No need to worry about the carbon footprint of Uzbekistan's ancient technique for preserving winter melons. Its special "kovunkhona" storage chambers have no automatic cooling systems at all. Instead, they just rely on cold outside air and centuries of local experience keeping melons fresh until spring.
The native Nenets reindeer herders of Russia's Far North are determined to preserve their traditional way of life despite population shifts, market changes, and perceived threats to their ancestral territory. But as reindeer herders start to vanish, this community faces a daunting tussle with time.
Current Time gained exclusive access to a closed village near a Russian military facility where five people died after an explosion and radiation leak. Residents of Nyonoksa have spent their lives in the shadow of a weapons test site, and while some are unworried, others say there's been a lack of information about possible health risks.
A Kyrgyz wildlife center is nursing a snow leopard named Zhaabars back to health after he was badly wounded by a shotgun. Despite conservationists' efforts, the rare cats are sometimes targeted by poachers and farmers protecting their herds.
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.
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