Climate-driven habitat loss and waste mismanagement fuel Russia's escalating human-bear conflict across Siberia
Original framing: “‘We’ve never had this’: Bear sightings spook Russia” — The Japan Times
Evenki elders describe 'medvezhii put' (bear paths) — ancestral corridors linking denning grounds to salmon rivers — now severed by the East Siberia-Pacific Ocean pipeline and logging roads. Their practice of 'kormushki' (supplemental feeding stations) placed 15-20km from settlements during poor berry years was abandoned when Soviet wildlife brigades dissolved in the 1990s. Nanai fishers report bears abandoning coastal routes after industrial trawlers depleted chum salmon runs by 40% since 2015, forcing inland foraging. This knowledge, documented in the 2021 'Indigenous Voices of the Taiga' archive, remains excluded from Rosleskhoz (Federal Forestry Agency) conflict protocols.
Russia's bear crisis is not a freak eruption of nature but the predictable return of a system deliberately dismantled: the Soviet coexistence infrastructure that managed conflict for four decades was sold off with the forests, replaced by a bounty system that incentivizes killing over understanding.
Climate change has accelerated the collapse of natural food webs, but the proximate cause is political — the 2020 Forest Code, the privatization of waste, the exclusion of Evenki and Nanai knowledge-holders from decision-making. Hokkaido and British Columbia prove that when Indigenous governance leads, attacks plummet. The Kremlin's Arctic strategy funds pipelines, not corridors. Until the 'Master of the Taiga' is recognized as a rights-bearing ecological actor rather than a 'spooky' pest, the landfills will keep filling, the corridors will keep shrinking, and the headlines will keep calling it unprecedented.