Up First from NPR - When Water Turns to Sand

Episode Date: September 22, 2024

In Central Asia, the world's youngest desert occupies a basin that once held a vast saline lake. The Aral Sea. Up until the 1960s, the sea spanned more than 26 thousand square miles across two countries. It supported thriving fishing communities along its shores. But then, in the name of progress and development, much of the river water that fed the sea was diverted for agriculture. Now the Aral Sea has all but disappeared, shrunk to about tenth of its original size. The UN Environment Programme has called the Aral Sea's destruction quote "one of the most staggering disasters of the 20th century." On this episode of The Sunday Story, Above The Fray Fellow Valerie Kipnis takes us to the Aral Sea to try to understand what went wrong and whether anything can be done to save the little water that's left.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

I'm Ayesha Roscoe. You're listening to The Sunday Story. Today we head to Central Asia where water is a precious resource that's running dangerously low. Unless something changes fast, the World Bank warns that as many as 2.4 million people across the region could be without water and forced to abandon their homes by 2050. Nowhere is the catastrophic loss of water made more visible and harrowing than at the Aral Sea. This sea, actually a saline lake, was once one of the world's largest lakes. It covered a vast area in the former Soviet republics of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. It was life-sustaining for this arid region. The sea's ecosystem included a unique mix of saltwater and freshwater species. Fishing communities watering the sea plied the waters for sturgeon, trout, flounder, carp, catfish. But in the 1950s and 60s, the Soviet Union increased its efforts to divert water from the two rivers that sustained the sea.

Without that river water, the sea got saltier and saltier and began to evaporate under the desert sun. Today, the Aral Sea is nearly gone. Some estimates say it has shrunk down to about 10% of its original size. The UN Environment Program has called the sea's destruction, quote, one of the most staggering disasters of the 20th century. In today's episode, we hear from NPR Above the Fray fellow Valerie Kipnis. She traveled to this region of Central Asia, hoping to understand not just how the sea was lost, but what is being done now to save the little water that remains. Here's Valerie with her story. When trying to make sense of what's happened to the Aral Sea, it's easy to get lost in the

details. So let me start with this fact. There's no longer one Aral Sea. As the water disappeared and the sea dried up, it actually split into two. So now there are two seas. The northern Aral Sea sits in Kazakhstan, and the southern Aral Sea in Uzbekistan. In the spring, I went on a long drive through Uzbekistan to see what remains of the southern portion. To get there, I first had to cross miles and miles of desert, the Aralcum Desert. It's the youngest desert in the world, and it formed as the Aral Sea dried up. After four hours of driving, I reached Moynak. It was once a bustling port city, home to 40,000 people, and a cannery

that produced millions of cans of fish a year. But no longer. Not here. Not anymore. Instead, Moinac is now known as a tourist site for those inclined towards disaster. People come to see six massive rusted ships moored in a vast, all-encompassing desert. I made it. I made it to the bottom of the Aral Sea, the graveyard of ships. Nearby are the abandoned fish processing plants and canning factories, shuttered and rusted like the ships. When the winds blow, as they often do, they serve toxic dust that sweeps through the city, making it hard to breathe without coughing. I get why people come here. The dry lake bed, the whirling gusts of wind, abandoned boats in a desert. It looks rather Mad Maxian, dystopian.

I understand the desire to be confronted by the things that scare you most, a world without water. In 2017, the UN Secretary General, Antonio Guterres, visited Moynihan and saw a sort of allegory of man-made natural disaster. After his trip, he issued a statement saying that the RLC's disappearance quote, demonstrates that men can destroy the planet. My guide for the trip was a man named Yusuf Kamalov. He's an engineer, an environmental activist.

