by Jamie Maslin
Of course you don’t just lose a sea like you do a set of keys down the back of the sofa, it takes quite a bit more carelessness than that. You have to do something pretty drastic, and that’s what the Soviets did to the Aral’s precious tributaries, the Amudarya and the Syrdarya. These river systems funneled run-off from the distant Pamir and Tian Shan ranges into the Aral Sea—actually a lake, that in the 1960s was more than twice the size of Belgium—serving as a crucial counterbalance to water lost from evaporation in the glaring desert sun. But in order to irrigate the region’s newly constructed cotton plantations, the inflow from these essential tributaries was channeled, pumped and diverted away from the Aral, reducing the water that reached the sea to barely a trickle. With next to nothing coming in from the mountains, it wasn’t long before evaporation began sucking the sea up into the atmosphere. Not that the Soviet planners seemed particularly bothered, at first at least, with them anticipating that the Aral Sea would shrink. Such was their obsession with greater cotton yields that they even made plans to construct a giant canal stretching all the way to Siberia, not to channel water to refill the Aral but to further boost production. It all led to an ecological catastrophe of truly biblical proportions, often described as the worst environmental disaster caused by man, and one that is clearly visible from space.
The Aral Sea once boasted beautiful clear water, pristine beaches, varied and unique ecosystems supporting diverse flora and fauna, and abundant fish stocks; so much fish, in fact, that in 1960, forty thousand metric tons was harvested. The Aral was a paradise in the middle of the desert, an island sea, cut off and isolated by a surrounding ocean of sand, and one that provided mass employment at Aralsk’s fish canning factory, the largest in the Soviet Union. In 1960 the sea stretched over 250 miles in length, was 173 miles wide, and covered 26,300 square miles, and had passenger ferries and fleets of fishing boats sailing across it. Not any more. Today it is a shadow of its former glory, a mere puddle by comparison, which by 2005 had leached sixty miles away from former coastal town Aralsk, and by 2010 had shrunk in size by more than 90 percent.
It was in the seventies that without warning the sea said goodbye to Aralsk, leaching away from its expansive harbor and disappearing into the desert, leaving nothing but a dry and dusty seabed in its wake, where landlocked fishing trawlers lay, never to set sail again. God knows what it must have been like for the locals, people who were as used to seeing the sea as they were the sky; and now it was gone, vanished as if someone had pulled the plug on a giant bath tub.
Making my way past a ubiquitous collection of white-washed houses, I booked into the only hotel in Aralsk, a decrepit four-floor establishment with plenty of boarded up windows, run by an old crone who practically growled at me as she handed me my room key. I went out immediately to look around. On the street outside, I passed three despondent-looking youths in their middle teens. One snarled and threw an empty cigarette package at me. It missed but landed at my feet. With an aggressive kick I hoofed it back towards him.
Jeez, what was it with people around here? And then I saw; their sea had gone.
At the end of the street lay a decorative blue gateway. Beyond stretched an apocalyptic scene of desolation, made all the more pronounced by a surrounding wharf with rusting cranes, a derelict fish-canning factory and several empty, broken-windowed port buildings. Here the ground dropped away into the deep banks of a vast harbor—containing scrubby wasteland rather than water. Past the harbor, stretching as far as the eye could see, was nothing but desert. A brown and white cow grazed nearby across the former seabed. Some old decaying fishing boats stood lined up on the sand, resting on plinths; a reminder of happier times, or perhaps a warning to future generations of what happens when nature isn’t treated with respect.
As I looked out at the bed of what was once the fourth largest lake in the world, I shook my head in disbelief: there was no water here! Obvious, I know, and something I knew before arrival, but now here it was difficult to comprehend. To be honest, the place gave me the creeps; this one-time paradise was thoroughly defiled and ruined. Was this a glimpse into the sort of future that beckoned for mankind if we do not reverse our wanton destruction of the planet? I hoped not, but was hardly confident; the amount of people I had met on my trip who had casually tossed trash out their vehicle’s windows was ridiculous, so common in fact that it only seems worth mentioning now collectively in retrospect. Which it to say nothing of the staggering industry and construction I had witnessed, slowly devouring the landscape along the way.
