of many Russians — for its scale, yes, but also for the lake’s mysterious, now endangered, ability to keep itself pristine, thanks to a unique self-cleansing ecosystem. Peter Thomson, founding editor and producer of the Somerville-based NPR environmental news show Living on Earth, journeyed to Lake Baikal from Boston, via trains and boats and cars, after his marriage crumbled. Some people join a gym after a divorce; Thomson, 48 years old, and currently living in Jamaica Plain, embarked on a trip around the world toward this great lake — “God’s own reservoir,” as he terms it. His new book, Sacred Sea: A Journey to Lake Baikal (Oxford University Press, 320 pages, $29.95), documents his trip in a blend of environmental journalism, travel narrative, and memoir. It’s a portrait of a place, its people, and its problems. It’s also an honest look at how far we have to go to get home again. Sitting at Newbury Street’s Trident Café recently, Thomson, who’s got an ageless look about him — a soul patch and a spark behind his eyes masks any world-weariness — talks about the process of writing the book, the trip itself, how our actions reverberate, and how to tell a narrative. “With a big story,” he says, such as something on the scale of Baikal, “what I learned to do is to humanize it, to distill it down to a core essence around which you can build the bigger story.” And so it is in Sacred Sea: straight reporting about mini-shrimp and pollutants and the people who exist on Baikal’s shores alternate with personal details of Thomson’s marriage and family, as well as his reactions to the place (on entering the waters for the first time: “the world is suddenly black and silent, as black and silent as space, and you’re floating weightlessly like in space too . . . except you don’t have a suit on, in fact there’s nothing at all between you and this hostile new environment”). Regardless of whether the tale is large or small, “there’s nothing in the environmental arena that’s unique to a particular place,” says Thomson. Which means that writing about the faraway wintry exileland of Siberia can resonate here. The mentality exists in Russia that Baikal can take anything that gets thrown at it, that toxic paper factories and a growing local population can’t harm it, that its ability to cleanse itself is bigger and more powerful than any potential human threat. Similarly, in the United States, the perception exists that “there’s always more,” says Thomson. “If paradise gets destroyed, we move and start over. We have this idea as a country of our limitless ability to build and build and build. And Siberia has the same notion of the frontier, of the infinite ability to expand.” When asked whether he’ll return to Russia, Thomson says he wants to focus his energies “back toward places where I live, where my life is, my homefront.” The US, he explains, has its own problems, ones he wants to bring into greater focus, issues of consumption and appetite, how our actions, even the smallest ones — what we drive, what we eat — have consequences. “We are fundamentally a part of an infinite number of relations,” says Thomson. “Everything we do reverberates.” And he stresses the importance of people’s relationships to place: our lives are defined by the places we live and work and visit, “and, ultimately, whether those places are preserved and protected and treated well comes down to how much people are willing to fight for them.” Copyright © 2008 The Phoenix Media/Communications Group Return to Top  SEJournal/Society of Environmental Journalists, Winter 2008 Exploration of ‘God’s reservoir’ informs and delights Reviewed by Krestia DeGeorge Sometimes, being the biggest, the oldest and the deepest thing can define its fundamental nature. A case in point: Russia’s Lake Baikal. In his new book, “Sacred Sea: A Journeyto Lake Baikal,” SEJ member Peter Thomson makes a strong case that the lake’s superlative features set it apart from the rest of the world’s large freshwater seas. At 25 million years old, Baikal makes North America’s Great Lakes look like what they are, in geological terms: ephemeral puddles left behind by the last ice age. With oxygen mysteriously present more than a mile below the surface, so is animal life. That’s just one of the lake’s unique features. It also has one of the world’s only distinct species of freshwater seal. And an endemic shrimp species linked to Baikal’s legendary ability to purify itself. In a remote region of a country that doesn’t have a good reputation for ease of access to outsiders or environmental safeguards, Baikal is an environmental journalist’s dream subject. So when his marriage ends in divorce, Thomson (founding editor and producer of NPR’s Living on Earth) leaves his old life behind and embarks on a meandering surface transportation-only circumnavigation of the planet, with Baikal as the centerpiece and main goal. The resulting book is a pleasure to read, thanks to Thomson’s sparse, lyrical prose. On his way east via railways, ferries, and a trans-Pacific freighter, Thomson tells of adventures through the American and Canadian West, Korea, Japan and Russian Far East that would stir the wanderlust in almost anyone. But all of these are just a warmup for the main course: Baikal. Thomson traveled halfway around the world to see this lake and from the first glimpse – through the smudged windows of a Trans-Siberian Railway car – it doesn’t disappoint. Despite pristine appearances, he soon discovers all may not be well with “God’s reservoir.” One of his first visits is to a pulp mill on the shores of the lake that is discharging much more organic sulfur and organochlorines than it is permitted under Russian law. During a tour of the plant, he encounters contradictory attitudes among officials on the matter of Baikal’s water quality. Later, he writes: “Somewhere deep in my brain, the voices of the two Natalias at the Baikalsk Plant resonate like a sympathetic string on a piano – There is not really any problem and we are committed to fixing it.” Despite the plant’s pollution discharges, the proximity of a nearby industrial corridor and additional contaminants flushing down the Selenga River from Mongolia, Baikal appears to defy the odds and maintain its purity. That’s one interpretation. Through Thomson’s discussions with several scientists, an ecological portrait of the lake emerges that helps to explain pollution’s effects on the lake. The story is compelling on its own merits but Thomson’s real genius is fleshing out the characters he meets on his journey. A young Japanese man in his first-ever drinking contest with legendary Russian tipplers. A Buryat woman hearing a recording of her own voice singing for the first time. A conflicted