Tom Bissel, Eternal Winter: Lessons of the Aral Sea disaster. findarticles.com
[ From Harper's Magazine, April 2002. This is one of the most depressing articles I've read in the past year, which is saying something. ]
Soviet hunger for cotton, the strain of a quickly growing population, and an intensifying network of irrigation made Jenkinson's prophecies come true. Shortly after 1960 the Aral Sea began to disappear. Moynaq, my ultimate destination, was once a prosperous seaside fishing town of 40,000 inhabitants and home to a cannery that produced 12 million tins of fish a year; by the late seventies, Moynaq was no longer even near the shore. A place that for so long lived off so little found itself rapidly losing everything. Fishermen, ferry captains, canners, and shipbuilders had to reinvent their lives within a planned economy that could not afford to admit that they existed. The natural world paid an equally appalling price. Of the 178 species of animal life that have historically called the Aral Sea home, only 38 now survive, and the thick desert forests, once unique to the Aral Sea's irreplaceable and distinctive ecosystem, have all but vanished. The climate, too, has suffered. In its unspoiled state, the Aral Sea absorbed the solar equivalent of 7 billion tons of conventional fuel, cooling the surrounding areas during the summers and feeding the stored heat back into the atmosphere during the winters. Summer temperatures now regularly surpass 120 degrees, and the commensurately harsh winters doom the irrigation-dependent crops that the sea was drained to nourish. . . .
In the late 1980s, just as glasnost was taking tenuous hold in Soviet society, plans to save the sea were devised and revised; they accumulated upon the shelves of the Soviet government and well-meaning international agencies. None were carried out. In 1991 the Soviet Union collapsed. Yet the cotton harvest continued, because the Uzbek economy depended on it. Each year the sea's condition grows worse, and it now shrinks faster than cartographers can accurately chart. Moynaq sits at least eighty miles from what is left of the sea, and Karakalpakistan finds its revenues shrinking and its monstrous medical-care expenditures crippling. It is one of the sickest places on earth. By 2010, most experts estimate, the Aral Sea will be completely gone. . . .
My feet came down on hard, crunchy soil that was, by far, the most chemically transmuted I had yet encountered in Karakalpakistan. My boots left no footprints. This was interesting, but not nearly as interesting as the huge beached trawler to my left. About the size of a baleen whale, this vessel had once been part of Moynaq's considerable armada of fishing boats. At their peak the Aral Sea's fishermen provided a tenth of the entire Soviet catch. In the 1920s their heroism and resolve helped save Russia from widespread famine. In Moynaq alone, 10,000 fishermen plied their trade, a number more than triple its current population. Today every one of the Aral Sea's twenty-four species of fish is dead. I studied the boat. It was encased in a shell of baked, flaky rust that came in six different hues, the whole spectrum of oxidation. The boat was atop a high dune, its bow pushed out over the dune's edge as though recalling the weightlessness with which it once breached the Aral Sea's crests. Dust-speckled sunlight poured through the slots of its missing ribs. . . .
The Aral Sea is not coming back, nothing will improve, people like Small will continue their impossible triage, people like Saghitjan will continue to sicken and die, until, one day, Moynaq will be spoken of in the doomed, sepulchral tones of Gomorrah, Pompeii, or one of The Tempest's "still-vexed Bermudas." A luckless place where angry fates and unwitting human need saw their devastating concussion. |
