Recovery, Reclamation, and the Future

The modern Kazakh government has not stood idly by while its largest deposit of fresh water has been draining into the earth. Recent mitigation/ recovery efforts have taken place with limited success. One method is planting millions of shrubs with deep roots to retain ground water, the Salal shrub has been planted by the millions with some level of success.

Desalination efforts have been somewhat successful as well, though the southern Aral sea may be beyond saving the northern aral sea has seen a reduction in salt content to such a degree that fish are actually back in the sea. However a full scale refill of the Aral sea is almost impossible, 60 billion cubic meters of water per year, this would be extremely difficult as with anything in life that water has to come from somewhere. In this case that somewhere would be the plantations getting irrigated water from the Amu Darya and Syr Darya rivers. Taking water from these economically vital plantations in order to service the more long term and less economically beneficial goal of refilling the Aral sea would be political suicide for anyone. Their is also the fact that the fish stocks have been massively depleted. Any re-population effort would have to carefully juggle the ecosystems needs as well as logistically move tens of thousands of fish across potentially hundreds of miles. However progress is not impossible and it will remain to be seen how much damage we can mend.

Authoritarianism, the environment, and short sightedness
Since the dawn of man it has been humanity’s goal to triumph over the environment, we now believe that we live in spite of the environment and not in harmony with it. The mistakes of the Soviet government are not unique and will be repeated in the future. The sad truth is that short term economic gain will always outweigh the evidence that what we are doing is killing the planet. Similar mistakes can be seen in the Soviet government's handling of Chernobyl, such as the reduction of the exclusion zone and not immediately evacuating Pripyat. Not to say that such mistakes are unique to the Soviets, the United States for instance has been damming rivers and destroying ecosystems for decades all to create cheaper power. In short, one of humanity's greatest weaknesses is our inability to properly assess long term threats with short term gain, and this goes well beyond the aral sea.