Frozen Image

In May 2015, one of Russia's most widely read newspapers, Argumenty i Fakty, published a report titled ‘Who Encroaches on the Sacred Lake's Water?’ It criticised a proposal by a Tomsk University scientist to transfer water through a special channel from Lake Baikal in Siberia to the Yongding River in Beijing, a river that was caught in the grip of drought (Tugutova 2015). This was not the first time that selling the water of the sacred lake had been debated. In 2012, Israel had offered to purchase the water at USD 4 per 0.33 litre bottle. Vladimir Zhirinovsky, Deputy Chairman of the State Duma at the time, excitedly described this sum as ‘crazy’, and said that industries in the region could thrive remarkably, and subsequently the welfare of the local people around Baikal could improve (Zhirinovsky 2012). Although such economic attitudes and proposals have often remained at the level of words before falling into oblivion as so many temporary ambitions, water currency was shaped as a possibility that has shown itself from time to time regarding the lake – not only in politicians’ minds, but also in those of the Indigenous people of this region.

Concern over the lake dates back to 1916, when Barguzinsky Nature Reserve, one of the earliest nature reserves in Russia, was established. With approximately 60 km of shared border with Lake Baikal to the north, this natural site has been expanded into northern Mongolia (Barguzinsky Nature Reserve’ 2018). This means that in addition to worries about its wildlife and land, the health of Baikal's water has always been a major environmental challenge, as its coastal waters are home to various species of fish, such as omul, whitefish and Baikal sturgeon, and there are Baikal gobies and unique golomyankas in its deeper waters. Selected as a UNESCO World Heritage site, this lake is the deepest freshwater lake in the world, known for its beautiful landscapes, natural features and ‘exceptional value to evolutionary science’ (UNESCO 2009).

Simultaneously, it is a significant sacred site for the Evenki¹ and the Buryats of the Baikal region,² Indigenous people in lands to the north-east of the lake and on Olkhon Island on its western side respectively (Walter and Fridman 2004: 539). They have long-term relationships with the lake; according to the Buryats’ famous folk legend, the pure, clear water of the lake was given by the mercy of the gods to the begging people, to save them from a fire that threatened their region (Gray 1927). With regard to the Evenki, Baikal has shaped a kind of memory among them about fishing as not merely a subsistence activity, but also an emotional experience representing their lasting connection with the landscape (Simonova 2014). However, after many years of concern – due to the Baikal–Amur Mainline (BAM) project (Povoroznyuk 2021) and the construction of an oil pipeline through the homeland of the Evenki³ (Fondahl and Sirina 2006) and the establishment of many polluting factories in Buryat territories – and despite having been heavily dependent on the health of the lake for centuries, both spiritually (Znamenski 2003: 193; Tkacz and Zhambalov 2016) and economically up to 2005,⁴ the Buryats suddenly began to engage in actions that, directly or indirectly, led to the destruction of the lake. For instance, the Buryats started selling water to China on the micro-level (Tugutova 2015) and creating on the island – known as the Mecca of shamanism – a huge volume of waste that has serious effects on the health of the water (Zakhvatkina 2019). In other words, there has been encroachment on the lake, this time not by national government or foreign forces, but by a growing Indigenous people with a nature-based culture that previously had a rich literature and records of anti-government actions to save their cultural resources (Fondahl 1996; Forsyth 1992). But what really caused the Buryats to begin to destroy what they considered sacred?

In research and scientific reports published on Indigenous peoples since 1990, authors – especially anthropologists – have frequently studied the relationship of culture to ecological diversity and its causes. By focusing on the concept of tradition, they have shown how environmental responsibility and the proper use of resources evolved in Indigenous societies as a direct result of traditional life and the logic derived from their knowledge systems (Milton 1998; Laudine 2016). More precisely, Indigenous communities’ reliance on a subsistence economy (as opposed to a market economy) led them to a more sustainable and responsible use of land and resources. Almost all conflicts and criticisms arise around four main issues: (1) the elimination or reduction of Indigenous peoples in the decision-making process around their resources (Vasquez 2014; Torres and Wong 2018); (2) the exclusion of Indigenous peoples from benefits and profits of development and modernisation processes carried out by government or global organisations (Breidlid 2013); (3) the loss of their skills and traditional ways of life in global processes (Jarratt-Snider and Nielsen 2020; Maldonado 2014); (4) the failure of the West to learn Indigenous peoples’ knowledge systems regarding nature to deal with environmental crises, or at least its failure to infer methods for solving current ecological problems (Edington 2017; Nakashima et al. 2018).