I thought back to a travel agency I had popped into in Kashgar, with a photo in its window of Shipton’s Arch taken in the summertime. Lined up under it were about thirty people. While discussing with the agent the specifics of a trip to the arch, I had casually asked whether the increased numbers visiting the place had had much effect on the landscape, specifically whether there was any trash there now—something that on my trip with Danilo, Manon, and Etienne went unseen under the thick layer of snow.
“Of course!” he replied, “There is lots.” This was said in such a way as to also imply a self evident, “Duh! What do you expect?” as if the only natural response for a human visiting such an area was to desecrate it.
A Native American saying thundered in my brain: “What mankind does not understand he fears, and what he fears he ultimately destroys.”
It seems clear to me that society as a whole is too removed from the land to have any real connection with it, and without an emotional connection or bond with the land, people feel no loss or pain in destroying it—at least in the short term. But it pained me now as I gazed out at the destruction that lay before me. The Aral Sea, or lack of it, cast a wave of pessimism over me. A melancholy I found difficult to shift, for the disappearing waters were only part of a far darker tale.
As the waters receded, they exposed a layer of fine, highly salted sand, which was then churned up into the air by the region’s howling winds, creating vast storms of salty, desiccated sediment that blanketed the immediate area. Since most cultivated plants have a very low tolerance for salt, the new saline rich cotton fields saw a dramatic plunge in the production of their precious fluffy fibers. The Soviet planners answer to the problem? Simple: pump the cotton fields of the Aral Basin full of more than ten times the average amount of herbicides, pesticides, and defoliants used in the Soviet Union, and between ten and fifteen times the average amount of fertilizer used in Russia.172
The results of this gargantuan influx of vile ingredients was catastrophic. Run off from the fields leached into the area’s drinking water and locally grown food, and new super noxious storms took to the air: toxic cocktails of salt, sand, and dust, infused with the residues of agricultural chemicals. Communities around the Aral became plagued with diseases.173 According to some reports, one of the defoliants, Butifos (classified as a deadly poison that affects the central nervous system, heart, liver, and kidneys),174 which was used in the region until around 1990, was so toxic that it killed thousands.175 In 2006 a UN report found that over the last forty years the Aral’s shrinking shoreline and the area’s subsequent pumping full of chemicals, had left behind an estimated 45 million metric tonnes of contaminated dust.176 On average, Aralsk suffers a dust storm every week.
No surprise then that infant mortality rates around parts of the Aral’s southern shores have reached levels of one in ten babies, or that birth defects and premature births are also common.177 In 2002, the health ministry for the region of neighboring Uzbekistan that borders the Aral, found an 80 to 90 percent rate of anaemia among women and children,178 which, according to the World Health Organization, is the highest rate anywhere.179
All this after the residents of the blighted towns around the Aral lost their livelihoods, and a large part of their staple diet. As the water receded, the Aral became far saltier—over twice as salty as a typical ocean180—causing most of the fish and smaller organisms to die out, including all of its 24 indigenous species.181 Before its d
estruction, 173 species of animals lived around the Aral Sea, this is now thought to number in the thirties.182 The once dense Toghay forests around the Aral’s fringes have also diminished greatly, reducing in size by about four fifths.183 And the climate has changed too; winters are colder and longer, summers hotter, and the air much drier. With drier air comes less rainfall, a shorter growing season, lower crop yield, and a higher probability of drought.