Since the 90s, he's been trying to figure out how to solve Uzbekistan's water problem. When he looks at Moynak, he gets a bit nostalgic. Yeah, I was swimming exactly 50 years ago, in 1973, right here. Yusup grew up in this region, and the majority of his adult life has been spent living in the wake of the seas shrinking. But now, we had to travel even further through the desert, until we finally reached what's left of the southern portion of the sea. And when we arrived, I was a bit stunned. I don't know, it feels kind of surreal to be here, to think that it was all one big body of water and now it's just this little part. The water is beautiful, blue, and dangerously salty, so much so that it stings even with

the tiniest cut in your hand. The shoreline is cluttered with tiny shrimp larvae called artemia, known to survive in the saltiest waters. Instead of sand, there's all these hard clumps of clay that kind of look just like rocks, but then you step on them and you feel your body just sink in a few centimeters. And there's all these artemia, and you can tell because it looks like red pebbles everywhere. In his lifetime, Yusuf has watched water turn to clay and sand.

Freedom to our land! But he's not the only one. Everyone here is a kind of historian of water. To understand what's happened to the Aral Sea, I need to turn from the sea to the two major rivers that feed it, the Amudarya and the Siridarya. These rivers are born from glaciers and mountains near China. Then they traverse Central Asia through six different

countries for thousands of miles. They've yielded and sustained human life for over 40,000 years. Medieval Islamic texts refer to them as two of the four rivers of paradise. There are songs and stories written about them. The Syr Darya feeds the northern Aral Sea, where there's more water in part because Kazakhstan built a huge dam there. The Amu Darya feeds the southern sea, in Uzbekistan, where I was. It's like the Nile of Central Asia. But the Amu Darya is tapped all along its course. In the past few years, the Taliban even started building a massive canal to take a bunch of water from the Amu Darya for Afghanistan. Civilizations have been doing this,

taking water from the river to irrigate their crops for thousands of years. But it wasn't until the 19th century, when imperial Russia took over Central Asia, that the approach to altering the reverse course really changed. Back then, there was a common understanding that RLC should die. And that instead, the Sriva should be used for economic development of Central Asia. This is Rahat Kormanbaev, a biology professor in Kazakhstan who studies the RLC in its long history. He says the imperial Russian leadership thought it was wasteful to let valuable fresh water go to a salty lake.

And so they diverted, dammed, and drained the river to grow cotton in the desert. White gold, as it's sometimes called. Then, the Soviets took over, and they ramped up the cotton industry by building a network of unlined, uncovered irrigation canals. Their mission was to bleed the Amidarya into Uzbekistan's vast deserts in an attempt to turn the Central Asian steppe into a cotton oasis. By the 1980s, it was reported that water from the river had almost entirely stopped reaching the sea. In 91, the Soviet Union collapsed. Uzbekistan became its own country, and yet the cotton harvest continued. Today, Uzbekistan is the world's sixth largest producer of cotton. 70% of the country's land is devoted to the crop.

And Uzbekistan directs 90% of its scarce water to agriculture. As for the Amu Darya, it eventually turns into a delta made up of a collection of small streams that remind me of a tangle of snakes. Eventually, even these disappear into the desert. I went to the Amu Daria Delta to get a closer look.

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When Yusuf pointed to them, he shook his head. Let's start from irrigation canals. We are losing about 40% of water before the fields. The canals are extremely inefficient. They leak water and allow much of it to evaporate. When I got closer to the fields, I noticed another thing, the texture of the soil. I had never seen dirt like this, pale gray and hard to the touch, encrusted by sand and salt. The quality is so poor that farmers told me they have to flood the fields with water to wash some of the salt away before even planting anything. The farmers I met were reluctant to talk. Uzbekistan is technically considered an

authoritarian state, and people have little to gain from speaking up against the government. This place belongs to the autonomous region known as Karkalpakstan, and what's happening here could be a story of its own. But for now, let me just say that the Karkolpaks are an ethnic minority who have suffered the brunt of the RLC's disappearance. Two years ago, they experienced a brutal government crackdown during large-scale protests. So the people here are understandably distrustful of reporters.

But one farmer, Kalif, was willing to share a little, if I kept his last name private. He wore a suit jacket over his worn t-shirt, a flat hat to shade his eyes. He walked me over to his plot of land and explained that recent rains had destroyed his crops and that he was now in the process of retilling the soil. This was a difficult loss, he told me.

He also told me how he learned to grow cotton from his parents, how for years he was a migrant worker in Kazakhstan, but came back home to try his hand at what he knows best, farming. These days he grows cotton, because he says the government requires him to do so on this land. But getting a decent yield of the crop gets harder with every year. The weather is unreliable. The summer's really hot.

