Read Unruly Places: Lost Spaces, Secret Cities, and Other Inscrutable Geographies for Free Online Page A

Agajan Babaev, explained in 1987, in an article for a Soviet economics magazine, that “the drying up of the Aral is far more advantageous than preserving it.” Even more oddly, he also concluded that “many scientists are convinced, and I among them, that the disappearance of the sea will not affect the region’s landscapes.” The death of the Aral Sea was not only foreseen but actively pursued.
    As the Aral Sea began to shrink, in the 1960s, the irrigation continued, the volume of water drained off the rivers only peaking in 1980. Without the rivers’ infusion of fresh water, many of the Aral’s shallowing pools became almost as salty as the ocean. A new dusty and denuded landscape emerged. Windblown pollutants turned the area into one of the world’s unhealthiest places to live, and infant mortality rates shot up along with respiratory diseases. The loss of the Aral Sea also had an impact on the climate. Such a large body of water had long kept the land warmer in winter and cooler in summer. With its disappearance came more extreme and more destructive localized weather systems.
    Since 1960 the Aral Sea has shrunk by more than 80 percent and its water volume has fallen by 90 percent. The size and shape of the Aral Sea on recent maps varies enormously: sometimes it is represented quite accurately, as fragmented and shrunken, but it is still common to see it portrayed as undiminished and unbroken. With cotton production still an economic priority in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, and no real prospect of rehabilitation in the foreseeable future, it is time the Aral Sea was removed from the world’s maps and the “Aralqum Desert” inserted.
    Visitors to the Aral today are faced with whipping winds across a barren plain. It is littered with bleached seashells and the remnants of scavenged boats—a desiccated land that stretches to the horizon. The Aralqum Desert is fringed with ghost towns, abandoned fish factories, and rusting boatyards. Barsa-Kelmes, which translates as “the land of no return” in Kazakh, was once the Aral Sea’s largest island and used to be a nature reserve, renowned for its eagles, deer, and wolves. Today it is just another dead stump of land. By 1993 it was empty except for one resident, who refused to leave, and a few stubborn wild asses. It seems that the holdout, an ex-ranger named Valentin Skurotskii, was rooted to the island by the fact that his mother was buried there. His body was discovered in 1998, sitting in a chair with his head in his hands.
    In Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan people have grown tired of sad tales and bad news about the Aral. Much of the regional news coverage about the Aral over the past two decades has been about the damming and “rebirth” of the so-called Small Aral Sea in the north. The implication is that the rest of the Aral should be abandoned to the sand. The newly built dam that keeps the waters of the Syr Darya in the Small Aral further restricts their flow farther south. In 2008 the president of Kazakhstan, Nursultan Nazarbayev, stood on a new dam near Aralsk and declared that one day the waters would return to the town’s harbor. Thanks to the new dams and locks, he may be right. The waters of the Small Aral have risen and become fresher. But it is a meager triumph compared to the loss of the “Large Aral Sea.”
    The Aralqum is not simply a vast new desert; it is also a huge experiment, the world’s largest example of anthropogenic primary succession. Primary succession refers to the development of plant life on land that is devoid of any vegetation. The classic examples are volcanic islands like Surtsey, which emerged from the Atlantic, twenty miles south of Iceland, in 1963. The first plant on Surtsey was spotted two years later, and today much of the island is covered with mosses, lichens, grasses, and even some bushes. While it’s a natural process, it’s the anthropogenic, or humanly caused, part that turns it into something less predictable.