bureaucrat. A handful of tireless scientists and zealous activists. A pair of researchers he dubs Dr. Despair and Dr. Hope. By populating “Sacred Sea” with interesting people, Thomson tells Baikal’s story in a way that no collection of facts, official statements and competing claims ever could. Krestia DeGeorge is the editor of the Anchorage Press in Alaska. © 2008 The Society of Environmental Journalists Return to Top   Sunday, August 12, 2007 Book review: A quest to see the world's oldest, largest lake John Stoehr Dreamy, melancholy and ultimately hopeful, "Sacred Sea" is a chronicle of Peter Thomson's global odyssey to experience the world's oldest and still relatively untouched lakes. Researched and written over five years by a veteran journalist and founder of National Public Radio's award-winning show, "Living on Earth," this travelogue shows the natural world of Central Asia at a crossroads. Siberia's Lake Baikal, just north of Mongolia, is truly one of a kind. Unlike the Great Lakes of North America, which were scooped out of the earth by receding glaciers at the end of the last Ice Age 10,000 years ago, Lake Baikal was formed when the earth's surface cracked more than 25 million years ago. Then it began filling with water, and it hasn't stopped since. It is the world's oldest body of fresh water - and the biggest. It's roughly 23,000 cubic kilometers. To understand the magnitude of that number, Thomson deftly invites the reader to imagine a hole so big that it that could hold all five of the Great Lakes. Or to imagine the earth's six billion residents each drinking three liters per person per day for 3,000 years. Lake Baikal is truly a thing of wonder. Thomson first heard of it during his tenure with NPR, but didn't contemplate traveling there until a change in personal fortune signaled an opportunity to go. That change in personal fortune gives this chronicle, exhaustively researched and lyrically written, has the tenor of a spiritual quest. It's also an attempt to document one of nature's last remaining sites of splendor amid the encroachment of global warming and globalization. The author weaves personal narrative with the story of the lake, the land and its hardy indigenous people, called the Buryats, to create a picture of a real-life El Dorado. Even as Thomson illustrates what makes Baikal special, however, he can't avoid the sustained ache of imminent loss. We learn about the microscopic shrimp that purify the lake, a bizarre scale-less fish called golomyanka, which can withstand depths that would crush a human, and the lake's magical nerpa, or freshwater seal. As pollutants threaten the shrimp, the number of golomyanka shrink. As the lake warms up, seals have less to eat and don't give birth to as many pups. Reading "Sacred Sea" requires the inner strength of a stalwart optimist, but this is a minor complaint. Thomson has a companionable style of writing (he often invites the reader to imagine life beneath the lake's surface as he does). His deep love of nature combine with a staggering amount of research to make "Sacred Sea" a fascinating read © 2008 SavannahNOW and the Savannah Morning News Return to Top  Booklist, September 15   Lake Baikal in south-central Russia is 394 miles long; it is the largest freshwater lake in Eurasia and the world’s deepest with a maximum known depth of 5,712 feet.  Thomson and his brother traveled there from Boston in October 2000 in what turned out to be  a 20,000-mile journey by train, cargo ship, and rubber raft.  He offers a brief history of the region and describes the fish, nerpa seals, deer, and wolves they encountered; but most interesting of their encounters were the villagers they met.  At one point, three women invited them to a meal of fish, onions, potatoes, meat, egg and ham salad, honey, jam, bread, pancakes, mushrooms, pickles, and beets!  Plus, there was homemade vodka (come on, you need something to drink to accompany all of that food, right?).  Traveling through woods, streams, hills, mountains, and pristine lakes, they had quite a voyage, and this in-depth recapitulation is absorbing in its detail. — George Cohen ©2007 American Library Association Return to Top  Nov/Dec 2007 Under Review: Sacred Sea by Paul E. Richards Focused on a lifelong goal to visit Lake Baikal, eco-journalist Peter Thomson uses this Siberian gem as the centerpiece of a round-the-world trip taken at a time of “personal transition.” Written in an easy style that is part journalism, part kitchen table storytelling over vodka and kolbasa, Sacred Sea is a humorous explorer’s tale just rich enough in back story to help the casual reader understand the forces surrounding and threatening Lake Baikal. Thomson engagingly weaves the travelogue with his personal journey (notably with the Red Sox’s failures and triumphs), offering a look at modern Russia through the prism of this great lake.
 Return to Top  The Moscow Times, Sept. 21, 2007 The St. Petersburg Times, September 28, 2007  Troubled Water The list of Lake Baikal's wonders goes on and on. And so, Peter Thomson writes, does the growing list of risks. By Robert Rosenberg
Published: September 21, 2007 Trivia hounds the world over can identify Lake Baikal as the largest and deepest fresh-water lake on the planet. But few would be able to describe the lake's other myriad wonders. That Baikal's waters are among the purest on Earth. That Baikal holds a fifth of the planet's liquid fresh water: enough to supply three liters to every living person for 3,000 years. That Baikal reaches more than 1 1/2 kilometers deep -- and up to 9 1/2 kilometers through sediment to bedrock, a rift approaching the world's deepest abyss, the Pacific's Mariana Trench. That, while most of the Earth's other deep lakes support life to 250 meters, there are living things squirming in Baikal 1,600 meters below the surface. That Baikal is home to 1,750 unique organisms, including the world's only fresh-water seal, the nerpa. The list of Baikal's wonders grows larger to this day, yet your average citizen of the world hardly knows Baikal at all. Peter Thomson's "Sacred Sea: A Journey to Lake Baikal" might help rectify the situation. Thomson, an environmental journalist, was the founding producer and editor of National Public Radio's "Living on Earth" program. In July of 2000, after a bruising divorce, Thomson set out on a life-altering trip with his younger brother James. The pair would travel by land and sea from Boston to Siberia, where they would explore Baikal before continuing around the world to the United States. "I've come to Baikal to try to take some kind of measure of the place," Thomson writes, "to find some kind of truth about it and lessons for other places, and myself." 

