How the Sea was lost
As I have previously discussed Agricultural reform was at the center of Soviet development policy. In the late 1940’s they became the world's second largest producer of wheat, and the world's largest producer of barley. They were however significantly behind the United States in many crops, crops such as corn and Cotton. Previous 5 year development plans by the Soviet Union put little consideration into the long term effects, societal or ecological, of their advancement, and the plans to increase cotton production were no different. In Central Asia there was good land, land with the right temperature and soil constitution to grow Cotton, however there was one problem. Water.
Initial Plans of the Diversion of the Syr Darya and Amu Darya rivers
Central Asia did, and still does receive little in terms of annual rainfall, this past year. Uzbekistan for instance gets between 3-7 inches of rain every year, whilst the United States gets upwards of 30. This is due to the Himalayas blocking the rain clouds from crossing from the Indian subcontinent into Central Asia. As a result parts of India are lush with jungles while central Asia is mostly devoid of trees. So in order to get water for the planned increase of cotton production they had one option: to divert rivers.
In 1960 headed by its party commissar Nikita Kruschev the central Bureau in Moscow began what was creatively called “The Aral Sea project” this was part of the Aral sea’s new assigned role as the supplier of raw materials to the rest of the USSR. Within 5 years the diversion of tributaries had been drained to such a scale that the amount of irrigated area had doubled to 17 MILLION acres. At the time the Aral sea and its tributaries seemed a limitless source of water, this has been a trap since time immemorial and will continue to snare countries and companies alike. Resources may be bountiful, large, expansive but NEVER limitless.
Initial Success
By 1970 the initial plans of becoming a major cotton producing power had exceeded expectations. The Soviet Union was at this point the world's largest producer of Cotton, closing the monumental gap that had existed between her and the United States in the 1950’s. And for now, there seemed to be no consequences of the massive ecological renovations that had been done to central asia. For now, agriculture was thriving and their was no serious danger present to the Aral sea, along with that millions of new workers had been imported from across the USSR to work the fields in the region. This was nothing new for the Soviets who had been mass moving populations since its inception. This would quell some of the nationalistic unrest in the area that had been boiling up in recent years as a more diverse movement would have a harder time coalescing.
It’s also important to note that the destruction of fishing communities was not necessarily a bad thing through the eyes of a moscow bureaucrat. For many of them fishing was an antiquated way of making an economy, while industrialized agriculture was the future. Fishing was also a cultural staple of many of the communities brimming with unrest, sufficient to say even though it wasn’t a problem yet the destruction of the worlds 4th largest lake wouldn’t be of much concern to the Soviet Union. In most developed countries today governments spend hundreds of millions of dollars on environmental protection. This was not the case in the 1960s, recently the United States spent $39 million on a study to evaluate the effect a dam would have on the local salmon population. This study was ignored but it shows the level of resources the United States government was willing to shell out to learn information about how infrastructure may affect the environment. Needless to say their either was no study or it was ignored when it comes to the soviet agriculture
A Slow Chernobyl
Slow violence, is a term coined by Rob Nixon. It describes a slower, however often more destructive process by which environments are destroyed through the gradual corrosion of the ecosystem. The slow part describes how outside of the inciting event there is no single moment in which the system is truly destroyed, that happens gradually over a matter of months, weeks, or possibly even years. Another key part of slow violence is that someone must benefit from its happening, contrasted with Chernobyl who no one benefited from, there are winners to slow violence, those who incite the slow violence.
The Soviet Government certainly got what it wanted from the diversion of the Syr Darya and Amu Darya rivers. Massively increasing cotton production combined with increased industrialization of Central Asia along with a demographic shift. The losers were most certainly the Aral sea fishing communities, not that the Soviet government cared. You see a key part of environmental violence or destruction is never that its cruel, it’s callous. Despite what I have said earlier the destruction of the fishing communities along the Aral sea coast line was never the intention of the Soviet government. What does matter is that they obviously didn’t mind it. This was not a case similar to when the United States government of the late 1800’s decided to put a bounty on Buffalo to wipe out the native population. There was cruel intent in this case, for lack of a better world the Soviet government of the mid 20th century simply didn’t know, or most likely care how diverting the rivers would affect the native inhabitants of the Aral sea region. And affect the native inhabitants it did, in 1964 41,000 tons of fish were caught from the Aral sea. In 1979 that number was, horrifyingly, down to 2,000, less than 5% of what it once was. This was an ecological collapse on par with no other man-made disaster in history. Except arguably the plains Buffalo, and even in that case the Plains buffalo is thriving today the Aral sea remains dead.
Why and How
Something fascinating that I learned late along the research process was that in the process of diverting the rivers, only about 25% of the water actually made it to the crops, the rest was lost along the way in the desert. This made it so that a massive amount of water was required to irrigate the crops, every drop of which would come out of the Aral sea which, as a reminder received only a couple of inches of rain every year. The rivers were the lifeblood of the Aral sea, without them the Aral sea would receive no new water, but lack of water was arguably the second of the 2 major problems facing the Aral sea, the first one was much more destructive but much less visible. Desalinization.
When water from anywhere evaporates it leaves most of the salt contents behind, this has been an age old technique to purify ocean water and has been useful to humanity for millenia. This however has the nasty side effect of increasing the concentration of salt in any body of water when evaporation occurs over a long period of time, and there is no better example of this phenomenon occurring then in the Aral sea.
Between the years 1960 and 1980 the Salt content of the Aral sea had increased by 10 fold, to about 3x the salt content of the Ocean. This had the effect of wiping out the entire fish population, literally killing the fishing industry where it stood. Though in the northern Aral sea, the smaller of the two bodies of water