In the Foreword to the first issue of Polar Record the editor wrote: ‘In the first place an attempt will be made merely to record the chief polar events of the preceding six months; but it is hoped that the scope of the journal will gradually be extended. The main body of The Polar Record, therefore, is a resume of polar news extracted from the best available sources’. This was a formidable task even in 1931, and a cursory glance at the latest volume indicates the tremendous growth and advances that have taken place since then. It is an impressive record and to mark the journal's 50th anniversary I shall use this information to make a general comparison of British polar activities, and the driving force behind them, in the pre- and post-war periods.

The object of trying to ascertain how environmental concerns are being faced in the Soviet northlands is twofold. On the one hand, it may be interesting to compare the Soviet experience with that of other countries having the same environment; on the other, these areas are very seldom visited, in particular by foreigners, so they are in no sense a shop window and may therefore be a good guide to the real situation in the country.

Among students of the history of reindeer domestication the Tuva occupy a special position. Their homeland, the Sayan mountains and the basin of the upper Yenisey, to the south-west of lake Baykal and to the north of the present-day frontier between the USSR and Mongolia, has frequently been suggested as the region where reindeer were first domesticated. This attribution rests on two types of evidence: the first archaeological, and largely consisting of rock carvings depicting reindeer; and the second ethnographic, comprising observations of the techniques of reindeer management employed by the Tuva, chiefly made by two western travellers, the Englishman Douglas Carruthers in 1910, and the Norwegian Ørjan Olsen in 1914. The fieldwork of Olsen has only been published in Norwegian (Olsen, 1915a; 1915b), and therefore has not been widely used by scientists. Yet of the two travellers he was perhaps better equipped to make technical ethnographic observations. In this article I shall analyse the descriptions of reindeer husbandry made by both men, but with especial attention to Olsen. I shall then assess the contribution that observations of the Tuva might make to the debate between ethnologists on where reindeer (Rangifer tarandus L) were first domesticated.

The text of the Convention on the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources, which was adopted at the close of a diplomatic conference at Canberra on 21 May 1980, is reproduced elsewhere in this number of Polar Record (see p 383–95). The aim of this commentary is briefly to describe the purposes which the Convention was intended by its negotiators to fulfil, to indicate how those purposes are reflected in the text of the Convention, and to explain where the Convention will fit in the overall scheme of international Antarctic conservation agreements that have come into being over the last 50 years.