Tom Bissell: Chasing the Sea

The second book in my post-Communist Russia series is actually set in Uzbekistan, an ugly piece of Soviet mapmaking in central Asia, combining the mountain-sheltered Ferghana Valley, the modern Soviet city of Tashkent, the ancient cities of Samarkand and Bukhara, and the desert area to the south of the Aral Sea. Although the population is nominally Uzbek, a Turkic grouping, there are notable minorities in all corners, and scattered Uzbeks elsewhere. In many ways this geographic sprawl and cultural disorganization mirrors Russia. One difference is that Uzbekistan didn't throw off its Soviet heritage; rather, the local strongman, Islam Karimov, saw which way the wind was blowing and took his fiefdom private, so the country remains a centrally-controlled dictatorship, albeit with less ideological baggage and less oversight from Moscow, or accountability to anyone else.

The book was written by Tom Bissell, who spent some time in the early 1990s in Uzbekistan working for the US Peace Corps. The book is Chasing the Sea: Lost Among the Ghosts of Empire in Central Asia (2003; paperback, 2004, Vintage Books), or as the subtitle inside the book explains, "BEING A NARRATIVE OF A JOURNEY THROUGH UZBEKISTAN, Including Descriptions of Life Therein, Culminating with an Arrival at the Aral Sea, the World's Worst Man-Made Ecological Catastrophe, In one Volume." It's filed under "Travel/Adventure."

Arriving in Tashkent, having made arrangements to stay with a family there. I flagged this as much as a sample of the writing as for any other reason (p. 22):

What shocked me -- what always shocked me about Soviet apartments -- was how broken-spirited it seemed. The carpets did not cover as much as they clearly wanted to. The furniture seemed beyond the possibilities of reupholstery. The plain red wallpaper was lumpy and peeling dryly in every corner. A toaster-sized, intermittently color television convulsed in the corner of the living room. The flat's four snug rooms were arranged railroad-style, end-on-end-on-end-on-end. I had the last room. It had the only bed. I wondered where Oleg and Natasha would sleep until I saw that the living-room couch, bleeding spores of stuffing from every seam, had been turned into a cot.

Welcome to the Aral Sea story (pp. 25-28):

The story of the Aral Sea is a familiar twentieth-century narrative, that of Development and Industrialization, albeit a less happy version than the one to which we are accustomed. It begins with cotton, of which Uzbekistan is the world's second-largest exporter. Cotton has for decades been Uzbekistan's national agricultural religion, mirroring a larger Russian trend to triumphalize the "heroic Soviet success of socialized agriculture," which might be funny if it wee not so disgusting. Indeed, adulation of cotton extends so far into Uzbek culture that today Tashkent's soccer team is called the cotton Pickers.

Such a huge cotton output is a strange accomplishment for a nation that is mostly desert, as cotton is a thirsty, ecologically demanding crop. For this Uzbekistan can thank the American Civil War, which cut off the cotton supply of a powerful northern neighbor, tsarist Russia, which in turn began to search for a new, easily accessible agricultural base. It found that base in Central Asia. The river that forms part of Uzbekistan's southern border and feeds into the Aral Sea, the Amu Darya, known in antiquity as the Oxus, was irrigated and bled into Uzbekistan's vast deserts, and soon "white gold" was blooming within this newly arable but fragile land. The diverting of the Amu Darya was one of the rare tsarist policies the Soviest continued. Imperialism was another.

No one knows precisely how long the Amu Darya River has flowed into the Aral Sea, the region's natural depression area. One Turkmen chieftain told agents of Peter the Great in the early 1700s that the Amu Darya's original course poured into the Caspian Sea, not the Aral. Peter the Great had, for a time, used this information to design, though never begin, an ambitious terraforming plan to restore the river to its "original" course. This would have allowed goods to travel between India and Russia without passing through the region's hazardous, bandit-plagued deserts. Whatever the case, the story illustrates how long ago Russia had set itself upon modifying th Amu Darya's course.

