Would Cover Alaska, Siberia Region : Americans, Soviets Plan Joint Park, Wildlife Preserve

A joint U.S. and Soviet national park and wilderness preserve is being planned for the land on both sides of the Bering Straits, where Siberia and Alaska are only 80 miles apart. It has already been dubbed the “ Glasnost and Glaciers” park.

Ecologists and park officials in both countries have agreed that the region is best treated as an ecological whole, and that joint management of the area is the best way to protect the wildlife and the wilderness and to guard against pollution, including oil spills, in this fragile environment, where winter ends in early May and resumes at the end of August.

This human attempt to see the region as a whole echoes the geological past, when the Asian and American continents were joined by a land bridge across the Bering Straits, across which America’s first human inhabitants are believed to have migrated.

Although the boundaries for the park have yet to be drawn up, and plans for tourist access and management rules are in the early stages, enthusiastic scientists from both countries are planning joint research programs into migration patterns and breeding zones.

The only access to this region is by dog sled, boat, four-wheel drive, helicopter or float plane. But in spite of the remoteness, reminders of the modern world are near enough, in the U.S. military base and radar station at Nome, and in the matching array of Soviet security installations in Magadan Province.

‘A Single Ecosystem’

“The Bering Sea happens to be divided by a political boundary, but it should be recognized and managed as a single ecosystem,” said Curtis Bohlen, a vice president of the World Wildlife Fund, and one of the promoters of the scheme.

The U.S. contribution to the venture is expected to be a large part of the Nome Peninsula known as the Bering Land Bridge National Preserve. The Soviet Union has a series of ecologically protected zones, rather than a formal national park service, but Soviet ecologists have lately been examining the U.S. and the British national park systems to see which best suits their conditions.

The most recent spur to this cooperation on the roof of the world was the Alaska oil spill disaster, when a purpose-built oil-skimming Russian ship was sent to help clear up the 11 million gallons of crude oil that gushed from the Exxon Valdez supertanker.

With further oil exploration already going on off Alaska’s Barrow Peninsula, and with the Soviets starting to drill in their own Arctic coastal zones, concern about more oil pollution has intensified the contacts between U.S. and Soviet ecologists.

Although the idea of an Arctic park was first raised in the 1960s, U.S.-Soviet cooperation in this neighborly Arctic region has progressed with remarkable speed since the coming of glasnost. Earlier this year, U.S. and Soviet officials agreed that the Inuit natives of both sides would be allowed to come and go without bothering with the tedious formalities of bureaucratic civilization such as visas. An Alaskan airline now flies a regular service back and forth to the Siberian town of Providenya.

And in this Alaska territory, which was a province of the Czar’s Empire until it was sold for hard cash in the 1860s, Soviet architectural historians have begun helping with the restoration of old Russian Orthodox churches.