Thomson's book is padded with the emotional and logistical baggage of his journey circumnavigating the globe. A bizarre decision to narrate events out of chronological order creates a problem of focus, with clumsy flashbacks, letters home and unnecessary passages of stream-of-consciousness. Thomson is an introvert who worries himself silly about visa issues and often admits to hating his journey. He does not speak Russian, and spends his time on trains fearful of leaving his berth. As a writer, he rarely dramatizes conversations, relying instead on summary, so the cast of potentially colorful characters he meets never entirely comes to life. It is not, then, for the pleasures of armchair travel that one should approach "Sacred Sea."   Rather, the jewels in this important book are the chapters focusing on Baikal. When Thomson is contemplating the lake, imagining a nerpa's dive or weighing Baikal's myths versus its science, his writing is energized and confident, and "Sacred Sea" accumulates the power of a fair-minded but impassioned essay. To what extent is Baikal being damaged by humans? How can it best be protected? These are the questions Thomson spends the bulk of his journey investigating. 

It's difficult to believe that humans have any effect on a lake of Baikal's size and reputation. Many Russians still buy into the myth of Siberia's inexhaustibility, of its "endless forests, uncountable numbers of fur-bearing animals, mines that yield 4,000 pounds of gold a year, an unfathomable lake that makes pollution disappear." And much of this is true. As Thomson skillfully explains, Baikal does pull off a unique miracle of self-purification -- through its miniature shrimp, the Epischura baicalensis. These animals strain pollution from the water like "a tiny vacuum cleaner about the size of a poppy seed." Baikal's zillions of shrimp filter "the lake's entire volume every twenty-three years." Thus "Baikal is in a perfect state!" one scientist announces. "It is huge, it is rich, it is healthy, it is wise, and it is not similar to any phenomena in the world!" 

