twenty years ago the largest country in the world to some degree says that with. all. of. us have been trying. to teach began the journey. where did it take till. seven thirty pm in moscow these are your arch in the headlights the u.s. slap sanctions on serious political leaders and a brutal crackdown on protesters in the country continues some analysts say washington's policies are only out of aiding the situation bronze revolutionary guard has also been sanctioned for allegedly supporting the practice. of russian activists sound the alarm over a vicious bullying in the army that's claiming more and more young lives and soldiers mothers see the schools aren't doing enough to stop the good practice.

loss of already is in new york cash in by policing the people thanks to a series of new regulations and guidelines for petty crimes the big apple smokers among those hardest hit cities to become illegal on many parts of the city. next argue talk of a photographer whose camera is capturing the rare and delicate heritage of the arctic and he's determined not to see it but i doubt it's coming your way next in scotland. hello yellow welcome to the spotlight show our take. ventilator my guest in the

studio is brian alexander. in a rapidly moving we don't have an opportunity to hit the pause button and give a particular frame a closer look maybe if we did we're going to have noticed more flaws in our actions and either charles to rethink and maybe even reduce or here's where photography fails they get our guest bryan alexander has brought some real here to stay put troubling from his favorite part. brian alexander's real love with the arctic started during his first visit to the region in nine hundred seventy one but all with difficulties and extremely low temperatures only to experience the hospitality and generosity of the locals they revealed to him the riches of the land and brian says if it hadn't been for them it would be impossible to take such astounding shots of the arctic but they're mostly on taj is in danger

the civilized world trampling on the primal landscape and the centuries old way of life of the indigenous peoples of the progress is rushing headlong into it and there seems to be normal force that can slow it down no force at the top of. the show thank you thank thank you very much for being with us well first of all we're so this wonderful picture of you somewhere in there. take or and target you you'll just as this guy i mean i mean just as indigenous as the business people all infer but first of all i want to ask you what's your attitude to. to this green movement to people that they see no to furries never wear fur coats and so on and so forth. so i think it's you do look as a supporter at least of a picture no no absolutely not i mean i think that if you me turned you were like the shoes of you got a little wallet whatever the whole question of becomes sort of really.

i think that compared with the industrial forms of production. the idea of hunting is is a much more civilized and. a much better way of obtaining food you know the animals running wild for. all but the last second or so of its life and then it's up it's much better than being you know one of these factory farming food producing units that a lot of our food comes from and as a matter of fact one of the one of the arguments i have for those people who say no to for is that is that the the high tech jackets the. the ones they produced in china probably they're better they're warmer would you say that this is true or this traditional clothing used by other people is better i think results in

no question for the full for warms. reindeer skin clothing which as hollow as is infinitely warmer than anything i would use anything else has not seen no question i mean i've sat on a sled been pulled behind a snowmobile for ten eleven hours of the time minus forty and i thought very very comfortably warm. the face well even though very soft covered with. this. you know there are ways of sort of tell me your head out of the window and saw this and it's like it brought you as far as i understood you first you first went to greenland and back in nineteen seventy one years later and since then you always you traveled to siberia greenland alaska canada take on tara take over how did you get involved with that region how why when i got involved really when i was studying photography in london and i did a project on the on the technical problems of photography at subzero temperatures

and that took me to the polar research institute in cambridge where i sort of happened upon. books written by rasmusen and peter freud and about the innuit of northwest greenland i got interested in it seemed to me to make a lot more it was a lot more interesting than what they did a lot of explorers who were just after achieving some sort of geographical saw you're actually started by trying to make the camera work at subzero temperatures here not just the camera working at subzero temperatures but it was also i don't know the actual processing film minus forty and being able to drive it you know tell me you're processing folder no i'm not doing a look at it i was working on was recently but you know looking into that because actually the american military had done a lot of research on this in in antarctica and then a little bit but there's no more folk there these days is there well there is film

