: Villagers in Siberia, Facing Wildfires and a Warming Climate, Battle to Protect their Homes #WorldNEWS This summer, as a haze of wildfire smoke descended on the village of Magaras in the East Siberian

Villagers in Siberia, Facing Wildfires and a Warming Climate, Battle to Protect their Homes #WorldNEWS
This summer, as a haze of wildfire smoke descended on the village of Magaras in the East Siberian region of Yakutia, crews of local residents set out into the taiga forest to defend their land from the encroaching flames. There was little in the way of protective clothing to go around, and no radios or GPS transponders, let alone firefighting aircraft to stop the blazes around this settlement of around 1,000 people. Locals made do with shovels, axes, and small fire-fighting pumps that they carried on their backs, along with their tractors, some dating back to the Soviet era, which they used to cut ditches into the vegetation in an attempt to hold back the fires. There was little choice but to undertake this dangerous work themselves, the local volunteers said. If they stood by and waited for government help to arrive, it would be too late.
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A hot, dry summer has fueled massive blazes in this East Siberian region over past weeks, burning through more than 10 million acres of Yakutia, also known as the Republic of Sakha, and sending clouds of smoke drifting all the way to the north pole. The fires have released more than 500 megatonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent in the atmosphere, the highest such total ever recorded for the region, according to the E. U. ’s atmospheric monitoring service. This month, authorities evacuated two villages in the region as encroaching fires endangered residents.

Alexey VasilyevLocal firefighting volunteers sleep in a small hut near the village of Magaras in the Gorny District of Russia.

Alexey VasilyevAlexander Yakovlev, 40, a volunteer from the village of Kyuerelyakh, together with his 18-year-old son Markel, has been working to extinguish wildfires near his home since early in the summer.
Earlier this summer, photographer Alexey Vasilyev, a member of the Yakut ethnic group that comprises a large part of Yakutias population, set out to document efforts by firefighters and locals to battle those blazes. The experience, Vasilyev says, was deeply troubling. “I watched the forests smolder as the fire slowly consumed the trees, the grass. I watched as life slowly melted away in these places,” Vasilyev wrote over email. “I wasnt scared, I was just sad to see nature die. I thought of the Yakut spirit of the forest, Bayanai. I wondered what had made him so angry that he had sent so many fires on people. ”
Yakutia leaders have blamed global warming for the hot, dry conditions that seeded these blazes, with arctic temperatures warming faster than anywhere else on the planet, according to climate scientists. During an extraordinary heat wave last summer, the Siberian town of Verkhoyansk above the Arctic Circle set a temperature record of 100.