Shin Nagai, Ayumi Kotani, Yasuyuki Maruya, Yuka Oishi

To accurately evaluate the spatiotemporal variability of ecosystem functions and services, as well as biodiversity, under a rapidly changing climate and shifting anthropogenic activities, it is an important but challenging task to retrieve information about past relationships among society, people’s lives, and the landscape. We watched documentary TV programs broadcast by the Japanese public broadcasting station (NHK) about 30 years ago to examine these past relationships in the Republic of Sakha (formerly the Yakut Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic) in eastern Siberia at the end of the 1980s (the “perestroika era”). We viewed 3 episodes of the documentary “NHK Special: The Arctic Circle” and summarized the content of the episodes. The importance of discovering mammoth tusks in this Arctic region to acquire foreign currency was highlighted, as was the relationship between nomadic peoples in Chukchi and managers of their sovkhoz. A trip down the Lena River featured the relationships of economic activities and ethnic minorities in the perestroika era, highlighting the importance of natural resources and the local environment. Despite limitations caused by production choices and historical background and unconscious bias of people at that time, and copyright and privacy issues, we concluded that old TV programs can be useful resources to retrieve information about people’s lives and landscapes in the past.