For 600 years the Aral Sea basin has been the traditional home of the Karakalpaks, a nomadic people who, after the Bolshevik Revolution, were first made part of the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic, were then briefly granted autonomy, and in 1936 were finally ceded to the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic. From the Karakalpaks' consistent poverty and small numbers, one can conclude that life around the Aral Sea -- some scholars have suggested that "aral" comes from an old Tatar word meaning "between" -- could never have been easy. The surrounding land is not blessed with much by way of readily exploitable resources, and though irrigation-based agriculture has been practiced around the sea for hundreds if not thousands of years, its economy never much devleoped beyond melon growing. "The banks of the Aral," wrote the great explorer Sir Alexander Burnes in 1834, "are peopled by wandering tribes, who cultivate great quantities of wheat and other grain, which, with fish, that are caught in abundance, form their food. The neighbourhood of the Aral is not frequented by caravans." But the Aral Sea's proximity to an important center of Central Asia culture, Khiva, found in the Amu Darya's once-fertile river delta -- allowed a few Western travelers some early, pristine glimpses of life in the Aral Sea basin. The Englishman Anthony Jenkinson traveled throughout the delta in 1558 and wrote that "the water that serveth all that country is drawn by ditches out of the River Oxus . . . and in a short time all that land is like to be destroyed, and to become a wilderness for want of water."

In 1960 the Aral Sea was still the fourth-largest inland body of water in the world, its volume equal to that of Lake Michigan. Jenkinson's prophecies had not been fulfilled. But an increasing hunger for cotton, which grew exponentially as the Soviet Union attempted to overtake the West, along with the strain of a population that had increased by a factor of seven and an intensifying network of irrigation, began, quite simply, to drain the Aral Sea. Moynaq, once a prosperous seaside fishing town of 40,000 inhabitants and home to a cannery that produced 12 to 20 million tins of fish a year, found itself, by the late seventies, no longer even near the Aral Sea's shore. For years dust storms had been scouring the area with hundreds of millions of tons of salt and sand from the Aral's exposed seabed, much of which was poisonous, thanks to the Soviet insecticides and toxic waste dumped into the sea over the decades. The weather turned foul as the sea shrank and shed its role as the basin's climatic regulator, affecting temperatures as far as 150 miles beyond the shore's perimeter. In its unspoiled state, the Aral Sea absorbed the solar equivalent of 7 billion tons of conventional fuel, cooling the surrounding areas during summer and feeding the stored heat back into the atmosphere during the winter. Now that the Aral Sea had lost 70 percent of its water volume, summer temperatures ruptured mercury bulbs and vaporized the soil's moisture, and months of morning frost during the increasingly harsh winters doomed the irrigation-dependent crops the sea had been drained to nourish in the first place.

Those living near the sea fell apart commensurately. A place that for so long lived off so little found itself rapidly losing everything. One by one, Karakalpakistan's industries staggered, then collapsed. Fisherman, ferry captains, canners, and shipbuilders had to reinvent their lives within a planned economy that could not afford to admit they existed. With mounting rates of infant mortality, anemia among pregnant women (which ran, and runs, at virtually 100 percent), and tuberculosis, the Karakalpaks began by the mid-1980s to question publicly what was happening to their land and themselves. "Tell me," a Karakalpak asked the Soviet Congress of People's Deputies in 1989, "is there any other stae in the world which permits its own population to be poisoned?" "When God loved us, he gave us the Amu Darya," one poet wrote. "When he ceased to love us, he sent us Russian engineers."

On Russia in Central Asia (pp. 70-71):

Russian invovlement in Central Asia was not always of ill consequence. With them the Russians brought goods, medicines, railways, roads, electricity. For many years under tsarist rule Central Asia's courts were allowed to operate under the Sharia (Islamic law). Central Asia's tsarist governors-general, who took an oath that promised "to show fairness to the needs and interests of the Muslims," discourage the efforts of Mother Russia's more zealous Christian missionaries. (The total number of Central Asian Muslim converts to Christianity during the tsarist period was exactly fourteen. The number of Central Asian Russian converst to Islam was ten.) The irrigation and diversion of the Aral Sea's feeder rivers was ecologically damaging but not insanely so, as it would be under the Soviest. Less defensible was Russia's thorough exportation of alcoholism, the ruthless of tsarist storm troopers in putting down revolt, and its rule through native surrogates. Throughout Central Asia -- and no more so than in Uzbekistan -- this system spawned a hated indigenous elite the power of which came only through Russian conduits. Use of elites would spread in the Soviet era. They still existed, but now the elites answered to no one.