The prevailing spirit of such debates and perspectives has been gradually changing in recent years because some research studies show a different occurrence in a number of nature-based communities: that is, an increase in the destruction or contamination of sacred natural sites by Indigenous peoples themselves. This issue has been highlighted by researchers such as Hansen (2001) and Petterson (2006). In these studies, surprisingly, most such destruction occurred in the period of global environmental change in which it seemed that Indigenous societies should be more deeply involved in the issue of conserving their environment – or should even react strongly to the destruction of the sacred nature of their home – due to the nature of this era, of which one aspect was media coverage and the awareness that resulted from it (Rantanen 2006). In other words, Indigenous societies, as long as their environments were not physically changed or they were unaware of changes, demonstrated stable relationships with their nature-based religions and sacred sites, describing them as the organiser and core of their daily lives and world views. Unexpectedly, widespread awareness of environmental problems challenged Indigenous societies’ relationships with their environments and also led to the destruction and pollution of the environment by those Indigenous peoples – despite contemporary global efforts to save the environment or environmental restrictions imposed on natural sites by national governments for conservation or restoration.

Based on such studies of the degradation of nature – albeit not employing a coherent approach – a cluster of criticism has emerged around the dominant idea that Indigenous peoples are still responsible for nature in general and for their environments, with a strong focus on the expectations that have been established by this frozen image of Indigenous cultures. These critiques can be tracked in two stages:

(A) Making others and the imagined community. This problematic view originated from Article 8j of the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), which indirectly constructs Indigenous peoples as the ‘other’. This means that the dominant narrative, based on the Western projection of a homogenising civilisation, has created a universal model that imagines a journey from nature-based, premodern, traditional societies to ‘modern’ societies. According to John W. Meyer et al. (1997: 149), one can argue that the CBD contains global models of how nature and indigeneity are supposed to be perceived by rational actors who regard Indigenes as ‘others’; the others, who are not yet part of national mainstream society or the modern capitalistic world system, consequently have no economic interest in exploiting nature (IUCN et al. 1991). As a result, they hold a position that has been established according to a division between traditional and modern. What should be considered here, as Benedict Anderson (1991) points out so well, is that this kind of global model has become exceedingly rationalised and universalistic, and created an imagined community.

(B) Paternalist protection and the aquarium. Furthermore, as previously discussed, such an imagined community embodies a subject–object separation within itself, which is rooted in the Western perception of the objectification of nature. Although there have been certain efforts to modify this perception, it has ended in ‘paternalist protection’, as Pálsson (1996) shows. People have defined themselves as overseers of the natural world with a stance outside the system, precisely a global position. They characterise the system as the rational management of the environment by introducing the metaphor of the aquarium. In this regard, since the manager observes everything from outside the system, they only see a separate reality, leading to the assumption that things are under control and will always remain the same. Thus, many researchers and organisations think that the concepts of nature and indigeneity should remain constant and unchanging during global changes in order to act as an exemplar for other societies.

On this subject, by criticising the two global models of nature and indigeneity, which are the bases of global policies towards Indigenous communities, Sowa (2013) shows how the American–European approach has ended in the ‘museification’ of Indigenous peoples and nature. This museification, as an imposed cultural structure, imagines nature to be like an unchanging aquarium, forcing local communities to act as a special group of people quite distinct from Western societies and others’ (Westerners’) understandings of nature. As a result, by pressuring Indigenous societies, these models seek to ensure that a particular situation is maintained whereby ecology will be preserved for future generations, regardless of what is really happening socially in transforming homes.

Relying on such a critique to go beyond global models that promote certain clichés about Indigenous communities and draw conclusions based on them can be a serious starting point for a new, more realistic perspective on contemporary Indigenous communities, especially in this research on shamanic Buryat society. This perspective paves the way for a realistic approach – released from institutionalised patterns of organisational understanding – to the social effects of environmental change that can be used to: (1) understand what boundaries in the shamanic Buryat community have changed due to environmental problems in Lake Baikal; (2) observe how the displacement of these boundaries affects the Buryats’ actions towards the sacred lake; and (3) shape a perspective of what new relations will be established in this society, in relation to the sanctity of the lake.

Methodology

Sacred Baikal as a Watching-Over Father

Serious attention to the pollution of Lake Baikal began in the 1980s, when the Campaign to Save Lake Baikal was launched by Russian scientists and intellectuals at the national level, escalating into full-scale protest (Pelloso 1993). The movement ignited environmental tensions that had been mounting since the 1950s, when scientific and literary circles together published a letter titled ‘In Defence of Baikal’ in the Literaturnia Gazeta newspaper (Brown 2018: 39). They revealed the plans for factories in this region to the public, particularly Baikal Pulp and Paper Mill (BPPM) (Weiner 1999: 359). The government of the Soviet Union initially pursued a policy of oppression of environmental movements while preparing for the realisation of Stalin's idea of the conquest of nature as a sign of modernity.

