The Aral Sea

Your experts reassured you. “The Aral Sea is nature’s error,” they said. “It should have evaporated long ago. Using its water will be far more advantageous than preserving it.”

You studied its immense expanse between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, the fourth largest inland sea in the world, and imagined new desert plantations, and a drained, fertile lakebed. It would easily counterbalance the loss of forty thousand jobs in the fisheries. Planting and exporting the ‘white gold’ of cotton would bring such wealth it would secure the USSR’s transition to socialism and feed the growing nation.

You spent thirty million roubles diverting the two feeder-rivers, and even though the poorly-built canals wasted over fifty percent of their water, you were satisfied.

But as the Aral shrank, a polluted seabed was revealed. Toxic dust storms blew residues from weapons testing, pesticides and fertilisers across the land. Within a decade, human mortality rose fifteen times, and rates of cancer and lung disease rose thirty times. All the Aral’s fish, half its mammals and three-quarters of its birds became extinct. At the same time, the heavily-irrigated plantations raised the water table and turned the desert to salt.

Today the fishing boats lie beached in salt, out of sight of water, testament to the greatest irrigation disaster in history.

The Harappan Culture

Your culture flourished four thousand six hundred years ago. Yours was India’s first great civilisation, the world’s third after Mesopotamia and pharaonic Egypt. Your lands stretched from Baluchistan in the west to New Delhi in the east.

You created over a thousand cities with impressive platforms, public baths and communal granaries, all built to a precise grid using uniformly-sized bricks. With access to fresh water, each house was connected to a sewerage system; the world’s first, and more advanced than many local neighbourhoods have today. Yours was an egalitarian culture with no monumental structures, yet what you believed remains a mystery because the code of your language has never been unlocked.

After just five hundred years, the impact of your people on the environment made itself felt. Your method of baking mud into bricks had consumed so much timber that your forests were gone and you had over-irrigated the land in an effort to feed your overcrowded cities. The salinity of the soil increased and yields fell.

Your culture went into decline. Your cities were no longer maintained and within a few generations you abandoned them. All that was left of your sophisticated culture were mud-brick ruins in an arid, empty landscape.