Tunguska

Auteur

Andy Bruno is an environmental historian and associate professor at Northern Illinois University. He is the author of The Nature of Soviet Power: An Arctic Environmental History (2016).

Texte du rabat

"Imagine that you have been transported to the middle of Siberia at the end of the first decade of the twentieth century. You are hiking through a bumpy, boggy forest when you come upon a spot where everything suddenly changes. Dense verdant conifers stop blocking your way. This is not because you have reached a river or a swamp, nor a meadow, a road, or a cultivated field. You do not know why the forest has ended. Curious, you climb a nearby hill to inspect. There you see rows upon rows of trees lying flat and pointing in the same direction, as if kneeling before you. They seem to go on forever. It almost looks like some massive logging operation had knocked down a city's worth of timber but then left the trees to rot away slowly. But the roots of many of these wooden victims had been torn out of the ground as well. When you trek closer, you notice standing groves with branches stripped away. Beyond these clusters of bare poles swaying in an open breeze, new rows of fallen trees shoot out: a sea of prostrate forest"--

Contenu

Note on sources, abbreviations, terminology, and transliteration; 1. Landscape of mystery; 2. Destruction from the sky; 3. Reaching the inaccessible terrain; 4. Poking and prodding for answers; 5. Cosmic fantasies; 6. Volunteers take charge; 7. Life in Tunguska; 8. Protecting the taiga; 9. Views from afar; 10. Siberian and planetary futures; Endnotes; Bibliography; Index.