Thomson is wary. "Baikal is perfect," he thinks. "It's a wonderful, soothing story, which exalts the lake even as it frees humans from their responsibility to care for it." 

Indeed, many others warn Thomson that "waste from factories, farms, and human settlements is testing the limits of Baikal's delicate ecology." Siberian industry helped spearhead the nation's economic and technological achievements of the 1960s and 1970s. Three dams on the Angara River produced electricity for aluminum, petrochemical and airplane factories -- all within 50 kilometers of Baikal. The result is a "contaminated hot zone." The region has been deemed "irreparably damaged" by the Rand Corporation. A Soviet government study found that in 1988 the city of Angarsk produced more harmful air pollution than all of Moscow, and the government recently admitted that Irkutsk and nearby cities have some of the poorest air quality in the nation.

Among the worst culprits is the Baikalsk Pulp and Paper Mill, whose red-and-white striped smokestacks "rise above the lakeshore at the edge of town like candy canes laced with strychnine." The plant was built in the 1950s as a source of cellulose fiber for military aircraft tires, to be produced using Baikal's "super-pure water." Nikita Khrushchev supposedly said, "Baikal, too, must work." Today the plant produces newsprint and bleached cellulose pulp, sending sulfates, phenols, heavy metals, E. coli and air pollutants into and over the lake. 

The head of the Baikalsk plant's Department of Nature Protection insists that none of this is doing any damage. To prove it, she invites the Thomsons to drink water at the spot where the factory's spillway rushes into Baikal. "The treated water meets all the standards of drinking water in the Russian Federation," she promises. The brothers decline. 

While the lake's shrimp do cleanse pollution, unfortunately, that is just the beginning of the story. Epischura are at the bottom of the food chain, and predators at the top -- seals, raptors, bears and humans -- are at risk of larger effects of contamination. The process, known as biomagnification, means that concentrations of pollutants "jump by several orders of magnitude from one link in the food chain to the next." So marine mammals like the nerpas, which accumulate enormous concentrations of toxic chemicals, are dying off. And humans, who eat the fish that eat the epischura, might likewise be in danger of grave health risks. Thomson muses on the "nasty irony in Baikal's stupendous self-cleansing act: extraordinarily pure water, extraordinarily contaminated animals." 

Still, what the effects of the pollutants are and where they come from (there is a penchant to blame Mongolia) are fiercely debated. As the world has seen so often in the United States' own recent environmental record, it is far too easy for a government to raise doubts about science long enough to kick the environmental can to some future generation. After intense discussions with Yevgenia Tarasova at Irkutsk State University, who has spent her life studying the lake, Thomson concludes, "Until or unless scientists can draw an unbroken line of pollution from specific sources through Baikal's water and fish to specific health problems in nerpas and humans -- the people with the power to make decisive changes may remain unconvinced of the need to do so."

So while the rich and powerful discuss harebrained schemes, like marketing Baikal drinking water to China, grassroots activists rally international support for conservation efforts and eco-friendly development. A critical race to save the lake is on, and Thomson's travelogue will help the effort. "If there were several Lake Baikals in the world, maybe the concern would not be that high," Tarasova says. "Unfortunately, there is only one Lake Baikal."