Russian involvement in Central Asia was rather akin to that of an irresponsible bankrupt maxing out a stack of credit cards in order to date women who do not love him and whom he cannot actually afford. Russia wanted to be a great power and could not pretend Great Power status without its captured khanates and miles of deserts and remote mosque-centered cities. And though Russia may have ruled Central Asia, Central Asia worked its own influence upon Russia. One does not merely "rule" a place of such apocalyptic possibility. How else to explain the varied roles Central Asia has played in Russia's great drama? Hope, savior, future, lifeblood, bane, and, to Solzehenitsyn, a "soft underbelly" that needed to be mercifully shed. In the last two centuries Russia has twice occupied vast territories it fought and connived for, filled the remaining world with awe and fear, and then, quite suddenly, collapsed from within. How did this happen? Any Central Asian will tell you: "That was us. We did that. We've been doing it for a thousand years."

Bissell has a pet peeve about Robert D. Kaplan, who passed through Uzbekistan on the way to writing The Ends of the Earth: A Journey to the Frontiers of Anarchy (pp. 80-83):

Kaplan's books are typically informed by an unimaginable lode of historical research, with bits of Conrad and Soyinka and the Qur'an paradropped into the text like little prose commandos. A partisan of the Clash of Civilizations Hypothesis, Kaplan's reporting often suggests that our future holds nothing less than some global Ragnarök. This may or may not be true, of course, But Kaplan's seeming addiction to prophecy (his book Balkan Ghosts is said to have "predicted" the meltdown in Yugoslavia) has given him over to an unhappy combination of gloom and credulousness. I am unable to speak to the accuracy found within his dispatches from most of the places he covers in The Ends of the Earth, but I can say his Uzbekistan chapters contain reporting of consistent, disconcerting inaccuracy. All travel books contain errors, and I am sure this one has more than its share. But Kaplan's hammering insistence upon figuring out What Culture Means requires an accuracy commensurate to the conclusions he draws. And yet once he is away from his books he begins to grease his analytical wheels with the highly anecdotal. This is accompanied by an almost perverse freedom to pinion entire cultures based upon how his morning has gone.

Start with Kaplan's ostensibly salutary commitment to confronting slums. As anyone who has traveled in economically stratified places knows, one cannot avoid slums if one tries. So one confronts this slum -- yes, before me stands a slum -- but to what end? This is somehow supposed to supply the key to all poverties? Additionally, Kaplan tells us that crime "is considerable in Tashkent." Kaplan was in Tashkent in 1994. According to those I know who lived there at the time, crime in 1994 Tashkent was minimal. Crime today in Tashkent is probably worse than it has ever been -- and still far, far below what one can expect on a sunny summer night in Chicago or Brooklyn. The crime that does exist in Tashkent, or any of Uzbekistan's cities, is almost always of a nuisance nature. Provided one is not looking to become a smack connoisseur or engage too deeply with the mafiya-run world of prostitution, bloodless muggings and pickpocketry are about as rough as Tashkent gets. (If one is a man, that is. Women unfortunately enjoy different worries.) "I was back in a place," Kaplan writes of Uzbekistan, "where the social fabric was thin." I have been mugged in Tashkent, more than once. Never, for one moment, did I fear for my life. It is impossible for me to imagine an average Tashkent criminal willing to murder his victim, particularly his Western victim. That is became Uzbekistan's social fabric -- and its attendant obsession with hospitality -- is so triple-ply strong. [ . . . ]

But this is small beer. Kaplan's most onerous failing in The Ends of the Earth is his willingness to pardon the dictatorship of Islam Karimov because he keeps Uzbekistan's "simmering hatreds" under control. [ . . . ] Uzbekistan does have its ethnocultural problems, as does every nation. Occasionally they have been violent. That said, Uzbekistan's culture is, in my experience, basically tolerant. This fundamental tolerance, not only to matters of ethnicity but also to gender, is one of the most benevolent legacies of the Soviet Union. And while many ethnicities -- Koreans, especially, and to a lesser extent Tajiks and Russians -- are glass-ceilinged from ascending too high within Uzbek officialdom or academia, people in Uzbekistan are not anywhere close to taking to the streets in search of different-colored hides. Their frustrations are almost wholly economic. Unless all of Central Asia collapses beneath some larger regional crisis -- a shortage of fresh water, for instance -- it is unlikely that Uzbekistan's average citizens will ever be ready to take up arms against their countrymen, Karimov or no Karimov. Indeed, the most pressing threat to Uzbekistan's stability is Karimov and his repressive policies.