This repressive stance enraged many nationalist Russians, who viewed the destruction of the lake as a national humiliation. The next government, led by Nikita Khrushchev, changed its policy, and made public participation in environmental discussions its first priority. Khrushchev preferred a policy of appeasement, promoting a strong link between nationalism and reverence for Russian natural landscapes, including Lake Baikal. However, he did not favour resisting the modernisation of Siberia. In fact, he agreed to form an industrial area around the lake instead of depleting it (as the previous government had done) (Korsgard 2013).

This meant that a large amount of industrial pollution entered the water. Only after the transition period between communism and capitalism did the idea of defending Baikal go beyond talk, and an alliance was formed against the government. With the eruption of debates related to the Chernobyl disaster, however, environmentalists, scientists and other members of the public sector decided to focus on mass campaigns for the regulation of nuclear energy, while Lake Baikal continued to accumulate chemicals and pollution from factories and the effects of climate change put further pressure on its condition.

The contaminated waters resulting from the industrialisation of the region were not taken seriously at first, due to the lack of tangible effects. However, as the sacred lake's fish stocks gradually dwindled, the issue came to the attention of locals and led to turmoil in Buryat society. This problematic situation, according to Indigenous human rights groups and their long struggle in the region, suddenly emerged in opposition to traditional memory or, more accurately, Buryat culture and its deep ties to the sacred lake.

Regardless of these groups’ valuable and realistic efforts, it is not clear from their speeches, notes or articles what exactly these deep ties are, which have been destroyed during fifty years of pollution and governmental not-seeing in Buryat society. This is strange, because being unaware of this nexus makes us unable to determine the mechanism of impact of environmental problems on the nature-based society's nomos, and, consequently, the potential new relations that can be divulged through this investigation. Therefore, the first step is to disarticulate the structure in which people live, and then to identify the body of their teachings that is damaged by the destruction of the lake. This structure can be revealed by relying on the main traditional narratives that act as an encyclopedia giving meaning to Baikal in the Buryats’ culture:

(1) Baikal is a powerful king, an old and compassionate father demanding happiness for his only daughter, Angara. She falls in love with someone, while her father promises another man that he will marry her. Angara escapes and tries to reach her lover. Despite loving his daughter, Baikal shows a fierce and angry face, throwing a large stone in her way, saying that if someone disobeys his command, they will not be safe from his anger, even if that person is his daughter. However, despite hardship, Angara flees and unites with her lover. From their tears of passion, plus the tears of Baikal and the jilted groom's tears of sorrow and grief, the sacred lake and surrounding rivers rise.

(2) Two powerful winds sometimes joked and played aimlessly together in the lake with a magic barrel, known as Omul⁸ Barrel. They threw it back and forth and the lake was filled with fish wherever it landed, as if an invisible force from inside the barrel was pulling fish towards itself. Baikal gave the winds the barrel as a gift for the game. One day, the two winds fell in love with another powerful wind that ruled another area of Baikal. The mistress asked the two suitors for the barrel in order to guarantee a monopoly of perpetual fish in her area of the lake, promising her hand in marriage to whoever gave her the barrel. A fight for the barrel thus broke out between the previously friendly winds. Baikal, realising that the winds intended to use the barrel for another purpose, took it back and sunk it to the bottom of the lake to ensure its presence and circulation in the lake.

(3) A supernatural creature in the form of a wild bull, who takes the form of a man at night, falls in love with a ruler's daughter in the region. He goes to the girl's bed one night and impregnates her. A boy is born. The creature kidnaps him with his cradle and buries them somewhere on the lake's shore. An old shamanic couple find the infant before he dies and raise him. Throughout his childhood, they notice that the child is occasionally absent. One day, they follow him along Baikal's shore and see two seals coming out of the lake, turning into a young boy and a girl, playing with the child. As soon as the little girl sees the old couple she turns into a seal again and returns to the lake, while the young boy does not get a chance to transform and stays with them. This seal from Baikal becomes the ancestor of the Vepholensk Buryats, and the boy born to the ruler's daughter the ancestor of the Buryats in the west of Lake Baikal.