As if all that wasn’t enough, an island within the Aral was formerly used by the Soviets as a biological warfare testing ground. Known as Vozrozhdeniya—the ironic Russian translation of which is “rebirth”—this secluded island base contained a secret town, Aralsk-7, where several thousand bio-warfare experts lived and worked, carrying out mass experimentation with the most deadly strains of bacteria and viruses known to man, “weaponized” versions of anthrax, plague, typhus, smallpox, Q-fever, botulinum and Venezuelan equine encephalitis, among other lethal nasties,184 that were tested on a wide range of laboratory animals—and quite possibly wild ones too. Roughly half a million antelope mysteriously dropped dead on the northeastern side of the Aral over the course of a single hour in May 1988,185 an event the authorities tried to palm off as the result of a spacecraft from Baikonur jettisoning its fuel on top of them.186 Other incidents around the Aral saw entire flocks of sheep lose their wool, and the local human population experience outbreaks of the plague and smallpox.187
Once isolated and surrounded by water, Vozrozhdeniya island is now part of the mainland, a result of receding waters splitting the Aral Sea in two in 1987—creating a Little Aral in the north and a Big Aral in the south. In 2007 the Big Aral split again. The fear is that if weaponized micro-organisms have survived on Vozrozhdeniya, which was hastily abandoned after the break-up of the Soviet Union, then they could make their way overland to population centers, by way of fleas or rodents, or, in the case of biological agents like anthrax—whose spores can survive for centuries—simply blow there on the wind. Such an eventuality is all the more worrying as many of the strains of disease developed for the Kremlin at Aralsk-7 were specifically concocted to resist conventional antibiotics.
If there remains any action that can be taken to alleviate, at least in part, the nightmare of the Aral Sea, then it seems not in trying to reverse the clock by reinstating the whole colossal body of water, nor in saving what precious water is left, but rather in focusing on saving the northern Little Aral only, where salt-tolerant flounder have been introduced.188 This section is fed exclusively by the Syrdarya, which, with less irrigation schemes than the Amudarya feeding the larger, hopelessly receding Big Aral, provides enough water to keep the Little Aral stable, so long as the two bodies of water are permanently blocked off. In 2005 a dam was constructed, sealing a thin channel that once connected the two, preventing the Little Aral from leaching away forever. Today, the waters of this limited section are slowly creeping back towards Aralsk, where it is hoped one day fishing can be reinstated.
It is, in truth, a mere glimmer of hope, a Band-aid solution to a gross environmental problem, whose success remains to be seen, but, ultimately, it’s better than nothing. The real solution would be to end irrigation of the Syrdarya and Amudarya. If only it were that simple. At their upper reaches, these are held by Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan; they then pass downstream through the giant irrigation systems of Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan. With cotton production making up a huge part of the industrial output of the downstream countries, any diversion or disruption of the water would require the complete restructuring of these economies. Were such a scenario forced upon a nation by an upstream neighbor, it would likely lead to regional conflict. So the choice is stark: industry or the living planet. To economists the environmental effects of industry are “externalities,” incidentals along the endless road to greater productivity and profit. Industry will no doubt prove more resilient than the fragile ecosystem of the Aral. With the exception of the token Little Aral, the fate, it seems, of the far larger ecosystem is sealed as a blighted environmental nightmare. We are a society that kills our grandchildren to feed our children, and no doubt will continue to do so until there is bugger-all of anything left.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Extreme Hitchhiking
It was too cold to remain stationary, so I began hiking off along the arrow-straight road into the desert’s blank interior, periodically turning back to look behind me, checking for approaching vehicles. I was in as concerning a location as I’ve ever found myself—right in the middle of the flat and frozen desert, by the side of a stony track, where the truck driver who dropped me here had turned, disappearing in a cloud of dust, presumably to some distant mine. The road was deserted and stretched northwest across the desert for nearly four-hundred-miles before the next significant settlement, Aktobe. With sections of this thin road fluctuating between mud, loose gravel and tarmac, Aktobe was a full day’s travel away. Should I fail to reach there, and get stuck outside tonight, then I could be in serious trouble, with temperatures plummeting perilously low. This seemed a genuine possibility. Today was Norouz, Persian New Year, a celebration that was likely to see the amount of traffic using this already sparsely driven road diminish further.
Over half an hour passed before I spotted a car on the horizon. It was so far off that nearly ten minutes expired before it reached me. I stretched out an arm, accompanying it with a trusty hand-on-heart gesture, asking, somewhat pleadingly, for a ride.