[ . . . ] Karimov at least has the excuse of self-interested hegemony. Kaplan is merely disguising his fatalism as pragmatism -- never mind that dictators are not known for their willingness to think in terms of "the short run." Kaplan fails to address the pivotal issue here: pervasive naked power worship, something one sees again and again in societies based upon certainty-peddling creeds, be they Islamic or Soviet. Forget the Pandora's box of instability. Karimov works in the idiom of power alone, and his subjects respect him because of his power. Power worship is what George Orwell, in a different context, called the worship of the "continuation of the thing that is happening." He also called it "a mental disease." Worship of the continuation of the thing that is happening is what keeps thugs like Karimov safely ensconced in their palaces. It keeps those living benath them in obedient line. It holds up the faulty eye chart that legitimizes American foreign policy's myopia when considering such brutes. It lessens the guilt of the American diplomats who have to deal with loutish regimes on a daily basis. And it gives tea-leaf-reading journalists like Robert D. Kaplan their stony surety.

An aside on the Cold War (pp. 110-111):

These small, quiet farms were a reminder of what was one of the frailer ventricles within the Soviet heart. When it comes to the Soviet Union, American conservatives cherish many articles of faith. Few are as know-nothing as the belief that Ronald Reagan's buildup of the military during the 1980s handed the Politburo the tombstone upon which it chiseled its own busted-budget epitaph. Reagan's talk of evil empires, this view holds, along with his refusal to quail before the doddering faces of Leonid Brezhnev, Yuri Andropov, and Konstantin Chernenko, the first three elderly Soviet leaders he faced, forced Moscow to pass on the Soviet premiership to the youthful dynamo Mikhail Gorbachev, whom Reagan then cannily outmaneuvered. Like much American conservative thought, this belief fails to take into consideration anything not directly related to American conservative thought.

More on Gorbachev and reform, leading into a discussion of Uzbek farming (pp. 111-112):

One of Gorbachev's biggest motivators -- other than looking at the Soviet balance sheet every month and not being able to deceive himself, as Brezhnev had -- was the controversial 1983 publication of the Novosibirsk Report, written by a brilliant, courageous sociologist named Tatyana Zaslavskaya (who, among other accomplishments, first used the term perestroika). The report's main thesis was that the Soviet economy was crippled by human factors: laziness, incompetence, apathy, and alienation. Soviet jobs, Zaslavskaya concluded, offered no meaningful connection to those who did them, and the negligible quality of their work reflected this. Gorbachev, who grew up in farming territory in the northern Caucasus, where workers felt a deep and automatic connection to their jobs, was stirred by Zaslavskaya's analysis. He had, after all, lost family members to the mass starvation that descended upon his native soil following the spectacular failure of Stalinist collectivization. Gorbachev was also mindful of the example of Lenin, who seemed to have glimpsed the bankrupt writing upon the bloodied Soviet wall well before anyone else. In his late New Economic Policy stage, cooked up to address why the world's first socialist state was starving to death, Lenin put forth a tinkered-with vision of socialism as a society of "civilized cooperators." These barely implemented Leninist innovations -- an infant Stalin throttled in its crib -- resembled a greatly moderated form of capitalism which Gorbachev looked to emulate in taking further than ever before previous timid Soviet experiments with liberalization.

