Thursday, 8th July 2010
The Aral Sea environmental tragedy
(Published in Metro Scotland, 8 July 2010)
The steel ribs of the old hull lie rusting on the sand. A ball of tumbleweed blows gently past in the stiff breeze. On either side, other rusty hulks form a solemn procession across the desert. In this eerie place, there is only the sound of the wind, which twists and furls the salty-sand into mini-whirlwinds, arching around the rotting wrecks of abandoned fishing boats. In the searing heat, the salt sticks to your skin and leaves a bitter taste on the lips. Only a profusion of shells and coral underfoot, disclose the fact that this ship’s graveyard was once a busy fishing port for up to 500 vessels. Today it is a tragic monument to man’s greed and stupidity.
In 1960, the rotting hulks which litter this desiccated seabed once landed 30,000 tonnes of fish a year in the bustling port of Muynak on the Aral Sea. These boats were tethered to the harbour wall. But one morning the tide went out and didn’t come back in. The water in Muynak harbour, which had been 20 metres deep, simply vanished, taking with it the livelihoods of thousands of fishermen, fish processors, and port workers. Today, you have to travel more than 100 miles from Muynak to reach the sea. Unbelievably this global catastrophe did not take centuries to materialise. It happened in the course of one generation.
The Aral Sea used to be one of the largest inland water reservoirs in the world covering more than 40,000 square miles. Only Lake Superior in North America and Lake Victoria in Africa were bigger. This rich oasis on the Silk Road was an abundant source of food for generations of farmers, merchants, hunters and craftsmen, who came to trade and buy fish from the scores of local fishermen who plied their trade in the river deltas, lagoons and shallow straits. The Aral Sea was home to more than 38 species of fish and its surrounding forests and hinterland teemed with a rich diversity of birds and wildlife including deer, gazelle, Asiatic cheetah, lynx and even Caspian Tigers.
All of that has gone. Now a salty desert stretches further than the eye can see. The searing summer temperatures and sharp winds have whipped up dust storms which can regularly deposit millions of tonnes of sand across hundreds of miles of neighbouring farmland. The disappearance of the Aral Sea has had a huge impact on climate change in the area. The rapidly extending desert has caused temperatures to rise in summer, while rainfall has decreased. In winter, severe frosts, which can see temperatures falling to minus 40 degrees centigrade, cause untold damage to agricultural crops.
How did this global ecological catastrophe happen? Sadly, it was entirely man-made! Those who think that mankind cannot cause climate change should visit the Aral Sea. It was here, in the rich, cotton-growing areas of Uzbekistan, that Stalin, in the 1960s, decided to build a network of canals and irrigation channels to provide water for a massive extension of the cotton crop. He had visions of this area, known as Karakalpakstan, meeting all of the cotton requirements of the USSR and drafted in tens of thousands of slave labourers to begin the job of excavating the canals, mostly by hand.
The water for this new ambitious complex of irrigation channels was diverted from the two main rivers which serve the Aral Sea, the Amu Darya and the Syr Darya. The fields of cotton flourished and when they faced a new threat from swarms of hungry locusts, Stalin ordered the crops to be sprayed with heavy doses of DDT and other poisonous pesticides. At harvest time, the cotton fields were sprayed with a desiccant, like Agent Orange used by the Americans in Vietnam, to remove the green foliage from the cotton plants, so that the balls of cotton could be cleanly collected.
By the early 1970s, locals could already see the looming disaster. The two great rivers had been reduced to a mere trickle of water. The melting snows and rainfall from the mountains of Tajikistan and Kazakhstan were no longer reaching the sea. It was like pulling a plug out of a bath. Within only a few years, the mean water level had fallen from an average of over 53 metres to only 26 metres. The sea shrank to one tenth of its former size, retreating quickly across the desert, leaving a wilderness of desolation in its wake and emptying hundreds of lakes and waterways along the course of the rivers that fed it.
Today, the toxic dust storms course around the whole of Karakalpakstan. Agricultural land has been ruined. The food chain and local water supplies have been contaminated by salt and pesticides. Humans and farm animals are born with severe handicaps and disease. Illness is rife and little tangible help seems to come from the international community. There is a standing joke in Nukus, the capital of Karakalpakstan, that if every consultant from the West who has visited the Aral Sea had brought a bucket of water, the sea would now have been filled up again! They are fed up with consultants and their endless reports in Nukus. They want action.
So what can be done? First of all, Nukus needs a new hospital. The local population suffer the same symptoms as HIV aids. Their immune systems have broken down and they suffer liver and kidney failure and a variety of cancers affecting the throat, thyroid, stomach, liver and pancreas. Secondly, pioneering work in Muynak needs to be encouraged and properly resourced. A new lake has been constructed and fish have been re-introduced. Large areas of land are being planted with salt-resistant varieties of trees. Thirdly, ill-considered hydro-power projects and reservoir schemes in some of Uzbekistan’s upstream neighbours in Central Asia must be re-evaluated to ensure they do not further reduce the water flow to the Aral Sea.
The West can help. The people of Karakalpakstan are the victims of the Cold War. They suffered at the hands of Stalin’s dictatorial race for world domination. We can learn a lot from their plight. The Aral Sea is a tragic laboratory of climate change. The environment, ecology, biodiversity and life itself can be wiped out in a single generation in the pursuit of avarice. Let us learn the lessons of the Aral Sea, try to restore it to its former glory and vow never to allow such devastation to happen again anywhere on our planet.