these days and in fact film is rather better than digital for extreme cold but yes you're right you know we're entering our digital we've entered into a digital world what why would you say that for extreme cold film is better than digital there's a lot of things. that i mean film is something there's something that can freeze great whatever the put the problem with digital is that it's largely electronic and electronic i'm told don't go well together and so on. you find i mean the camera that i use now which is a digital canon camera it works down quite comfortably to about minus thirty five but it stops at minus forty and some of the photos that you take quite like it will go on the well you can press a button and nothing happened stop and whereas you know in with with film i've used them down to minus fifty it's also similar but. ok now you. of course have. a lot of challenges their whole world one king at the industries

and one of them is that you just mentioned challenges for the camera but what kind of challenge for yourself keeps you going there again and again because it should be a challenge it's not the comfort but one of it's just it's the images i mean you know this last march i was. with a group of trucks the reigning herders inch acosta perhaps the most traditional group of. of indigenous people that i've ever worked with and you know in them we were living in i suppose you'd relatively uncomfortable conditions and each morning you know when i woke up i was thinking to myself you know. doing this sixty one isn't quite as easy as it wasn't doing it at twenty two but then i look at the pictures and that's what keeps me going to have millions of those pictures for you more but because the arctic's changing in

a new pew i'd never come across these people before i'd never photographed rangar before trying to start over these years i know i read their q you have been through a pretty dangerous situation a fellow fell into ice water right at minus forty and so on and so forth here do you have something. in mind in your memory which you could consider as the most dangerous. position in your life fulfilling through finds through falling through thin ice and. water minus forty is the range but it's only sort of a problem for a few minutes because that you either get out or you're dead. but i suppose the most significant thing i can remember was being adrift with a group of hunters going war or something off the north coast of greenland and then during the night the ice broke up and we were dreadful purposely just you just know it cracked and off we went we were cut we were floating between greenland and canada and we were about sort of i don't know so many kilometers off. the coast and

there for i think nearly five days before we were rescued by helicopter so it during that time you're kind of going through highs and lows and wondering whether it's going to be your last photo shoot well you have been here have been focusing on people here and indigenous people and you have been witnessing in registering changes in their life in their attitude even their parents what's that made tray and what would you say today well we're going to enter the twenty first century or . i suppose i mean the main trend is one of the styles native peoples concern is one of modernization there's so much more you know access they have access to please now a lot of people even the remote hunting camps have you know d.v.d. players and televisions and stuff so there's been a general modernization i suppose and with that comes a sort of deterioration of traditional culture. bad well

in many ways it there's nothing wrong with you know the modernizing and and cultures have to change you can't get cultures in a museum but. when people are you know. sort of if you like you want to say educated from their own culture if you give them or a sort of danish educational russian education they should let you know education is lead somewhere there should be jobs or something for them to do and that's what the danger as i see it at the moment in a lot of northern communities just. jobs so you know the people are left sort of between two worlds they're neither in a traditional culture nor they generally kind of accepted into european or whatever culture what would you want to deceivers are if if those people of the indigenous people of the north get educated and get more modernized laid there they may still be in their fur coats but watch d.v.d. and listen to and listen to that i felt for years and so i think they they were absolutely right is it ok shall we all lose something ship show. their humanity

lose something important if they start drifting and i said and start and stop hunting but go to go to cities and start going to work in the in the back i'm going to follow the culture has to say i have to change i think it's a shame if cultures. die mean you know people are up in arms when a particular species of animal die is often becomes extinct or you know but i feel pretty much the same i think it's sad i mean the it's that the sort of mix and wealth of cultures in our world that enrich has it and so every time you lose one i think it's sad when a person like yourself comes to live with the church or you see here look so this way of life and it what people do and usually say well i think they are happier than us who live in the cities i've always thought this was this wasn't our chrissy's or no and i think it's probably less if you talk about