Robert Rosenberg is the author of the novel "This Is Not Civilization." He teaches writing at Bucknell University. Copyright © 2007 The Moscow Times Return to Top  ONLINE EDITION: SUMMER 2008 by Eliza Murphy “Yikes!” is evidently an insufficient response to discovering that the deepest lake in the world, known also to be the purest, is undergoing alarming biochemical shifts in response to human activities. Perhaps “Bloody Hell” will suffice. This is Siberia after all, the nether regions of Russia, and Lake Baikal—home to miniature, pollution filtering shrimp (epischura), the world’s only fresh water seal (the nerpa), and the hardy people who live on its shores—is under siege. Author Peter Thomson invited his younger brother to join him on a journey half way around the world to see this ecological wonder. As hard as Thomson tries to portray the lake as a miraculous entity capable of healing from a variety of assaults, the verdict is still out on its ability to absorb warming temperatures in a climate so cold that the locals take pride in their skillful adaptation to the frigidity. Some believe that the way to solve any assaults to the lake, the most obvious culprit being the paper mill with its toxic effluents, will be through economic development. Never mind the high concentrations of industrial pollutants stowing away in the blubber of the nerpas, who dine on the epischura that gobble up PCBs, dioxin, and any number of waste products generated by transforming trees into paper products. Thomson, a veteran environmental journalist, admits that he wants “to believe that this remote place is different,” that “Baikal might somehow manage to elude the corrosive influence of civilization.” Seeking one place on earth imbued with that vanishing essence, hope, he leaves Boston an idealist, attempting to sublimate the “cold-eyed realist” he confesses that he is. Along the way he encounters all sorts of people, iconic architecture, a frustrating bureaucratic machine, some desultory meals, at least one exquisite meal, and dreary landscapes that the realist in him cannot help but describe in detail. Such details might threaten the narrative if Thomson weren’t willing to acknowledge the anxiety this trip provoked in him. Hope arose for Thomson in the form of his guide, Andrei, who although initially aloof, softens one night and divulges his vision of a trail similar to the Appalachian Trail. Exposed to travelers attempting to leave behind as small a footprint as possible, Andrei absorbs and passes on valuable ways to do so. The exchange takes root in Thomson, who returns on another trip to help build that trail, a gesture significant both for the ground level engagement with an enigmatic location as well as the completion of a personal odyssey for the author. A skilled science writer, Thomson shares the perplexing and not altogether uplifting news of the lake’s health, presenting an even-handed portrayal of a natural wonder that is as imperiled as every other place on earth. Unafraid to share the tediousness and vexation, beauty and hideousness that travel sometimes entails, he recounts not only the vast physical terrain he traversed, but also intimate personal details that echo the scale of the geography he and his kid brother covered via planes, trains, and a cargo ship across the Pacific. The result is a strong book that is as much about the sacredness we carry with us as it is about a “sacred sea.” © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2008 Return to Top  The Greensburg (Indiana) Daily news January 16, 2008 By Pat Smith, Daily News Columnist