More Cold War illusions (pp. 112-113):

But American conservatives need to have the narrative this way. The Soviet Union, with its backward farms and wheat-scything cross-eyed peasantry, was a tyrannosaur of state power, as evil as it was massive. The Central Incompetence Agency did little to dissuade such thinking, predicting in the late 1950s that the Soviet economy would triple that of America by 2000. Around this time the CIA was still using Nazi maps to determine likely Soviet nuclear launch pads and confidently predicted a Soviet moon sortie by 1967. Throughout the 1950s and '60s, the CIA consistently overestimated the number and destructive capacity of Soviet warheads, leading to famous worries about the U.S.-Soviet "missile gap." When, in 1975, Soviet engineers began screwing nose cones onto new and unimaginably powerful lines of nuclear missiles -- the SS-17, SS-18, and SS-19 -- the CIA, as though on cue, began to report that the expansion of Soviet nuclear capabilities was finally "coming to an end." One might think that by the 1980s the CIA would have calibrated its thinking on the issue of Soviet economic might, which, as anyone who lived in Moscow or Kiev or Tashkent or Minsk could see, did not merit even polite comparison with our own. They did not. As far as "evil empires" go, the age of widespread Soviet terror had, by Reagan's time, mostly passed. The regime had relaxed into a posture of farting corruption and petty cruelty, it is true. It is also true, Cold War scholars now recognize, that Soviet leaders did believe they could fight and win a nuclear war, and drew up several first-strike scenarios to achieve that end. But a nation that only a decade before was dropping napalm on children in a war it already knew was unwinnable could hardly lob "evil-empire" opprobrium without provoking cynical Soviet chuckles. Let us say, however, that Ronald Reagan, wearing a loincloth of American righteousness, did indeed throw the spear that brought down the prehistoric Soviet lizard. What still needs explaining is why this mighty empire, when it finally did fall apart, suddenly found itself waiting in a breadline behind international starvelings such as Somalia, Nicaragua, and Bhutan. And what did the USSR get to alleviate its seven decades of mass hypnosis and disaster? Among other things, one plane after another of smiling Peace Corps ingenues not unlike myself.

The stuff about first-strike scenarios is new to me. Brezhnev explicitly renounced any first-strike use of nuclear weapons -- something the US has never done, and a policy that was eventually reversed by Putin, not so much as a threat as to establish some sort of parity of bullshit between superpowers. Later on Bissell authoritatively asserts (p. 363): "First Reagan war chest arrived in Afghanistan in 1986, seven years after the Soviet invasion." The US started funding Afghan mujahideen in 1979 when Jimmy Carter was president, before the Soviet invasion. As I understand it, Reagan continued that funding from his first days in office, and increased it significantly over time. The shoulder-fired Stinger anti-aircraft missiles may be what Bissell is thinking about. I'm not sure when they were first delivered, but 1986 seems about right. Much of this history is in Steve Coll's Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, From the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001, which is not cited in Bissell's interesting bibliography.

Bissell has a translator named Rustam for much of the trip. Rustam is a young man from the Ferghana valley, hip, pro-Western at least culturally, wants nothing to do with Islam, despises the jihadists, fears the militsiya, etc. Bissell is constantly harping on the crimes of the Soviet Union, which finally leads to this moment at the Registan in Samarkand (p. 184):

"It takes a moment for the hole effect to set in, but it's pretty impressive, isn't it?"

Rustam nodded in courteous deferral. "The Soviets saved it, you know. Uzbeks did nothing for this place. For centuries they let the Registan fall apart."

"Sure, but the Soviets decided to restore it only after forty years of really half-assed administration. I read that after the Bolshevik Revolution they used the Registan as a granary, then as stables. Stables!"

Rustam head-shakingly regarded me. "What do you have against the Soviets? Don't you realize that without the Soviets I would have never been educated? That I would have never gone to America? Everything Uzbekistan has is because of the Soviets, dude. Uzbeks are simple people. The Soviets made us modern. Look at Afghanistan. The Soviets lost the war, right? But maybe if they had won, it would not be so unhappy there. Maybe the Taliban would not exist, and maybe all these fucking Muslims would not feel so free to kill and destroy."

"It's complicated, I admit that."

"Actually," he said, "it's not complicated. I have just explained it to you."