It drove straight past, the driver barely looking at me.
Turning back to face the wind I trekked onwards, sand and cold lashing at my frozen face, as I watched the car slowly melt into the wide open horizon.
Being out here all alone was worrying and exhilarating at the same time. It was as bleak a landscape as I had ever seen, and one that from a survival point of view concerned me. Often I find myself scanning a landscape trying to figure out where, if necessary, I could build a shelter, source water, and gather materials for a fire; but out here there was next to nothing on offer, just mile upon mile of flat and seemingly endless sand and scrub, with the occasional lonely ball of tumble weed adding a forlorn touch to the setting. It left me scratching my head for options. There were no trees to build a shelter, or material to make a fire, or discernible presence of water. In the sacred order of survival, your priorities are shelter, water, fire, food—in that order. Generally speaking you can go without water for four days, and food for forty, but hypothermia can set in within minutes—accounting for shelter’s prime importance. If I was stranded out here tonight and it got seriously cold, then I’d be relying on my tent, sleeping bag, and jacket to keep me alive. I was hopeful that they could, although not entirely certain. The official comfort rating of my sleeping bag was -10 degrees Celsius, but it already felt close to that right now, and this was daylight; when darkness arrived it would become much colder. Through repeated use my sleeping bag had lost much of its loft—that all important quality that creates small pockets of dead-airspace to trap heat next to your body—meaning it was no longer as effective as its rating professed. What’s more, the jacket I’d bought in China had been leaking feathers for the last couple of weeks; apparently not the high quality goose down that its label professed. If push came to shove, and I spent the night out here, then at the very least I was in for a thoroughly unpleasant experience.
Despite the remoteness of my crazy location, for the first time since setting off from Australia I felt seriously close to completing my long hitch home to London. After Kazakhstan, lay the tiny nations of Azerbaijan and Georgia—each hitchable in a single day—after that was a country I had hitchhiked through three times previously, Turkey; where Europe began at its far western reaches. From there, I knew from experience, I could push hard along super fast modern highways and be home, sleeping in my own bed, just three or four days later. Having traveled around Europe and Turkey many times before, I had no intention of stopping off along the way, so in essence I had just two countries to go, both ve
ry small ones. In some respects it was an encouraging thought, although a rather misrepresented perception of things. I was, after all, still in the middle of a Kazakhstani desert, nearly 5,500 miles along my chosen route from Britain. Were the journey reversed, and I was setting out from London to Kazakhstan, then I would no doubt have considered it a ridiculously long way to go, but having covered so much distance to get here, it no longer seemed so far.
I walked on and on, and after half an hour or so spotted a convoy of six mining trucks coming up behind me. My spirits dropped as first one, then two, three, four, and five trucks drove straight past. I’d given up hope that the last one would take pity on me but to my surprise and delight it did, not so much pulling over as stopping in the middle of the road. Such was my desperation to secure the ride that I dispensed with my normal prerequisite handing over of a translated note, and just gave a sort of “let’s go” double nod to the driver—a middle aged man. Only once the huge tires began to turn did I hand one over. With the road so straight and empty he had no trouble reading it at the wheel, and raised no objection on discovering that I wouldn’t be paying. Unlike my earlier lift in a mining truck, all six of these were carrying a full payload: a heaped mound of some sort of ground up rocks. This boded well; had the trucks been empty then it seemed likely they would be heading to another mine in the middle of nowhere to load up, whereas being full it seemed likely they were heading to civilization. After all, I surmised, they weren’t going to dump their loads in the middle of the desert.
Wrong.
Don’t ask me why, but an hour or so up the road and they did just that, pulling off onto a little side section where they began offloading their cargo via hydraulic tip-up units. With an almost apologetic expression, the driver indicated that he and the others were turning around now, heading back in the direction they had come. It was quite the disappointment, but as I bade him goodbye and climbed down onto the stony surface of this oddly located dumping ground—maybe situated here for use in road maintenance?—I noticed another truck, a lone vehicle beginning to depart; this time in the direction I needed.