Modern western civilization is based on the availability of cheap credit, cheap oil, cheap meat and cheap cotton. At the time of writing most governments are running around like headless chickens, panicking over the collapse of cheap credit. The fact that at some point we will pass the peak of oil supply has begun to penetrate the public consciousness. The other two have not. Even the organizers of protests against bankers or oil companies are likely to publicise their campaigns by the distribution of cheap tee‐shirts, and to feed their followers at rallies on the ubiquitous burger. The effect of the worldwide growth of MacDonald's and their ilk can be seen in the inexorable deforestation of Brazil. The effect of the Primark (UK clothing retailer) revolution can be seen in the tragedy of the Aral Sea.
The Aral was something between a sea and a lake: a large inland body of salty water surrounded by semi‐desert, fed by two great rivers – the Amurdarya or Oxus and the Syrdarya. Like its neighbour, the Caspian, it had no connection with the world ocean. The surface of the Caspian is considerably below sea level but the surface of the Aral was a couple of hundred feet higher. The sea probably owed its origin to melt‐water following the last Ice Age, and appears to have begun to shrink due to natural global warming. The Oxus enters human mythology very early in recorded history as one of the four great rivers of the world. There is some geological and mythological evidence to suggest that well into historic times it flowed on, via the Sarykamish Depression over a waterfall into the Caspian, rather in the way that the North American Great Lakes empty through Niagara into the sea. From mediaeval times however, the rivers stopped at the Aral and their outflow was broadly balanced by evaporation, so the sea remained stable until well after the Russian conquest.
The key factor in its change was the development of large‐scale cotton farming. Cotton grows best in very dry weather but in very wet soil, so irrigation in desert areas provides the ideal environment. Following the Russian revolution the Soviet government set targets to make the USSR self‐sufficient in clothing. Under Stalin settlements were bulldozed, farms and grazing lands were flooded, and huge numbers of labourers drafted in. Now, in some seasons, the two rivers do not even reach the Aral: all the water is taken for irrigation. What had been mile upon mile of reed‐filled delta, full of muskrats, unique fish species, migrating birds, etc, is now desert. As a result the Aral is now a shrinking collection of shallow saline lakes, interspersed with dry salt pans. This has been graphically illustrated by pictures of modern diesel‐powered fishing‐boats stranded in the desert, a dozen miles or more from the nearest water. The dry salt blows over the land, and, combined with the soil degradation inherent in intensive cotton farming, is decreasing the area available for farming. The independent state of Kazakhstan, and the Karakalpak Republic (an autonomous subdivision of Uzbekistan), have inherited a horrendous social and ecological problem. So much about the Aral area has to be described in the past tense – the Turkestan catfish “were” and the Muinak Fish Canning Factory “was”.
This man‐made environmental disaster needs to be much more widely publicised. A major reference book ought to be published on it. Unfortunately this book is not it. I am very surprised at Springer producing such a poor‐quality work on such an important topic. The compilers of this book are leading Russian experts and know their stuff thoroughly. The origin of the text is not made clear anywhere in the book, but I have a sneaking suspicion that the authors drafted entries in Russian, and these were then machine translated and machine sorted, with no human checking of the English at all. The book abounds with bizarre mistranslations – it is, of course, possible that that great explorer Alexei Butakov did end up as rear‐admiral in charge of a “soundly armoured sheep squadron” in the Baltic – he was a very versatile and inventive man, but I suspect that ships are more likely. It is also plausible that one minute muskrat was caught in 1950 but figures from elsewhere suggest that there were a million trapped, all of them full‐sized (the figure now is virtually zero). Even without the mistranslations, the English is so clumsy as to make comprehension difficult on occasions. The alphabeticization is bizarre. There are a string of entries under T for example: The Aral Sea Navigation … , The Aral Sea Selected Bibliography, and another group under O: On the Termination of Works on Partial Flow Transfer … , On the Environmental Condition of the Circum‐Aral Territory … , etc.
In view of the widespread public ignorance of the changing geography of Central Asia, it would be useful for such a reference book to be illustrated with maps. The maps in this volume seem to have been downloaded from free internet sites, but reduced in size so as to be nearly illegible, and printed in black and white so the colour coding is irrelevant. The other illustrations scattered through the book look as though they were copied from the Great Soviet Encyclopaedia of 1939, and probably were. I cannot imagine anyone being able to identify any birds or fishes from these tiny sketches.
The best I can say of this book is that most of the relevant information is in here somewhere, if you can find it and make sense of it; and that there is far too little else available on the topic in English. I would mention the Proceedings of the NATO Advanced Workshop (Michlin and Williams, 1996) and some World Bank papers, such as Witword (1992) but not much else. I note that Springer are proposing to bring out another book shortly, on The Aral Sea Environment, by two of the authors of this book. I hope that they will have found an English‐speaking editor to help them pull it into shape. If it contains all the information from this book put into a useable and coherent form, with legible maps and better illustrations then it will be well worth waiting for. University libraries catering for academic programmes in environmental sciences, geography or East European/Central Asian studies may find it worth acquiring this in the meantime as there is so little else available. Other libraries may find it more sensible to wait to see whether the next book is more suited to their needs.
