High and dry: big government causes big problems, and in Central Asia, Soviet-style big government destroyed the Aral Sea.

The scene is nothing short of apocalyptic. A fleet of fishing vessels, seven or eight in all, lies immobile in the desert sands of central Asia. Most of the ships are in tight formation, seeming to jockey for position in the center of a curious channel cut through the desert. The fleet is silent and ghostly, floating in an ocean of sand where once they plied the blue-green waters of an immense inland sea. At one time these ships hauled tons of fresh fish to local canneries. Now they serve as monuments to one of the greatest ecological disasters of all time.

The landlocked fleet is all that remains of the vibrant fishing industry that was once supported by central Asia's great Aral Sea. As recently as 1960, the salty Aral covered a surface area larger than that of Lake Michigan. Prior to the 1980s, fishermen brought in an average catch of almost 40,000 tons per year of pikeperch and other commercially useful fish. That fishery has disappeared just as quickly as the lake itself. According to data from the University of California-San Diego, today the Aral Sea has lost as much as 75 percent of its former volume and its surface area has shrunk by 50 percent. Imagine not being able to see Lake Michigan from Chicago, and you have some idea of what it is like to live in one of the Aral's former port cities like Moynak or Aralsk.

Researchers point out that water levels in the Aral fluctuate widely over large spans of time. But the current drying of the Aral is unique. Left to its own devices, the Aral Sea would today be just as large as it was in 1960. Instead, in the 1960s, '70s, and '80s Soviet government planners deliberately destroyed the lake, leaving behind an ecological wasteland. The destruction of the Aral Sea was man-made, and it occurred because, in the Soviet system, no one owned the area around the lake. And without private ownership of the region, there was no incentive to preserve the ecology of the region.

Bone Dry

The town of Aralsk in the former Soviet state of Kazakhstan once boasted a busy harbor on the northern shore of the Aral Sea. Now the harbor is dry. Tourists to the region can walk on the dry bed of the harbor amidst a few rusting ships that the retreating waters left behind. In his travel blog, writer Joel Stern described the scene during his recent visit to the area. "In the evening, we took a stroll into what used to be the port," Stern wrote. "You can walk right out over the salt-crystalised sand which is littered with old sea shells and empty beer cans and contains a number of rusting ship hulks, now stranded by the sea which has long since departed. Walking out into the port gave me a real sense of devastation. A sense that something has died here or more appropriately has been murdered."

The murderer was the Soviet Union. In the 1960s, government planners decided that the region near the Aral Sea would become the new Soviet cotton belt. This decision sealed the sea's fate. In most areas where it is grown, cotton requires substantial irrigation. This is particularly true of the region around the Aral Sea, where average yearly rainfall is approximately only one-third that received by the state of Georgia. If cotton were to be grown, the water resources of the Aral Sea and of the rivers that fed it would need to be tapped.

This is exactly what the Soviets under Khrushchev did, according to Elisa Schaar, senior editor of the Harvard International Review. "In 1959, under General-Secretary Nikita Khrushchev's self-sufficiency plan," Schaar wrote, "the Russians diverted the courses of the Amu Syr and Amu Darya rivers, the Aral Sea's two main feeders, to irrigate newly planted cotton fields in Uzbekistan. With the diversion of two of its feeding rivers, evaporation took its toll on the Aral Sea."

The Soviets knew that the diversion of the two rivers would cause the Aral to disappear. As a result, they planned to compound one ecological disaster by creating another one, by diverting still other rivers. According to Juergen Salay of the University of Uppsala's Department of Economic History, the Soviets planned to "draw water from the river Ob and its tributary Irtysh and send it southward" to replenish the Aral Sea. "The transfer route would have stretched from the confluence of the Ob and Irtysh rivers through the central parts of western Siberia southward to the Syrdar'ya and Amudar'ya rivers." This would have been an immense undertaking, and even the Soviet planners had to admit that it wouldn't work. Gorbachev canceled the plan in 1986, although it resurfaces now and again, most recently in 2004.

An Uncertain Future

The results of the diversions that have dried the Aral Sea underscore the environmental dangers inherent in transferring power from local officials and landowners to unaccountable central bureaucrats. Having no direct stake in the regions affected by such massive schemes, the planners had no incentive to preserve the natural flows that sustained both the native economic base and the native ecosystems. As a result, the world's fourth largest lake was destroyed and two major rivers, the Syr Darya and the Amu Darya, that once had combined flows almost matching that of the Nile, have been reduced to a trickle.

Today, the Aral Sea is only a shadow of its former self, but regional efforts to modify the lake remain underway. The drying of the sea left the northern basin separate but for a canal connecting it to the larger southern basin. The canal allowed water still flowing into the northern basin from the Syr Darya river to flow into the larger southern basin. In Kazakhstan it was thought that these flows might cause the northern basin to dry up altogether and a dam, funded by the World Bank, was built across the channel that once connected the two basins. The dam is having predictable effects, causing the northern basin, or Small Aral, to refill, but exacerbating the situation in the southern basin. While fisherman in the north look forward to returning to the sea, to the south, in Uzbekistan, the Aral Sea faces an uncertain future.