This is on the Wahhabi-backed Islamist movement in Central Asia, starting with movement leaders Tohirjon Yuldashev and Jumaboi Khojaev, a/k/a Juma Namangani (pp. 269-270):

After putting time in at various Tajik madrassas, Yuldashev went to Pakistan, where he found connections to Saudi Arabia's small Uzbek community, who had lived on the peninsula's immaculate Islamic soil since fleeing the Soviet basmachi [a word for bandits] annihilation of the 1920s. These exilic Uzbeks, now more Wahhabi than the Wahhabis, worked with the head of Saudi intelligence, Prince Turki al-Faisal, to funnel enough funds through Islamic charities to Yuldashev to allow him to spend the better part of the next decade organizing from Peshawar, Pakistan, another, bloodier Ferghana uprising. Jumaboi Khojaev, a younger and more reckless acolyte, stayed in Tajikistan to fight with the Islamic Resistance Party (IRP) against the regime of Tajik president Imamali Rakhmanov, who was holding on to power with help from 25,000 Russian troops sent by Boris Yeltsin to protect what many Russians still believed was their southern border in everything but name. Khojaev, reborn in Islamist fire as Juma Namangani, was indispensable in the fight against Rakhmanov. As the journalist Ahmed Rashid was gold by a Tajik political activist, "Namagani knew the tactics of the Soviet army and special forces, which was extremely useful to the IRP." In 1992 Namagani arrived in northern Tajikstan's Tavildara Valley with no more than forty Uzbek militants. In Uzbekistan itself, the number of committed Islamists dedicated to the overthrow of the Uzbek regime between 1992 and 1995 is thought to have never been more than one or two hundred, the vast majority of whom were concentrated in the Ferghana Valley. As Karimov squeezed the vise, more and more young men who had had only a cultural (and completely understandable) interest in Islam were beaten and detained. Many of these embittered souls, and their brothers, and cousins, and friends, rushed to join Namangani in Tajikistan. By 1996 the number of his followers reportedly approached a thousand, and as an aside, one is hard-pressed to find a lesson here. Suppressing violent manifestations of Islam clearly does not work, as we can see when the Wahhabi grandchildren of basmachi Uzbeks in Saudi Arabia are still seeking violent redress. Igoring militant Islam only hastens its spread. Accommodating militant Islam hardly seems an option, as hard-line Islam has, with the possible exception of Iran, proven repeatedly incapable of forming anything resembling a functional human society. The other option that comes to mind -- making a sign of the cross and grabbing a rifle -- is precisely what the Islamists most desire. If the strange career of Juma Namangani is any indication, it seems we all have a long, long century ahead of us.

Note on travel (pp. 290-291):

Travel did many things to a person, but the one thing it did most successfully was break a person down. Admittedly, my travel experiences were not very representative. My experience with travel was Central Asia. Central Asia, then, broke a person down. It did so first by exhilaration. Was this place real? Was I really here? It did so next by exhaustion. Nothing was easy, and each hassle and bribe and malfunction and injustice took something of one's spirit, bent it, made it meaner. Then came the most brutal breakdown of all: the knowledge of how easily one could live within that meanness.

Minor parenthetical note (p. 291):

At 11 PM it was still raining. Sleep was, for some reason, impossible. I got out of bed, having decided to write in my notebooks ("The most deceptive aspect of procrastination is that it, too, involves action; only, it is the wrong action") until the rain ceased.

The sorry history of Soviet environmental depredation, not to mention similar history in the US (pp. 314-315):

Even a brief catalog of the former Soviet Union's ecological and health misadventures stupefied, sickened, silenced. The Soviet Union was a nation in which one could stand next to a waste-spurting pipe near the town of Chelyabinsk and absorb a lethal dose of radiation in a single hour. Where surgeons were often forced by supply shortages to perform appendectomies with straight razors rather than scalpels. Where 40 percent of its medical-school graduates could not read an electrocardiogram. Where the Hippocratic Oath was forbidden, scorned as "bourgeois," and replaced with a pledge "to conduct all my actions according to the principles of Communistic morale." [ . . . ]

The Soviet Union was a country whose experts maintained that radiation sickness was basically a mental problem,and called the Aral Sea "nature's error" and hope it would "die in a beautiful manner." Whose medical personnel were sometimes instructed to wash bandages for a second use. Whose doctors, 66 percent of whom were women, took home 80 percent of the average male factory worker's salary. Whose minister of health in 1989 advised, "To live longer, you must breathe less." The Soviet Union was a country where, in 1990, remembering Nikita Kruschchev's boastful promise to overtake and surpass American standards of living, angry, abused, and exhausted protesters marched past the Kremlin carrying placards that read LET US CATCH UP WITH AND SURPASS AFRICA.