The rains that we're supposed to get on time, they're either early or too late. Overall, the climate has changed and it's affecting us. Central Asia's temperatures are increasing at twice the global average. Experts say this is a consequence of the loss of the RLC, because the presence of a large body of water once helped moderate the temperatures in the region. But the fact remains, here, on the Central Asian steppe, the water crisis is largely a human-made problem. It started with Imperial Russia, remained with the Soviets, and continues to this day with the Uzbek government.

Because the farmers still work as slaves for government, not as free businessmen or free entrepreneurs. During our drive along the cotton fields, Yusup explained to me that Uzbekistan still sort of functions like it did in the Soviet days, like a planned economy. Farmers don't own their land. They lease it from the government. And the government has closed ties

to these private cotton production companies, which pressure or force farmers to sign contracts specifying which crops they must grow, like cotton, and how much they should sell it for, usually at a very low price. You're sure of this? Absolutely. So they're buying it at a low price,

and then they're turning it into textile or whatever. And then they sell it for a much higher price. Much higher price. So it's farmers who lose out on the fruits of their labor, which means that their relationship to their crops and land is fractured. And using water efficiently is often one of the last things on their minds. It is useless to tell them that safe water, because they don't have any incentives or stimulus to save water.

Even as the water disappears. I spoke with other farmers too, even more reluctant to discuss the details of the water crisis. And most of them would take me to their irrigation canals, which were bone dry, and explain how little water they got this year, how they wished for more. And they were leaving it up to chance.

God willing, one said, the water will return. When I spoke to government agriculture officials, they told me farmers are actually free to grow what they want. But what some farmers told me was this. They're unable to get loans, fertilizers, export licenses, and even cotton seeds without signing contracts with these private companies. For Yusup, this whole system is driven by a kind of post-Soviet inertia. We're still in the past. We're still in the Soviet life by Soviet agriculture, Soviet economics, Soviet management.

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I wanted to hear what the government thought about all this. And so I spent a lot of time talking to government water officials during my reporting to hear them out. And here's the bottom line. The government admits that there are a lot of inefficiencies to address. After all, Uzbekistan is among the 20 most wasteful countries when it comes to water use and agriculture. But officials maintain they're working as fast as possible to find solutions to the water crisis. President Shavkat Mirzaev has declared 2024 the start of a, quote,

emergency regime of water conservation. He's also budgeted $2 billion to the water sector, prioritizing efforts to line the out-of-date canals to prevent so much water from leaking before even reaching farmers' fields. And I witnessed it happening with my own eyes. I watched as canals were lined with concrete, slowly but surely. I was also invited to observe government-sponsored workshops that helped farmers transition out of using so much water. At one of them, I wound up in a back room with several local officials, all of them ready to show me what they'd been doing, holding stacks of papers with details of the plans they were executing to save water. They really wanted to tell me about lining the canals and all the farmers

they had bussed into their water management schools to teach them how to modernize their irrigation methods. At one point, they even brought in this massive glass container with a new species of less water-consuming cotton that they were planning to introduce to farmers. And I just kept pushing back. But where was all this years ago, when the region had started running out of water? How about when the sea dried up? And how quickly could they really get all this done now? Mostly, I wanted them to engage with me on a bigger picture, existential level. What was the point of all this,

if the Uzbek government wasn't really willing to give up their attachment to cotton? What was the point of promoting conservation efforts, if at the very same time, the system was encouraging overconsumption? And I mean, we really got into it. I think they sort of felt like I was ignoring all their efforts. And I felt like they were talking out of both sides of their mouth. Ultimately, I couldn't shake the feeling

that the onus of change was falling onto the people with the least amount of power, the least amount of money, and the most to lose. The farmers. At the end of our meeting, there was this moment where the official in charge of lining the canals turned to me and said, your shirt, what's it made of?

