Ecology, Education and History United into A Whole.

The National Museum of the Reserve "Khakassky" was officially opened in Abakan on February, 2009. The one of Reserve's main professional activity is ecological enlightenment, and the Nature Museum is geared toward that goal.

The National Museum of the Reserve "Khakassky" was officially opened in Abakan on February, 2009. The one of Reserve's main professional activity is ecological enlightenment, and the Nature Museum, along with a Visit Center built in 2000 in the Lake Itkul, are geared toward that goal. However, the Visit Center is used only during the warm summer months, whereas the Nature Museum is used all-the-year round.

The Museum was completed in 2007, but the department of ecological enlightenment faced a problem in designing the exhibits. In summer 2008, however, the Reserve won a local contest and took part in the 3rd Russian-American seminar on design and decoration of exhibitions and expositions for Special Protected Nature Territory visitors, which took place in Boston, Massachusetts. Following this participation, as well as federal budget financing, the Nature Museum was able to start operating.

Currently, the museum display features examples of parts of the reserve, a separate Agafya Lykova's Corner, sections on "General information", "Collaborators", "Partners", "Threats to the reserve", and a big interactive map. Many of the displays borrow heavily from innovative methods learned during the visit to Boston museums.

The Nature Museum is an important instrument for ecological education. It combines fun, serious research work, and learning. It has a huge cultural and national potential and we have put a lot of professional effort and feeling into organizing the exhibits to provide a compelling show. We have tried to make it interesting for visitors because we realize that it can easily turn boring and stale, especially for children on forced tours. We have contributed all our knowledge and enthusiasm to making it the best Nature Museum in the world and we want guests to come again and again, and to bring along their friends and acquintances.

To achieve this we have created an exhibit that is both stable and flexible, with elements that encourage serious research and fun. We are planning to create interactive exhibits that will encourage guests to "guess what animal" or "guess what plant", simply by observing animal skins and parts of plants. Another remarkable exhibit, called "Movement of Nature", will show the visitor how the shores of Lake Ulug-Kol changes during the course of a year. Puzzles, "collect an animal or a plant", will allow us to capture and retain the attention of primary (elementary grade) students. By summer, we also plan to build a "real meal-shop", a unique construction found only in far away Siberian villages.

When completed, the Nature Museum will be one of the most modern instruments of eco-enlightenment and education in the country?a trully innovative instrument for conducting thematic lessons for students and developing programs to raise the teachers' professional skills.

The modern person spends most of his or her life in the city and becomes more alienated from nature. Thus, urban civilization has misplaced beliefs about our own superiority over nature. The Reserve "Khakassky", along with the Nature Museum, tackles this very important issue by bringing humans closer to nature.

Analysis of current practices all over the world shows that environment protection based on archaic "prohibition" methods is ineffective as it creates friction between the enforcement authority (in this case workers of the reserve) and the population. Environmental conservation measures will only be effective if Khakassians feel responsibile for the health of our environment. Widespread ecological education will give an opportunity to slow down direct negative human influence on the wild environment, but getting an ecological world outlook and understanding cannot be taught at the level of abstraction; it must be learned through personal experience and practical activity.

One of the most effective instruments for teaching ecological understanding for younger people is out-of-school, outdoors activities. A visit to the Nature Museum provides just such an activity. We will strive to use modern and innovative ways to present the material (such as games, hands-on activities, research and discovery) and ensure that the excursion imparts and consolidates knowledge in the visitor's mind. We will make these activities interesting for the different groups of visitors--from primary school students to adults.

The Nature Museum is open to all kinds of visitors--students and citizens of the Republic of Khakassia, Russian and foreign tourists. For now visitors learn about the museum through information stands, the interactive map, and the Red book. But we working to implement the full design so that visitors can get the full experience, e. g. an element of discovery, games, or research. Once we have these elements in place our Nature Museum will be an exciting and fun place to visit, and visitors will leave with a small part of the Reserve "Khakassky" and the Republic of Khakassia in their hearts. We invite you to visit our new Nature Museum and hope that you, too, will find it interesting and exciting.

Elena Kim
Deputy Director of the Reserve "Khakassky", Republic of Khakassia