Crossing the Oxus - destruction of Aral Sea in Uzbekistan - Brief Article

I must have seen it from the air, as I flew in from Moscow, but I don't remember it. We were flying over the desert and the bare, scrubby land was beautiful and strange when seen from above. Long streams of dust billowed off the purple and maroon sands, creating huge spreading lines of dust clouds which gradually attenuated until they became invisible. Then we were over a strange, very shallow body of water, obviously in retreat, with enormous mud flats and little glistening spots of water. The shoreline formed arabesques of mud and water, a complicated pattern of dry and wet. The plane flew back out over the desert and suddenly we were over an area of lurid green, the first sign of the huge irrigated fields of cotton in Uzbekistan. It must have been in amongst all that green, but somehow I missed it.

In classical times the Oxus River was the boundary of the known world. It is now called the Amu Darya and is the source of water for much of the irrigation in Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan.

The driver's name was Alexander, an ethnic Russian still living in Uzbekistan. I formed the impression that he made a pretty good living for himself driving tourists around in the old Volga. He was wiry fair-haired, burned by the sun, and about my age. He ore large, pink plastic, square-framed glasses with gradient tinted lenses, the kind of glasses I remember cafeteria ladies used to wear, except that they always had their initials in the corners of the lenses; Alexander was more restrained than that. In spite of his fashion-forward eyewear, he reminded me of the men of my grandfather's generation in Alabama: a man comfortable in his environment, knowledgeable about all wildlife, and suspicious of the natives. He spoke no English, and I spoke no Russian, but from Yegor and Natasha I got the idea that being Russian in Central Asia was not easy any more. The Russians had conquered Central Asia in stages during the nineteenth century, and the indigenous inhabitants--Uzbeks, Kazaks, Tajiks,Turkmen, and other g roups-were never assimilated into Russian culture. The current flight of Russians from Central Asia seems an echo of what happened to the British in India. The Soviet Raj is over, and the local officials are all Uzbeks now. Alexander was wily about the local police; we took many detours to avoid the militia checkpoints, which he said would cause us (perhaps he meant himself) many problems.

Under the Soviets the main crop of Uzbekistan was cotton. In another example of Soviet gigantism, the central planners decided that Uzbekistan would grow cotton. Just cotton, oceans of cotton, enough cotton to make the Soviet Union an exporter of cotton. Vast, highly inefficient irrigation works were built to siphon off the water from the Amu Darya and other rivers of Uzbekistan to irrigate the desert. Open canals crossed the desert, losing half their water to the sun. Since the Amu Darya is the source of most of the water for the Aral Sea, the Soviet designers of this system fully expected the Aral Sea to eventually disappear as all the water that fed it was absorbed by the irrigation projects. As an afterthought, they considered reversing the flow of one of the rivers in Siberia and diverting that water to the Aral Sea.

I imagine these planners sitting in Moscow, on a cool, rainy fall evening, streetlights coming on mid-afternoon as the daylight failed, drinking tea and deciding to eliminate an entire ocean in order to grow cotton. The entire elaborate web of life surrounding the sea was completely ignored, the fisheries, the climatic implications, the economic impact on people's lives, the terrible price that such a monoculture would exact, all totally unconsidered. The central plan, the economic pattern they were constructing, had a life of its own, abstract and unconcerned with anything outside itself.

And so we were bumping along through the cotton fields, rice paddies, fruit orchards, and sunflower fields, on roughly laid melting asphalt roads, swerving around donkey carts. The heat was beginning, to be oppressive, but as we got closer to the river, the fields became more and more verdant. We crossed many little canals, through thickets of bushes and then suddenly, we were at the bridge across the river. The bridge was a line of old barges that had been crudely tied together, the deck a mishmash of welded patches of dented rusting metal. An old tug boat was poised at one side to push the bridge back into place should some current dislodge it, but the lack of water in the river made that seem unlikely. The river at that point is nearly a mile across, but all we saw were sand bars surrounded by little rivulets of water. Old dredges stood ready to open the navigation channels should there ever be enough water.

It is one of the largest and most horrifying ecological disasters in the world: an entire sea destroyed. The indigenous fish populations became extinct sometime in the mid-1980s, but before that the sea had supported a fishing industry, with fleets of fishing boats. Before the irrigation projects diverted so much of the water of the Amu Darya (and the Syr Darya, another river), the Aral Sea had been the fourth largest body of fresh water in the world. Now, the port towns of the Aral Sea are as much as sixty kilometers from the rapidly retreating shore; in the new white desert left behind, rusting fishing trawlers list in the sand. The exposed sea bed has become a white desert, and the wind blows clouds of salty, pesticide-laden dust. The weather patterns around the old sea have been permanently altered: rain has become exceedingly rare (it was infrequent before), and the temperatures soar. Deprived of any way to earn a living, people have abandoned the old fishing ports, leaving empty, desolate towns. The new republics of Central Asia are desperate to become self-sufficient, able (they hope) to grow the food they need. Some of what had been cotton fields is now given over to the cultivation of food: vegetables, grain, and fruit. The water from the Amu Darya is the only way these new countries have of surviving; they have no other way to grow the food they need, and, until their petroleum reserves become accessible to Western markets, no hard currency to buy food from other countries. There seems to be no way to save the Aral Sea.