(4) An upset man, tired of the cruelty he suffers from a local lord, goes to Baikal in the hope of a better life. He tosses all his meagre possessions, a few coins, into the lake as a gift. He waits to see if Baikal returns his gift, meaning he must leave, and if not, to stay. Because of the respect shown by the man, the lake accepts the gift, giving him shelter and a prosperous life. When the man complains of loneliness a couple of years later, through a dream, Baikal teaches him how to marry a god's daughter who is dressed as a swan. He warns him never to return the swan costume to the woman. This woman gives birth to many children. This family is considered the ancestral root of the Trans-Baikal Buryats.

(5) A seagull from the North Sea is separated from her group due to strong winds. No matter how hard she tries, she cannot fly and return to her homeland. Desperate to return, the bird constantly cries and makes strange noises. A hunter, who considers the wail of a seagull an ominous sign of catastrophe, shoots her with a rifle. As he approaches the corpse he notices a tear in the corner of the bird's eye and regrets his act. He brings her to Baikal where its coastal springs, connected to the ocean via groundwater, heal the dead bird's wound. She immediately comes back to life with more strength; overcoming the wind, she flies north.

(6) A woman has two sons and a daughter. One day, a snake from the forest kidnaps the girl and takes her to his home. The girl's brothers go to the snake's house to save their sister, but the animal imprisons them under a large rock. Years pass and the woman grows old without being able to have more children. The lake brings a pea seed to the beach near the old woman, who eats it; she becomes pregnant and gives birth to a son. The boy grows up and saves his sister, but finds his brothers dead under the rock. He goes to the lake and revives his brothers with the life-giving water. They all return to the old woman.

These famous old narratives are so widespread in the Baikal region, including on Olkhon Island, that they have found their way into art and drama. Although over time, belief in these stories has faded, and the Buryat people mainly consider them entertainment, the repetition of the lexical composition of the sacred lake and the reproach of its polluters with religious words, metaphors and similes in various ways in recent years reveals the remnants of a normative world that is rooted in the narratives’ content. People have structured their relationship with the lake as a sacred entity based on what is defined, according to Cover (1982: 9), as ‘the relationship between past patterns and present meanings’.

Thus, a system regarding Baikal is explored through the extraction of the stories’ main themes, as follows: (1) Baikal is an everlasting, powerful and benevolent entity, but is simultaneously pitiless and omnipotent towards those who disobey his orders; (2) Baikal, as the giver of the staple food (Omul fish), seeks balance and equilibrium in the distribution of this source of life to the Buryats while at the same time opposing a monopoly over it; (3a) Baikal is the origin of the Buryat people or (b) its saviour or the place of salvation; (4) Baikal is a generous shelterer in terms of livelihood, with the power of prediction and guidance; (5) Baikal is a healer; (6) Baikal is a fertiliser and reviver.

These six themes, interestingly, portray a referential entity with certain fatherly aspects, since all these features and acts have been attributed to men in most narratives in Olkhon and surrounding areas (Curtin 2009). This image over the centuries has brought about a world view in which Baikal has functioned as more than an inanimate object, with transcendental powers acting like totems. Instead, as an active and dialogue-able other,⁹ Baikal has watched over life-related actions in Buryat society objectively – that is, with a direct visible agency and contribution, not solely in a subjective or unseen role.

Moreover, keeping fatherhood in mind, a complex and strangely compelling confluence occurs between the shamanic spiritual experience and this image of Baikal, based on which the lake plays a decisive role. Like in other shamanic traditions, this region's shamans and their followers define themselves in connection with nature in general and with Baikal's energy in particular. The sacred lake's surrounding environment, landscape and creatures are used as convenient tools to achieve a unique religious and spiritual experience. This experience, called an ‘other reality’ in shamanic language, is a realm in which believers’ identities transform through the mediation of Baikal, connecting to a knowledge system in which they can anticipate, revive, heal, enter altered states of consciousness or find solutions for society's problems in order to give guidance (Urbanaeva 2000; Krader 1945; Fridman 2003). Surprisingly, all these acts in ‘other reality’ are the same characteristics extracted from narratives about Baikal, upon which Buryat society created its own normative universe; that is, Baikal is not only a means to reach the spiritual world but also an embodiment of the spiritual world of the Buryats. This perception can be explained to some extent from the perspective of Naess's (1973) greater self, a component of his ‘deep ecology,’ based on which my true self is not confined to my physical body, but, because everything is connected to everything else, extends to the whole of nature. He believes that this way of thinking guarantees biospherical egalitarianism that is equally concerned with the good of nonhuman species and people in the long-term future.

