Population
The only permanently inhabited locality is the village of Nikolskoye on the northwest end of Bering Island, with an estimated population of 613 as of 2009. The population consists almost entirely of Russians and Aleuts. The majority of the islands' area, as well as much of the adjacent marine habitat (14,088 square miles (36,488 km2)), is taken up by the Komandorsky Zapovednik, a natural preserve. The economy is based primarily on fishing, mushroom gathering, the administration of the zapovednik, ecotourism, and government services.
The village has a school, a satellite tracking station and a dirt airstrip south of the village.
The other settlements on the two islands are small villages or scattering of houses:
- Severnoye
- Podutesnaya
- Gladkovskeya
- Lisennova
- Peschanka
- Preobrajenskoe Settlement at Peschanaya Bay on Medniy Island - abandoned
- Glinka
Read more about this topic: Commander Islands
Famous quotes containing the word population:
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—Adolf Hitler (1889–1945)
“This was the Eastham famous of late years for its camp- meetings, held in a grove near by, to which thousands flock from all parts of the Bay. We conjectured that the reason for the perhaps unusual, if not unhealthful development of the religious sentiment here, was the fact that a large portion of the population are women whose husbands and sons are either abroad on the sea, or else drowned, and there is nobody but they and the ministers left behind.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“What happened at Hiroshima was not only that a scientific breakthrough ... had occurred and that a great part of the population of a city had been burned to death, but that the problem of the relation of the triumphs of modern science to the human purposes of man had been explicitly defined.”
—Archibald MacLeish (1892–1982)