Some Americans might regard these statistics as proof of American capitalism's superiority to Soviet Communism in every imaginable way. (This is not even to mention other capitalist paragons such as Japan, its tropical logging practices, brutal whaling,a nd busy involvement in the international plutonium trade making it a veritable ecological criminal state.) Such citizens hexed Al Gore as a "radical environmentalist" on the basis of his sensitive and ideologically tame book Earth in the Balance. Their organizations have names like the Abundant Wildlife Society of North America. They have wiped from their minds a history in which Ohio's Cuyahoga River periodically burst into flames. They possess crusaderly faith in Le Chatelier's principle, which posits the tendency of the environment to restore itself in the face of destabilizing forces. But the ecocidal histories of the United States and the former Soviet Union are tartlingly similar. In the years following World War Two, Americans cut down vast forests, built thousands of factories, assembled millions of atmospherically toxic automobiles, and filthied the water throughout North America. In 1970 the United States passed the Clean Air Act twenty-0ne years after the Soviest had decreed their own version. (Interestingly, the president we have to thank for the Clear Air Act as well as the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency is one Richard Milhouse Nixon.) Our Clean Air Act was actually more lenient toward polluters than the Soviet Union's in fixing carbon monoxide limits -- not that the Soviet Union, whose environmental pledges were filled with high-minded ideals, actually bothered to obey its own laws. The Pittsburgh of the 1940s and 1950s, to name one locale of acute American environmental shame, bore a ghastly resemblance to the manufacturing urban leviathans of the Soviet Union.

What to do about the Aral Sea? (p. 345):

Given the problem's gigantic nature, such recognition had the potential to make existence itself unendurable. How does one live with the biggest sword in the world held over one's head? Instead, many Karakalpaks chose to believe the old Soviet saw about the Aral Sea's historical tendency to wax and wane. They told me that the sea would return, eventually, that the ecology would improve, eventually, and Moynaq and Nukus would again come alive. Could one blame them for this failure to confront reality? The people of Karakalpakistan wee faced with a prisoner's dilemma so dire that I, for one, could not. They had two choices. The first was to completely restructure their cotton-based monoculture and prevent all but certain future ecological and economic collapse. The problem with this was that the resultant turmoil would open the doors to some of the worst privation any society has intentionally brought upon itself. The second was to do nothing, to carry on, and to watch the same malignant doors magically open themselves.

On rusted hulks of abandoned ships, miles inland from the Aral shores (pp. 351-352):

Everything around me had the same pleading obsecurity. What had happened here? What did these ships want to tell us? Was this the world's most potent symbol or merely local scrap? It meant everything, nothing. It meant there was still hope for those societies on the edge of environmental catastrophe, and it meant that all eventually came to rust. It meant that to remain ignorant of the Aral Sea disaster was to dodge deliberately its eschatological implications, and it meant that all the knowledge and attention in the world proved unable to save the Aral Sea. [MSF liaison Ian] Small regarded the Aral Sea as "a fable of our time," and it was that, too. Indeed, ti held a fable's multitude of dark, simple, immutable meanings. No society can consume heedlessly and expect to survive. Finite environments cannot withstand infinite economic expansion. The world could be unevenly divided between those who diet and those who starve, those who gobble antidepressants and those who die of curable diseases such as tuberculosis. American affluence was no mere bystander to that division, and while responsibility and complicity differ in both degree and intention, they are born of the same moral surrender. "Maybe," Ian Small told me, "it's time. The Aral Sea's already dead. It's all about palliative care right now. Maybe it will be a blessing when it's finally gone, and it will just become this remote postdisaster place that once had a sea."

The sea was not coming back, nothing would improve, people like Small would continue their impossible triage, many Karakalpaks would continue to sicken and die until, one day, the Aral Sea would be spoken of in the domed, sepulchral tones of Gomorrah, Pompeii, or one of The Tempest's "still-vexed Bermudas." A luckless place where angry fates and unwitting human need saw their devastating concussion. It meant there was hope, but not here.

posted 2007-09-20