Being embedded in the Buryat religious belief system for centuries, this idea and the picture it creates of the referential entity with fatherly aspects have managed the way that the Indigenous society thinks of or remembers the sacred lake as a focal point. It has formed a norm of conduct on the basis of which ethics towards Baikal were defined in society, formulating certain prescriptions for the regulation of specific values and anti-values. What is important here is the relationship between moral standing (moral considerability) and value. On this subject, as Goodpaster (1978) points out, the value is whatever has a good of its own and can be beneficial. This means that benefit is central to morality, and all living creatures have moral standing. Such things merit moral consideration in the spirit of deserving, or in his words, the most fundamental forms of moral respect.

Based on this view, the two terms ‘values’ and ‘anti-values’ – connected with acts or behaviours performed by the Buryats in relation to this body of water – require clarification based on the context of Buryat society. In this regard, the first important issue is to bring the common condition for the realisation of all narratives’ themes into the debate, namely Baikal's health. This, as the core value, means that the characteristics of Baikal as a spiritual element in relation to daily life can be fully realised when Baikal's water is healthy.

The second important issue is that each concern that Baikal implicitly fought against in the narratives – such as food scarcity (that is, lack of economic security) and monopoly over food, and death and disease (including infertility) – has found its way into the minds of Olkhon Island Buryats as an anti-value and a possible consequence of the absence of water health. Therefore, an unwritten canonic system has been created in which the Buryats’ actions and behaviours carry a specific meaning in the space of health and its absence.

However, regarding this meaning, a significant point must be considered based on the themes of the narratives: Baikal's health is not dependent on people, because it was always assumed to be self-sustaining due to its all-round dominance in people's everyday life. It is completely against the dominant idea of nature in general, based on which ethics towards nature is human-centred and human beings are overseers or custodians of the natural world and responsible for its care. Rather, here, an attack or encroachment on the lake's health has often been seen as an act of ingratitude towards the one who takes care of the island's people, deserving punishment from the gods. Such a perception puts an act's meaning regarding the sacred lake into two distinctive realms – gratitude and ingratitude – and consequently defines it with transcendental or demonic references. This is the same moral realm in Buryat society on which the normative universe – where people live – was established.

This world's nomos was maintained almost until 2005 in Olkhon, and the Buryats lived with the same historical and collective memory of the sacred lake, even though the concerns about Baikal raised by the media and journalists had begun in the early 1950s, with serious warnings over cultural homelessness. This was due to two main reasons. On the island, access to mass media was very limited and Baikal's gradual decline was hidden from people. Government censorship also isolated environmental debates to the elite, leaving little room for islanders’ image of the sacred lake to be affected. Furthermore, Olkhon did not have a permanent electricity supply for a long time. Its centre, the village of Khuzhir, only had electricity from a diesel engine generated by a fishing factory for several hours a day. Electricity has been available in the area since 2005, the same year that mobile communication was launched there. Consequently, after this year, the region underwent a giant leap in development, which was supposed to lead the people to a normal life and prosperous economy (‘Olkhon Was Given Light’ 2005).

The Mecca of Shamanism or Garbage Island?

The situation changed in less than fifteen years. After the introduction of electricity and the improving of audiovisual media, as well as the distribution of state and local newspapers, the Buryats suddenly faced an influx of images and content concerning Baikal. However, the emergence of environmental problems in Buryat society as anomy, presented inconsistently by the media, told another story of these developments. The services that were supposed to bring normality to their lives have gradually contributed to the death of fish and other endemic species across Baikal's vast area, a loss of biodiversity and the alteration of the Buryats’ main medium for religious and spiritual experience. Baikal was revealing another face, completely different from previously known meanings. An interviewee, for example, thought that even though radiation and chemicals have no place in the nature of the sacred lake, and we cannot spot them if we walk around it, only God knows what will happen to us if we swim in it. Another individual expressed her fear that the lake would turn them into a society dominated by flesh monsters, pointing out the significant number of people in the area who have extra limbs.

Although the details differed, this same warning was made by journalists for many years. According to them, the ecological problems directly affect people's routine lives, causing the lake to lose its meaning as a home (Chivilikhin 1963; Rasputin et al. 1989); this is intertwined with an uncertain future and unfamiliar relationships – a possibility that the lake could negatively change in the future (e.g. Rasputin's essay ‘The Fire’). The Buryats are currently living in this transforming home, although it is not entirely clear how these unfamiliar relationships emerge and function in a way that could ruin the future. Therefore, analysis of the current image of Baikal seems necessary.