Cotton, cotton also cotton. It's also cotton. Cotton, cotton, cotton. They pointed at my shirt. They pointed at the tablecloth. It's everywhere. It's in everything. What would you have us do? But there is a lot being done by scientists and engineers and economists

all working tirelessly on solutions of all kinds, But there is a lot being done. By scientists and engineers and economists, all working tirelessly on solutions of all kinds, thinking about how to change infrastructure or create new drought-resistant crops. They're all trying to move the dial for the sake of the future. This is all licorice, right? I visited an outdoor garden laboratory growing hardy plants and soil collected from the former lake bed. It's run by a man named Bahijan Habibulayev. He switched careers to do this work.

I saw how people are fighting against the desert. It brought tears to my soul. I said, I'll not be a diplomat. Let me take this direction. And since then, I've been doing it. Now he spends his time teaching farmers how to reduce their water use. He helps find species of crops that require less water and money to grow, which farmers can then sell on their own as a way to supplement their income.

His lab feels like a Garden of Eden in the middle of the endless desert. There are various crossbreeds of apples and licorice and mung beans. Habibulaevich's latest obsession is with getting farmers to use runoff water from the Amu Darya to farm carp and underground ponds, and then use that same water filtered by the fish to grow strawberries and greenhouses. He's not particularly nostalgic or interested in bringing water back to save the RLC. He's interested in saving the environment that's here today and in preparing farmers for a future that's fast approaching. And at the end of the day, he's an optimist, uninterested in being bogged down in all the faults of the system that I point out. Many people are changing.

If you look at what people were doing 15 years ago and compare it to now, things have changed for the better. But so many questions remain. Will it be enough? Will it come fast enough? And who will bear the costs and burdens of change? These are the same questions people and places face across the globe as temperatures rise and demand for water grows. Who will make the sacrifices, and when? There's actually a moment, a person who looms in my mind when I think about the sacrifices that will one day be asked of this region

and what all of this means for the future. She's 17. Her name is Aisulu, and I met her in the city of Nukus. Nukus sits in the northwestern corner of Uzbekistan, a couple hours away from the Aral Sea. It's also one of the last places the Amudaria still flows as a river. For centuries, Nucos was an important settlement on the banks of what was once the wide Amudaria, a stop along the Silk Road. Now, the city of 300,000 struggles with one of the highest poverty rates in the country. And for a time, as the sea dried up, residents here struggled with mass cases of

tuberculosis and cancer. It's a hard legacy that's been passed down to a younger generation. I met Isulu at a local coffee shop called Cinnamon, a place with the best coffee in town. So I went often. She actually came up to me and just plopped herself down next to me. You're from America, she asked. Yep. Aisulu freaked out. Plainly walking on the streets of New York, oh my god. That's like an American dream, we have an American dream.

Living in America is like a dream for us. But in a way, anywhere but here is the dream. Everybody is aiming for abroad. 50%, at least 50% are trying to study abroad. It's not just the students. Many families send away children to study or work. To Russia, Korea, and Kazakhstan. For now, Aisulu lives with her family, right by the Amidarya.

She invited me to go there. Aisulu's father, just like Yusup, has vivid memories of the water that was here just a few decades ago. Aisulu says her dad told her that when he was young, the river was so deep that steamships could plow through it. My father and his friends used to be at that, maybe like at that hill where the steamships would come. And when they come, you know, they create a big wave. So they would lie there and the big wave would come to them.

So it was fun for them, you know. But all of that is just a story of the past to Aisulu. Words and images from books and movies and her family's memories. Not real life. It feels like if I close my eyes, it's really hard to imagine that the water would come near to this rift near to like five meters but right now I have to walk like at least 200 or 300 meters to go to actually reach the coast of the river and that's's a little bit, that's sad.

And it doesn't resemble the Amu Darya. These days, the Amu Darya, at least where Aisulu lives, is small. Seems easy to walk across, easy to mistake for a shreem. It's thick and murky like coffee with milk. At points, sandbanks creep through its shallow center. Dunes hover on the edges. What is real, what she experiences almost every day,

is the wind. It's bad when it's windy and sandy. Does that happen a lot? Yes, it hurts your eyes. Sometimes it irritates your skin, but mostly it hurts your eyes. I really felt for Aisulu. We seemed to be both deeply connected to her homeland,

and at the same time, questioning her loyalty to it. At the beginning of this story, I mentioned that as the Aral Sea dried up, it split into two separate bodies of water, the South Aral Sea and the Northern Aral Sea in Kazakhstan. In the north, as a last-ditch effort in 2005, the Kazakh government, with support from the World Bank, tried to change its fate and built an eight-mile dam to contain the water that still remained on their portion of the sea.

