Review
THE DEVIL AND THE DISAPPEARING SEA:
A TRUE STORY OF THE ARAL SEA CATASTROPHE
by Rob Ferguson
Raincoast Books, 264 pp.
The Aral Sea catastrophe is one of the worst human-caused environmental disasters in history. The central Asian inland sea, once the fourth biggest inland water body in the world, has shrunk by about 20 per cent since 1960, the result of decades of irrigation mismanagement by Soviet planners. The decline has left former waterfront towns abandoned, a brackish, polluted sea and a toxic desert of chemicals and pesticides creating some of the highest rates of cancer in the world.
Many writers have traced the sea’s decline, but few have offered more insight into the ongoing mismanagement of efforts to save it than Toronto’s Rob Ferguson in his first book, The Devil and the Disappearing Sea.
Ferguson, a communications consultant hired by a team working to save the Aral Sea with millions of World Bank dollars in 2000, found himself getting a rare first-hand experience working in the former Soviet states of Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan.
Rather than educating central Asians about water management, however, Ferguson ended up battling Soviet-era bureaucracy, corruption and paranoia. He was quickly swept up in the sometimes bizarre workings of central Asian governments, with their quirky dictators, lingering Soviet management practices and a culture that distrusts both westerners and Russians. And strangest of all, Ferguson wound up being questioned by police about a sordid murder.
What emerges is a cynical and sometimes humorously incredulous view of post-Soviet life in central Asia, and serious doubts that anything will ever be done to save the Aral Sea, even though its salvation seems readily attainable. And with emerging water crises hitting nearly every part of the world, The Devil and the Disappearing Sea offers another, more discouraging insight – the most powerful force on Earth may not be almighty water, but government bureaucracy.
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