a traditional way of life i think there's less. less stress less i think generally people randi heard is that i have groups i've been with certainly i would say ourselves are on the whole fairly content with their lot and they're in a you know pretty good shape when it comes to survival because i can give you an example that in one in the early ninety's when i first traveled to the remark this is these were chaotic times in the north of russia i mean you couldn't get food you couldn't get through i mean it wasn't transport they were just no end of problems i then went out with a group of men a twenty herders. and spent altogether three months with them on the tundra it was a very different story everything was very organized we had a range of meat we had as much food as we needed we had very good shelter we had rain is intense as much from firewood as we needed to keep warm we had transport in many ways we were much better off than people who are actually in the village or

the towns of the amar and probably a lot of places in russia says brian alexander an award winning photographer spotlight will be back shortly but after a break so stay with us we'll continue in the in less than a minute. wealthy british style. has been tied to the title of five card. markets finiteness come to. find out what's really happening to the global economy

with much stronger for a no holds barred look at the global financial headlines tune into cars a report on r.g.p. . russia would be so much brighter if you knew about sloan from first impression and so. he's for instance on t.v. don't scone.

welcome back the spotlight algorithm of in just a reminder that my guest in the studio today is bryan alexander an award winning photographer. a used spend most of your time. taking pictures in the far north america they have charted regions and these regions of the planet are considered to be like the true barometers of what their world what's changing in

the climate on the whole planet so so is there really any visible change over there certainly visible change i mean i've seen it in areas of north greenland which i've been sort of visiting sort of on a fairly regular basis for the past thirty nine years so i've seen places have receded and also what tends to be happening is the. ice around the coasts of the arctic and the rivers and lakes are freezing later each autumn or later in the autumn and that same ice is then breaking up earlier in the spring and that poses problems for people who need to travel on them on the ice and rivers. cherry alexander one of the b.b.c. world life photographer of the year back in ninety five yes that's right here with a picture of a blue eyes very again this and what i read about it is that is that one of the reasons is that. those blue eyes were very rare those days but now they're

not is climate change also the reason i don't think blue icebergs were ever particularly rare is that the picture and i know that's hard to know that so that happens to be a picture of a piece of iceberg that's taken at midday but if you look at whole another she was taken at. day in january during the polar night and it's a piece of ice with the moon reflecting off. so so so so will the but back on one of those it was going to one of my blue eyes you know the blue i suppose you know they were never that rammy that was just a particularly stunningly beautiful one and of course it had penguins on it it just it looked absolutely delightful and it was a great shot but i think that. what's happening now is that. they're more common i'm not sure it is i just think that there's more people going to the art you can going to the and they can seeing those a rush for economic economic exploration of the region of the arctic especially

right now do you think it's an opportunity or do you think it's more a danger. for this region which you really love but i think you know for the rain for the people who are that it's not so much an opportunity i think it's probably a danger but you know i presume you're referring to all the oil and gas that's in the arctic and it's something that we need russia needs it for its own economy and you know the rest of the world needs it too as consumers so it's something that i think that it's sort of inevitable. that these resources are are developed it's not a saying of whether it's sort of good or bad it's just only something that's inevitably going to happen well let's see what people in russia now thing about investment into the arctic spotlight. on that has the answers. hi there well the arctic has been a topic of discussion lately due to its undiscovered oil and gas reserves which

estimated quarter of the world's resources global warming is causing you know the ice caps which in turn is triggering an increasing interest to the area let's see if people in this country think that it's time to start investing into the region. i think it is very important for our country to invest money into the article because of its resources which were discovered a long time ago at that time there were no technologies to get to those resources today such technologies exist and many countries will try to get to the regions and try to get a bigger piece of the pie. i think it's a very good idea for all country at this moment because it could serve as a good foundation for future generations. i think it's necessary for any state which is aspiring to be global because the arctic is our future do try to understand that resources the best in the world i think it is very important to invest money into the arctic because we need to protect our sea shelf. yes i think