A review of Russian media between 2006 and 2007 highlighted two issues: clean-up expeditions and freshwater loss. However, these were presented optimistically and considered solvable if certain operations were performed by the government. The general context of this propagandistic view is that in 2006, Baikal returned to international environmental debates, but the Russian government saw this as a threat. Authorities considered foreign emphasis on pollution, and the large-scale media coverage of it, as undermining their own performance and position within the country. Consequently, scrutiny of environmental issues – the link between the sacred lake and national security – not only cut off international involvement in the revitalisation of the lake, but meant that the reception of foreign aid was stopped. Instead, widespread propaganda about Russian measures for Lake Baikal, a matter of national heritage, was disseminated. As a result, in 2008, Olkhon's nature-based society was exposed to a wave of news, programmes and media propaganda related to the launching of Mir1 and Mir2, deep submergence research vehicles. Exploratory missions, along with cleaning up the lakebed, were so admired by political figures that attention-grabbing phrases like ‘miracles at the bottom of the lake’, ‘seven wonders’, ‘mysterious expedition’ and ‘oil discovery’ were repeated in the media. These pictures of Baikal boosted the lake's previous image in people's minds, blurring the cracks that had formed in international discussions about pollution.

In 2009 and 2010, however, news coverage of Baikal suddenly declined, with scattered notes and reports appearing in newspapers and radio and television programmes. They no longer emphasised wonderful Baikal but rather concentrated on conservation, with both positive and negative connotations: Baikal was represented as both valuable and endangered. Because it was portrayed as endangered, UNESCO was asked to visit the lake as an important cultural and environmental heritage site in order to find a solution for its custody. Therefore, the dominant discourse came to be about the fragility of Baikal, overshadowing the earlier discourse that the lake's problems were solvable.

From 2011, alongside a decline in environmental attention to Baikal in the news, there was a remarkable increase in economic news regarding the lake. This was a result of Dmitry Medvedev's presidency, when repression of environmental movements around the lake was particularly high, as if environmental activists had been defined as the adversaries of governmental actors. In this regard, although protests have also fuelled discussions on the power of non-governmental organisations over ecological issues, politicians in Russia developed their policies based on a range of factors, most importantly the costs and benefits, and not what was considered the ethical decision. Although, Nikolai Petrov, an authority on civil society at the liberal Carnegie Endowment argues that ‘civil society actions can succeed only when they are able to ally with one elite group against another’ (Nikitin 2010: 23), this is not what occurred in this case. On the other hand, the government's success in suppressing these organisations had another result as well – to alienate ordinary people from environmental activism and traditional civil society players by making them feel that these activities were completely unrelated to their values and daily experience (Nikitin 2010).

Thus, until 2014, ecological matters relating to the sacred landscape were traceable only in higher-level publications. Simultaneously, the Buryats were exposed to two dominant approaches to Baikal in the media. The first was an economic approach, wherein strict environmental laws were presented as a reason for the declining quality of life of the people. For example, the BPPM plant was closed and its employees made redundant because of the pollution of the lake, a pharmaceutical factory and new job creation were cancelled due to strict rules on the use of water, and difficulty and expense were imposed on people through traffic restrictions on the ecology of Baikal brought about by environmental organisations. During all this, what made Olkhon's Buryats more sympathetic to the government's economic orientation was the closure of the fishing factories, the island's main income source where many people had worked for years. This was an industry that linked them to the sanctity of the lake. The second dominant approach to Baikal seen in the media was tourism advertising, which reached its peak after 2011. Such advertising included attractive photos of the landscape and focused on summer and winter recreation. In fact, these two views – prioritising the economy and attracting tourists – reflected an altered state in the source of people's subsistence economy, in which the sacred lake, from the perspective of the Buryat people, was economically transformed into a mere passive tool.

Nevertheless, as much as news about water contamination was largely avoided during these years, between 2015 and 2017 an unusual amount of attention was paid to the lake's problems. The issue of rescue reached its peak in the media. Two factors could explain this. First, a decline in the water level of the lake was repeatedly attributed to Mongolia's building of dams on rivers flowing into Baikal; news headlines often predicted that the lake would disappear or turn into a swamp. Second, the lake became visibly polluted due to the large quantity of chemicals left by factories and the more than two million tourists that came every year. Stories about pollution were accompanied by photos of the mass death of fish and seals and the decay of underwater coral reefs. News about the allocation of government funds to rescue Baikal frequently appeared, and phrases like ‘Siberian pearl’, ‘sacred lake’ and ‘dangerous and toxic waters’ were repeated together.

