Pictures of Pripyat, the abandoned town near Chernobyl, are world famous -- but Ukraine has another nuclear ghost town. Orbita was built for workers at the Chigirinsky nuclear plant. The workers moved in, but the plant was never finished, and Orbita is now a crumbling ruin with just 100 inhabitants.
In southern Kyrgyzstan, entire regions live off illegal coal mining. The work is dangerous. Six miners died in an accident in October. But locals say there is no other work for the region's men.
Russia's remote Altai region is not just about a tentative gas pipeline to neighboring China. People here are now heading to the mountains in thick snow to cash in on other riches that literally grow on trees: pine nuts. Russia is the world's largest supplier of pine nuts. For locals, it's a rare chance to make money, but the work is hard, cold, and dangerous.
Arslanbob is an ancient walnut forest on the slopes of the Tian Shan mountains in southern Kyrgyzstan. Every fall, the locals, mostly ethnic Uzbeks, harvest walnuts for sale at Central Asia's biggest walnut market.
It once was a proud and prosperous part of the Soviet Union’s robust uranium-mining industry. But today, residents of northern Kazakhstan’s Saumalkol call their home a ghost town.
Residents of Russian villages near the Gulf of Finland are fighting against the construction of a huge port for coal shipments, and the destruction of a nearby forest which has already begun.
Moscow activists say a new road project next to a Soviet-era nuclear waste site could pose a radioactive risk.
Conservationists blamed poachers for destroying some of the remaining snow leopards in Russia's Siberian Altai Republic. Now, they are being paid to capture images of the rare species to help save them.
The derelict Usolyekhimprom chemical plant contains tanks of chlorine, mercury, and other deadly substances spread across hundreds of hectares in Russia's Irkutsk region. During a visit this July, the head of Russia's environmental safety agency warned that the site poses a potential environmental disaster on the scale of Chernobyl.
A Russian physics professor spends his free time as a volunteer high in the trees of Yekaterinburg, saving animals that have gone astray.
There's little work to be found in the dying villages of northwest Russia's Solovetsky Islands. But there's a rich crop of kelp just under the surface of the White Sea, and the farmers who harvest it say it's a tough but viable business. (From Vadim Kondakov's film The Gatherer (Ловец).)
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