we need to invest money into the arctic but it shouldn't be watching investments because russia has enough issues within the country which are like in financial support from i. think we should because if we don't do it. definitely get to those undiscovered reserves. i think the development of technology for more wouldn't. yes i think it's very important because of the reserves and the northern routes to asia how i got your question yes in the economic development of the arctic you destroy the everyday lives of the indigenous peoples of the new well the answer is yes yes absolutely but i think. it's almost sort of a i think it will in the areas you know obviously where the main mining or

oil and gas extraction. is taking place yes if we compare the life of the indigenous people of the north of all the indians in canada in world or america in the united states i would say that the life of the indians is destroyed i mean what's left is more like museums or what used to be but the life over there is still worth do you agree and i'm not i'm sure there's a lot of crean indians in and northern canada who wouldn't agree that their life has been destroyed and they may have you know a lot of modern boats and. and also snowmobiles and and all the other modern paraphernalia but they're still hunting and trapping and this it's you know the price of food in the arctic can be very high so this use of traditional foods is kind of important. but do you think that. the sort of the the big industrial complex is the big industries.

that russia is planning and on and starting to construct in a celtic regions are big. and their impact on the environment will be will be very serious well there's a potential for of course environmental disasters to see what happened in the gulf of mexico but from a point of view of. destroying cultures yeah because reindeer herders in the jamar which is one of the areas that are has is very very rich and gas. you know they face a very uncertain future because it's a question of ownership of the land they need land to be able to migrate with their reindeer and they follow traditional routes you know there's a view of. of nomadic people of just sort of wandering aimlessly across the tundra it's not that at all they have statistics as if it routes that of they and their

answers have been taken for centuries now the question is if a gas company then comes and wants to drill there what's going to happen. if there are no longer going to be allowed there and that certainly happened in areas of the amar where whole large areas of the tundra just been closed off and. all people it's looted from it apart from you know official gas company workers so there's a you know there's a very serious sort of threat there from this oil and gas and you know the question is whether how you compensate for that and whether in fact people will be well prime minister putin is a member of thank you you don't see me you don't seem to be pretty much worried about the significance of your situation but the russian prime minister he ordered to start cleaning up cleaning the mess in the in the air russian or attacks and he said leg well do you think that this is because he knows better than you out there i mean that the ecological situation or is just like well part one i think we're

talking about the mess that's already there i think is what he's referring to. and that goes back you know to the fifty's when you know people were sort of exposed exploring in the area and they just saw it as a sort of wasteland and they just discarded all the rubbish and all equipment that they didn't didn't use and it's a was a very similar case in the north of canada and. as well but they are the they've taken very active steps and the spent a lot of money and you know people are more cautious yes i think in via we have our mental attitudes have changed dramatically since that it is people are much more aware of. sort of preserving a sort of arc because a sort of pristine environment if it just came up that we've been talking about it already called it which is close to russia what about the antarctic. is it is the situation different and i'm telling you that yes absolutely i mean the antarctic is protected by

a treaty and the mission at the moment and the world at this because well yes but the there is you know at the moment the antarctic treaty prevents any industrialisation being carried out on their how long that would last if. vast deposits of oil or gas or valuable minerals were discovered there i don't know i suspect not too long but at the moment it's impossible so so what really needs the attention of the environmentalists is today is the arctic yes. yes because i think there needs it more than the i mean there are other areas of the world where the heat and ultimate tension from environmentalist not just the arctic but you know the antarctic and say is it's already rate well regulated and controlled the arctic is much less thank you thank you very much for being with us and just to remind my guest in this studio today was an award winning photographer brian alexander and that's it for them from all of us here if you want to have your sales

spotlight or have someone and you think i should until they start to drop me a line of al green of ads but it's illegal i will be back with more of them stay on russia today and take thank you thank you thank you very much. wolf. review the latest in science technology from around russia. we've done the future coverage.

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