In 2017, the issue of Lake Baikal's pollution became so acute that the Russian government began to react. Vladimir Putin, after many years’ resistance to accepting the condition of the lake, complained about the dramatic pollution, saying that the lake would be his government's priority. As a result of the economic changes due to the collapse of factories and the fishing industry in the region, and the consequent shift to tourism, two words became common in media discussions of Baikal: ‘sewage’ and ‘garbage’. Even if news was focused on expeditions, the focus was no longer on the lake's wonders or the discovery of oil, but on human faeces found even on exploration missions in the middle of the lake, or mountains of garbage on Olkhon's beaches. These problems were caused by the increasing number of cruise ships emptying human waste into the water and tourist accommodation without proper sewage or garbage facilities. The media highlighted two issues that struck a final blow to Baikal's image: the non-drinkability of Baikal's coastal waters and the emergence of two dangerous bacteria in water, Enterococcus and E. coli, which had the ability to affect the lungs and cause blood infections. Media discussions went beyond rescue of the lake and portrayed an image of death and disease.

Collapsing Sanctity

Media content cannot be a mere description of an environmental crisis at the lake, since the Buryat religion has been a kind of cultural ecology¹⁰ (lived religion), something that appears as part of a culture's flexible correlation with its environment. This means that shamanic islanders on Olkhon need to access a specific bio-regional space, namely Baikal, to organise their cultural skills and knowledge system in order to make meaning either for their lives or their society. Therefore, through strong cultural and religious references, Baikal is directly linked to Buryat society's identity and the lived experiences of individuals. In such a situation, it is crucial to translate media content culturally in the context of the Buryat people's understanding, thus enabling an evaluation of how they perceive ecological challenges.

After a few years of depicting Baikal's wonders, the first issue the media brought up was the need for conservation of the sacred lake: that is, according to National Geographic Society (2022), ‘the care and protection of resources so that they can persist for future generations’. This idea, based on its definition, is very far from the image of a watching-over father according to which the Buryats define themselves and their security in connection to Baikal, and not vice versa. Thus, conservation can immediately be translated into a vulnerable sacred place or the risk of losing something precious, both objectively and subjectively. What appears to be so vital here is that the vulnerability of Baikal in the Buryat context and the shamanic mind can end up struggling with both the sacred (Baikal as a tool for reaching a transcendent stage) and the holy (a religious purpose, particularly here, the realm of other reality). Indeed, the theme of conservation challenges Baikal's perpetuity and, consequently, suggests that the main route to holiness, utilising Baikal's energy, is blocked, or at least troubled. Thus, conservation impairs the principal memory of the sacred lake, formed based on the narratives around it, which should be remembered: that is, perpetuity as the basis for the Buryats’ nature-based religious world view.

Subsequently, an essential change in government policies – from conserving to ignoring the sacred landscape – caused a deep rift between economy and sanctity, which were intertwined in the Buryats’ minds. This was reinforced by the media's implicit slogan, dangerous (for Baikal) but necessary (for subsistence), and had a destructive impact on the relationship between the lake and the people. As a major part of sanctity in nature-based world views is revealed through economics associated with the environment, the growth of a dichotomy between the two, or putting them at two opposite ends of a spectrum, indubitably pushes the sanctity to the point of collapse. In other words, Baikal emptied of those things that livelihoods were based on – in order to keep the lake healthy – casts doubt on the full presence of holiness as it once was and defies Baikal's active role in the economy of society, which had the characteristics of a watching-over father. Consequently, the Buryats not only witness the disintegration of Baikal's role as a generous giver, but also see it as an obstacle to their daily subsistence, in stark contrast to being sheltered in the past narratives.

The first consequence of undermining Baikal's sanctity – a result of government policies and the way the lake is reflected in the media – is the direct impact on the ‘I–thou’ relationship¹¹ between the Buryats and the lake, such that this intercourse has shifted to ‘I–it’. Put differently, this Indigenous society, through the transformation of Baikal from a dialogue-able actor with an active, referential entity to a passive tool for attracting tourists, has turned its focus away from the lake's usefulness tied to religious identity (that is, both on the earthly and spiritual levels, intertwined), to its usefulness dependent on exploitation (only on the material level, without any specific reference). In practice, this means more erosion of the lake. It is exactly because of this erosion's effects that the Russian government suddenly faced an uncontrollable catastrophe. To manage it, they had to inject certain environmental hot topics concerning rescue into the media, with the unexpected promotion of a global ethic towards the environment. The crucial point at this stage is the prior image of Baikal as a saviour. As a place for the metaphorical rescue and origin of the Buryats, Baikal forms a logic in which the sacred is supposed to save us, not one in which we save the sacred. More precisely, ethics relating to the sacred lake in the Buryat knowledge system are based on a bilateral usefulness–gratitude relationship, not a unilateral relationship or monologue from the people, such as rescue without any benefit. In fact, the differences between these two rationalities have rendered the moral prescriptions regarding Baikal in the media completely meaningless in the natives’ eyes. Consequently, translated into the Buryat system, the notion of rescue – which equates to the reversal of the relationship between usefulness and gratitude – not only had no effect, but also fuelled a sense of irresponsibility towards the lake.

