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An Elegy For The Amu Darya River
March 6th, 2024
Courtesy of Guernica, a look at how – in so many ways – human behavior is emptying the Amu Darya: Most mighty rivers enjoy a spectacular finale: a fertile delta, a mouth agape to the sea, a bay of plenty. But it had taken me almost a week to find where the Amu Darya comes […]
Read more »Japan’s Role in Healing the Aral Sea and Engaging Central Asia
February 20th, 2024
Courtesy of The Diplomat, a look at Japan’s role in healing the Aral Sea: Multiple international actors have become involved in helping Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan alleviate the devastating consequences of one of the worst human-made environmental disasters across the Central Asian region: the loss of the Aral Sea. One notable partner in these endeavors is […]
Read more »Here’s How the World Looks When We Use Up All of Our Water
November 28th, 2023
Courtesy of The New York Times, an article on the Aral Sea whose demise holds sobering lessons for our water scarce future: Walking toward the shrinking remnants of what used to be the Aral Sea in Uzbekistan was like entering hell. All around was a desert devoid of life, aside from scrubby saxaul trees. Dust […]
Read more »Reevaluating The Forgotten River Civilizations of Central Asia
October 5th, 2023
Via PNAS, an interesting paper examining the Aral Sea basin in Central Asia in which its major rivers, the Amu Darya and Syr Darya, were the center of advanced river civilizations, and a principal hub of the Silk Roads over a period of more than 2,000 y. The region’s decline has been traditionally attributed to […]
Read more »The Water Wars Coming to Central Asia
July 31st, 2023
Via Foreign Policy, a report on rising water tensions in Central Asia where the situation has been bad for decades, but the Taliban threaten to make them worse: In Turkmenistan, household faucets are running dry and locusts are devouring crops. In Kazakhstan, a state of emergency has been declared as the Caspian Sea shrinks to […]
Read more »Northern Remnant of Aral Sea Struggling to Survive
June 11th, 2023
Via Window on Eurasia, a report on challenges faced by the northern segment of the Aral Sea: Two decades ago, the World Bank provided funding to allow Kazakhstan to construct a dam isolating the northern segment of the Aral Sea in the hopes of saving it from the sad fate of the rest of that […]
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