Thomson’s journey to Lake Biaikal An excellent book and time to read it in a leisurely way is surely a luxury. If you know that the author has connections with Decatur County – well, that’s even more satisfying. I’ve been reading a book titled "Sacred Sea, a Journey to Lake Baikal" by Peter Thomson. It was loaned to me by Anna Paul Lowe and Margaret Lowe who helped me sort out the Decatur County Thomson family. As we’ll discover next week Thomson’s ancestors are from Decatur County. They also loved to travel. Sacred Sea was published last year by Oxford University Press. The book is dedicated to "my father, Peter, my mother, Anne and my brother, James, without all of whom I would’ve just stayed home." Thomson lives in Boston where he was the founding producer and senior editor of National Public Radio’s "Living on Earth." He received many awards for excellence in broadcast journalism. Seven years ago he left that job to travel around the world and the book is the result of his and his brother’s journey to the lake located in the South-Eastern part of Siberia. It’s estimated to be at least 25 million years old and is the deepest lake on the earth (5400 feet). An exceptionally favorable review in the New York Times states that the lake holds so much fresh water that it could swallow Lakes Superior, Michigan, Huron, Erie and Ontario and still be thirsty." The lake has been one of Asia’s holy places for centuries. People once prayed to the lake believing it had special healing powers. There are carvings of tribes of people that have not lived for thousands of years. The word Baikal is from the Turk language meaning "bai" wealthy and "kul" means lake. As we find out from Thomson, it is indeed a wealthy lake, wealthy with plants and animals that are found no other place on earth. Early in the story he writes about the sea dogs and it reads like poetry. "The existence of nerpas, of sea dogs in this far inland freshwater sea knocks the mind for a loop and leaves you laughing at the creativity and whimsy of nature." He explains that the nerpa or Baikal Seal is an earless seal that only lives in Lake Baikal and that they can live for more than half a century. They and two subspecies are the only seals to live their whole lives in freshwater. No one knows how they came to live in the lake but some speculate that they came when there was a sea passage linking the lake with the Arctic Ocean. Thomson is an environmental journalist so there was no surprise that he conducts some investigation of the lake especially the myth that the water purifies itself. Russians have believed that the tiny filter-feeding shrimp cleanse the water but he found otherwise. Although the area is so remote that few visitors are seen, there are still some industrial pollutants in the lake. I’d never heard of Lake Baikal. Thomson knew very little about it until he read about it in a 1992 issue of the National Geographic. He was fascinated with the story and pictures. "Who knew that in the middle of Siberia, a place nearly synonymous in the Western mind with exile, deprivation, imprisonment and death, was this piece of creation at its most fantastic? One of nature’s jewels stuffed away in a dark corner of earth’s basement?" He filed the thought of Lake Baikal away knowing he would never get there. But eight years later he did get there. He and his brother James traveled by plane, trains, cargo ships, rubber rafts and by using their feet through all kinds of waterways, woods, hills, mountains and what passes for roads in some areas. He states that the book is not the work of an authority about the lake; it is only his story of the remote place. Probably my favorite parts in this book are about the people Thomson and his brother encounter along the way. They remember only a-few individuals they met as someone they were glad to leave; most were generous and intensely respectful of their own communities, wherever they might be. Their journey, began as a search for restoration in nature, became a gradual unfolding of restorative power of good people - of trust, faith and the human connection. Next week I’ll share what Peter Thomson wrote about his family members in this book and what Margaret Lowe told me about the Thomson family. © 1999-2008 Community Newspaper Holdings, Inc Return to Top http://travel.nytimes.com/2007/11/25/travel/25armchair.html?ref=bookshttp://travel.nytimes.com/travel/guides/north-america/canada/alberta/banff/overview.html?inline=nyt-geohttp://www.kirkusreviews.com/kirkusreviews/index.jsphttp://www.focusmag.co.uk/http://www.nationalgeographic.com/traveler/extras/travellibrary/library3.htmlhttp://lava.nationalgeographic.com/pod/pages/templates/pod-enlarge-11-20-01.htmlhttp://www.publishersweekly.com/article/CA6457562.html?q=baikalhttp://www.naturalhistorymag.com/index_reviews.htmlhttp://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6471825.html?industryid=47112&q=baikalhttp://www.reedbusiness.com/index.htmlhttp://www.r-e.com/http://thephoenix.com/article_ektid51510.aspxhttp://thephoenix.com/Boston/Authors/NINA-MACLAUGHLIN/http://www.sej.org/http://savannahnow.com//node/341365http://savannahnow.com/user/129http://www.booklistonline.com/default.aspx?page=show_product&pid=2108278http://www.russianlife.com/issfull.cfm?Issue=2103108144http://context.themoscowtimes.com/stories/2007/09/21/105.htmlhttp://www.sptimes.ru/index.php?story_id=23148&action_id=2http://travel.nytimes.com/2007/11/25/travel/25armchair.html?ref=bookshttp://www.kirkusreviews.com/kirkusreviews/index.jsphttp://www.focusmag.co.uk/http://www.nationalgeographic.com/traveler/extras/travellibrary/library3.htmlhttp://www.publishersweekly.com/article/CA6457562.html?q=baikalhttp://www.naturalhistorymag.com/index_reviews.htmlhttp://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6471825.html?industryid=47112&q=baikalhttp://thephoenix.com/article_ektid51510.aspxhttp://www.sej.org/http://savannahnow.com//node/341365http://www.booklistonline.com/default.aspx?page=show_product&pid=2108278http://context.themoscowtimes.com/stories/2007/09/21/105.htmlhttp://www.sptimes.ru/index.php?story_id=23148&action_id=2http://www.raintaxi.com/online/2008summer/thomson.shtml#shapeimage_1_link_0shapeimage_1_link_1shapeimage_1_link_2shapeimage_1_link_3shapeimage_1_link_4shapeimage_1_link_5shapeimage_1_link_6shapeimage_1_link_7shapeimage_1_link_8shapeimage_1_link_9shapeimage_1_link_10shapeimage_1_link_11shapeimage_1_link_12shapeimage_1_link_13shapeimage_1_link_14shapeimage_1_link_15shapeimage_1_link_16shapeimage_1_link_17shapeimage_1_link_18shapeimage_1_link_19shapeimage_1_link_20shapeimage_1_link_21shapeimage_1_link_22shapeimage_1_link_23shapeimage_1_link_24shapeimage_1_link_25shapeimage_1_link_26shapeimage_1_link_27shapeimage_1_link_28shapeimage_1_link_29shapeimage_1_link_30shapeimage_1_link_31shapeimage_1_link_32shapeimage_1_link_33shapeimage_1_link_34


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