I made my first trip to Lake Baikal in 1986 when the country was still the Soviet Union. In 1990 the late David Brower, America's conservation icon, invited me to participate in a special prooject to help convince Russia to nominate Lake Baikal as a World Heritage Site (later conferred in 1996) and to begin work on a book - Baikal: Sacred Sea of Siberia, published by the Sierra Club in 1992. Since then I continue to return there as often as I can.