The Making of an Ecological Disaster The Aral Sea

The Aral Sea [in Central Asia] is dying. Because of the huge diversions of water that have taken place during the past thirty years, particularty for irrigation, the volume of the sea has been reduced by two-thirds. The sea's surface has been sharply diminished, the water in the sea and in surrounding aquifers has become increasingly saline, and the water supplies and health of almost fifty million people in the Aral Sea basin are threatened. Vast areas of salty flatlands have been exposed as the sea has receded, and salt from these areas is being blown across the plains onto neighbouring cropland and pastures, causing ecological damage. The frost-free period in the delta of the Amu Dacrya River, which feeds the Aral Sea, has fallen to less than 180 days – below the minimum required for growing cotton, the region's main cash crop. The changes in the sea have effectively killed a substantial fishing industry, and the variety of fauna in the region has declined drastically. If current trends continue unchecked, the sea would eventually shrink to a saline lake one-sixth its 1960 size.

This ecological disaster is the consequence of excessive abstraction of water for irrigation purposes from the Amu Dacrya and Syr Dacrya rivers, which feed the Aral Sea. Total river runoff into the sea fell from an average fifty-five cubic kilometers a year in the 1950s to zero in the early 1980s. The irrigation schemes have been a mixed blessing for the populations of the Central Asian republics –Kazakhstan, Kyrghyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Usbekistan – which they serve. The diversion of water has provided livelihoods for the region's farmers, but at considerable environmental costs. Soils have been poisoned with salt, overwatering has turned pastureland into bogs, water supplies have become polluted by pesticide and fertilizer residues, and the deteriorating quality of drinking water and sanitation is taking a heavy toll on human health. While it is easy to see how the problem of the Aral Sea might have been avoided, solutions are difficult.

The Central Asian republics (except for Kazakhstah) are poor: their incomes are 65 percent of the average in the former Soviet Union.... The regional population of thirty-five million is growing rapidly, at 2.7 percent a year, and infant mortality is high. The states have become dependent on a specialized but unsustainable pattern of agriculture. Irrigated production of cotton, grapes, fruit and vegetables accounts for the bulk of export earnings. Any rapid reduction in the use of irrigation water will reduce living standards still further unless these economies receive assistance to help them diversify away from irrigated agriculture. Meanwhile, salinization and dust storms erode the existing land under irrigation. This is one of the starkest examples of the need to combine development with sound environmental policy.

Unit 14 a global village?

Rapid and unrestrained communication is a hallmark of the global village – a metaphor used by many futurologists to portray a world in which borders will vanish and the world will become a single community. The major source of this global transformation is the growing speed and flow of communications, because "by drastically reducing the importance of proximity, the new technologies change people's perceptions of community" (Mathews). Do cellular phones and other means of transnational communication portend consensus, and, perhaps, an integrated global village? Will life in the emergent wired global village be an improvement over what we now know? Or is the vision of such a global village, in which shared information breeds understanding and peace, mere mythology?