The deadliest blow was struck to the body of past narratives when the media, after moving on from the rescue phase, confirmed the presence of pathogens in the water. This manifested as an attack on two mythical-metaphorical features of Baikal in people's memory: benevolence and healing. Indeed, unlike with the previous themes discussed in the media, the problem is not the loss or weakening of features attributed to Baikal, but the rebellion of the new Baikal as a dangerous creature compared to its former image – that is, its metamorphosis from a centre of good to a centre of evil. Here, the issue is no longer one of saving Baikal through universal morality, but one of rescuing the people from the evil brought about by the sacred lake, which is presenting itself as an anti-sacred being.

There is a significant debate regarding these objective and subjective alterations in and about the bio-regional space that better explains the Buryats’ destructive actions towards the lake. In his environmental theology, Northcott (2014) emphasises this kind of situation from a general perspective, writing that changes in the physical space lead to changes in religious meanings, and these changes in meanings end with certain changes in the feeling of being at home.¹² This is exactly what has occurred in Buryat society, as is clear when the two main narrative images of Baikal are compared: changes in Baikal – reflected by the media on the societal level – altered religious expression, and this altered expression has alienated people from their home, namely the sacred lake. As a result, this alienation, by affecting what individuals subjectively internalise, changed the way they act objectively in the external world towards their bio-regional space. However, the issue in the case of Buryat culture has gone beyond a simple change and reached an inversion of religious meaning, which has led to an inversion of morality (based on the Buryat normative universe) as a basis for subsequent acts and behaviours.

Northcott (2013) has suggested an innovative perspective for overcoming this kind of complicated situation, stating that a new theology (in the environmental age) is required – a revision of previously constructed meanings that are the foundation of a religious society's order. A similar debate can be seen in Cover's (1982) discussion of nomos, which focuses on alternatives that could save a specific nomos when a society's order is threatened by anomy. However, a consideration of two detailed illustrations of the Sacred Lake, as already explained, shows that a revision or alternative would not work in this case or, more precisely, does not exist. This returns to the fact that nature-based religions in a changing ecological home are losing their cores and knowledge systems, not remaining the same religions simply with some altered elements or relations. Thus, environmental problems as anomy impose themselves on society as a new order, leaving the Buryats’ destructive actions without any devilish or moral references.

Conclusion

For many years, the Buryats fought against the excesses of successive Russian governments in exploiting their land's resources, especially their water. However just as the Russian government took an environmental turn in its domestic policy and sought to protect the region, in contrast with all its previous excesses in the Baikal region, these Indigenous people began to exhibit actions diametrically opposed to those of their traditional culture, leading to the destruction of their native habitat in various ways. That is, they gradually became violators of the same laws that they themselves had been attempting to enforce through years of struggle.

But the issue of how these positive, progressive and rational environmental policies, which had previously not only met no resistance from the Buryats, but were apparently in line with their cultural interests, suddenly faced opposition to their goals and their morality, goes back to the Russian media. In this regard, examination of the Buryat social order before the implementation of environmental policies shows that the concept of ‘nature’ in the culture of these Buryat people, many of whom no longer held the beliefs of the past, was synonymous with ‘life-giver’ (economic and spiritual) and ‘caretaker’. It was a sanctity based on usefulness. This was, interestingly, precisely the function of myths and gods in the meta-narratives prevalent in the region, patterns that people consistently and definitively avoided believing in. But when the process of introducing environmental protection policies began in this region, suddenly this image of great power and nature's bestowal came under the beam of huge daily advertisements on television and in newspapers, with images of the lack of fish in the lake, the pathogenicity of its environment and so on. In other words, by attempting to show the necessity of implementing those laws and protecting the Indigenous people, the government unconsciously created narratives of a weak, damaged nature that not only needs help, but is also dangerous and deadly.

As a result, the people's memory of their centuries-old relationship with Baikal, based on the image of a father watching over them, was broken. The ‘nature’ that those policies were introducing was not only unrelated to the concept and image of the sacred lake that people had fought for, but had turned into a completely opposite image. Therefore, the sanctity of Baikal tied to usefulness and care collapsed in their belief system and, consequently, so did their environmental ethics towards it. This is precisely the complexity of the function of hidden religious patterns in the collective memory of the natives of this region, invisible patterns that ‘translate and interpret’ policies and laws for the Buryats and affect their moral disciplines and external actions by challenging their internalised social order.