And it worked. Because the Sierra D'arra River, unlike the Amu D'arra, still reaches the northern sea, the water began to rise. The fish came back. And soon enough, local fishermen began pulling fish out of the salty water. I visited a Kazakh fishing village that borders this renewed sea. The village of Tastubek was nearly desolate for 30 years. Omar Sereg Ibrahimov grew up here without knowing the Aral Sea.

As a kid, he played in rusted fishing boats stuck in the sand. When the dam was built, Ibrahimov was 10. As the water returned, his father taught him how to fish. So in one, two years after building the dam, the water salinity dropped down. So the water became fresh. And nowadays we have about 10 types of of freshwater fish species back in the sea. These days, Ibrahimov is one of roughly 20 or so fishermen in Tastubek able to make a living off fishing. The village is still small and quiet, but it buzzes with life when the sun rises and sets,

as fishermen head out to work and as they drive to hand off fish to processing plants. I went out onto the sea with Ibrahimov's cousin, Nurjan Sidbinbetov. I watched as Nurjan grabbed large sturgeon, carp, and perch out of plastic nets he had set the night before. And catch was plenty. There were four of us, and We were surrounded by water. The wide open sea felt magnificent. But the truth is, this moment is fleeting.

Like its southern counterpart, the northern Aral Sea's water is at risk. The water came back with the dam, but now the dam needs to be fixed or rebuilt to hold the sea in. Plans have been stalled for years. Whether that's the fault of bureaucracy, negligence, or corruption is hard to tell. Meanwhile, people keep taking water from the Sierra Daria River. And the little that's left may one day not be enough to maintain this part of the sea. It's hard to imagine that where I am now, surrounded by water, could turn into a desert as it has in the South. Out here, I'm struck by the abundance, by how resilient life is, and how nature is seemingly willing to forgive.

I'm just not sure for how much longer. The RLC and what's happened in the wake of its shrinking is really a paradox of progress, a story of human action and inaction. After my months reporting on this place, seeing the enormity of the problems, I find it easy to despair, easy to think about how it'll take more work to reverse the course of progress than it took to march down it in the first place. But we got here, right? So maybe it's not too late.

We're the only thing standing in our way. That's Valerie Kipnis, NPR's Above the Fray fellow. Her reporting was sponsored by the John Alexander Project, which supports foreign reporting in undercovered parts of the world. The Above the Fray fellowship gives promising early career journalists the opportunity to cover important but underreported stories from a location abroad. This episode was produced by Justine Yan and edited by Jenny Schmidt. Gilly Moon mastered the episode.

Thank you to Tara Neal, Dede Skanky, Claire Harbitch, Greg Dixon, Ann Marler, and Alyssa Shapiro. An additional thanks to Alim Khan Isalayev, Sarek Dusanbayev, Talgat Mindibai, Abroar Korbin-Maratov, Sarah Cameron, Kate Shields, Elizabeth Bright, Eric Rudenshood, David Trilling, Umida Kaknazar, James Chapman, Christopher Butler, and the team at the USAID Oasis Project, as well as the U.S. Consulate in Kazakhstan. The Sunday Story team includes Andrew Mambo and our senior supervising producer, Liana Simstrom.

Irene Noguchi is our executive producer. I'm Aisha Roscoe. Up First is back tomorrow with all the news you need to start your week. Until then, have a great rest of your weekend. Hey there, this is Felix Contreras, one of the co-hosts of Alt Latino, the podcast from NPR Music where we discuss Latinx culture, music, and heritage with the artists that create it. Listen now to the Alt Latino podcast from NPR. For a while now, you've probably been hearing about book bands, how they're gaining momentum everywhere in Texas, in Missouri, Florida, and Pennsylvania.

On the Code Switch podcast, we're taking a look at why. Why are so many books suddenly considered so dangerous to kids? Listen to our new series on the Code Switch podcast from NPR.