1
April 2013
Excerpts
from A World to Win News Service;
Global
warming and rapid change in the ecosystem are creating a serious crisis for the
very survival of humanity. A third of the planet’s fresh water has disappeared,
or is on the verge of disappearing. Groundwater wells, used by three billion
people, are drying up or are at lowering levels, as well as becoming polluted.
Lake
Chad, which provides water for over 20 million people from Chad, Cameroon,
Niger and Nigeria, has shrunk by 95 percent since 1963. Lake Karachay, in
Russia, is a nuclear waste dumping ground, with radioactivity levels almost
comparable to Chernobyl. Tens of millions of people all around the world are
protesting against the abuse and destruction of nature. Nature is speaking
through humanity, that it also has had enough, and wants revolution.
The Aral Sea – a
living/dying example
The
Aral Sea has been hit so hard by a man-made environmental catastrophe that the
results can easily be seen from space.
The
Aral Sea is a landlocked, closed basin in Central Asia. It lies between
Kazakhstan in the north and Uzbekistan in the south. The name roughly
translates as "Sea of Islands", referring to the more than 1,500
islands of one hectare or more that once dotted its waters.
Once
the world's fourth-largest inland sea, almost half the size of England, with an
area of 68,000 square kilometres, the Aral Sea began steadily shrinking in the
1960s, after the rivers Amu Darya and Syr Darya that fed it were diverted by
Soviet irrigation projects. By 2004 the sea had shrunk to 25 percent of its
original surface area, and a nearly fivefold increase in salinity had killed
most of its natural flora and fauna. By 2007 it had declined to 10 percent of
its original size, splitting into three separate lakes, two of which are too
salty to support fish. Many fish species have disappeared.
The
once prosperous fishing industry was destroyed. Former seashore villages and
towns ended up 70 or 100 kilometres away from the present shore lines. They
became ship graveyards. Some of the hulks have been there for a generation. The
world's biggest fish processing plant, which produced over 40,000 tonnes of
fish a year and employed 60,000 people, closed down. This collapse brought
unemployment and economic hardship.
The
ecosystem of the Aral Sea and the river deltas feeding into it have been nearly
destroyed, not least because of the much higher salinity. The receding sea has
left huge plains covered with salt and toxic chemicals, which are picked up and
carried away by the wind as toxic dust and spread to the surrounding area.
Crops in the region are destroyed by salt being deposited onto the land.
The
Aral Sea is also heavily polluted, largely as the result of weapons testing,
industrial projects, pesticides and fertilizer run-off. This, along with the
salt- and dust-laden air, caused serious public health problems, including high
rates of certain kinds of cancer and lung diseases.
With
the reduction of the size of the Aral Sea, its climate modifying function was lost,
causing local climate change, with summers becoming hotter and drier, winters
colder and longer, and little rainfall in the spring. The growing season has
been reduced to 170 days a year, and desert storms occur more than 90 days a
year.
Capitalism
was restored in the Soviet Union in the mid 1950s by representatives of a new
capitalist class that had arisen from within the Communist Party and state
apparatus. Although the economy would still be characterized by state
enterprises and centralized planning for over three more decades, the goal of
the economy changed to one of maximizing profit. In the 1960s, in carrying out
new policies regarding the role of the country's regions, the USSR's new
imperialist rulers assigned Central Asia to supplying raw materials, notably
cotton.
Most
importantly, the Soviet government decided that the two rivers that fed the
Aral Sea, the Amu Darya in the south and the Syr Darya in the northeast, would
be diverted to irrigate the desert, in order to grow rice, melons, cereals, and
most importantly cotton. This was part of the Soviet plan for cotton, or
"white gold", to become a major export. This did happen eventually,
and today Uzbekistan is one of the world's largest exporters of cotton. This
project turned desert into cotton fields, but it also turned the Aral Sea and
beyond into a desert – with tremendous, social, economic and ecological
consequences.
The
construction of irrigation canals began on a large scale in the 1940s. Many of
the canals were poorly built, allowing water to leak or evaporate. From the
Qaraqum Canal, the largest in Central Asia, perhaps 30 to 75 percent of the
water went to waste. Today only 12 percent of the length of Uzbekistan's
irrigation canals are waterproofed.
By
1960, between 20 and 60 billion cubic metres of water were going each year to
the land instead of the Aral sea. Most of the sea's water supply had been
diverted, and in the 1960s the Aral Sea began to shrink. From 1961 to 1970, the
sea level fell at an average of 20 centimetres a year. In the 1970s, the
average rate nearly tripled to 50–60 centimetres per year, and by the 1980s it
continued to drop, now with a mean of 80–90 centimetres each year. The rate of
water usage for irrigation continued to increase: the amount of water taken
from the rivers doubled between 1960 and 2000, and cotton production nearly
doubled in the same period.
The
disappearance of the lake was no surprise to the Soviet rulers; they knew it
would happen long before. As early as in 1964, Aleksandr Asarin at the
Hydroproject Institute pointed out that the lake was doomed. He explained,
"It was part of the five-year plans, approved by the council of ministers
and the Politburo. Nobody on a lower level would dare to say a word
contradicting those plans, even if it was the fate of the Aral Sea."
At
the same time the reaction to the predictions varied. Some Soviet experts
apparently considered the Aral to be "nature's error", and a Soviet
engineer said in 1968 that "it is obvious to everyone that the evaporation
of the Aral Sea is inevitable”. But by the summer of 2003, the South Aral Sea
was vanishing faster than predicted. In the deepest parts of the sea, the
bottom waters are saltier than the top, and not mixing. Thus, only the top of
the sea is heated in the summer, and it evaporates faster than would otherwise
be expected.
From
1960 to 1998 the amount of water it lost was the equivalent of completely
draining Lake Erie in North America (the tenth largest lake in the world) and
Lake Ontario (between Canada and the U.S.). Over the same time period its
salinity increased from about 10 g/L to about 45 g/L. As of 2004, the Aral
Sea's surface area was only 17,160 square kilometres, 25 percent of its
original size. By 2007 the sea's area had shrunk to 10 percent of its original
size, and the salinity of the remains of the southern part of the sea had
increased to levels in excess of 100 g/L. By comparison, the salinity of
ordinary seawater is typically around 35 g/L.
In
1987, the continuing shrinkage split the lake into two separate bodies of
water, the North Aral and the South Aral Sea. An artificial channel was dug to
connect them, but that connection was gone by 1999 as the two seas continued to
shrink. In 2003, the South Aral further divided into eastern and western
basins. Shrinkage of the lake also created the Aralkum, a desert on the former
lake bed. Since then the loss of the North Aral has been partially reversed.
In
the 1960s, in a meeting held in Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan, the USSR's
deputy minister of irrigation talked about Soviet plans for boosting cotton
production by diverting the two main rivers to irrigate the plantations. In
that meeting, someone from the audience shouted "But what will happen to
the Aral Sea!" "The Aral", the deputy minister responded,
"will have to die off gracefully." (Natalya Antelava, BBC News).
Many
decades later, the governor of the Aralsk region, an area affected by the
disaster, Nazhbagin Musabaev, said: "The Aral Sea did not die, the Aral
Sea was murdered."
It
is absolutely clear that the imperialist rulers in the Soviet Union were aware
of the consequences of their economic projects and their impacts on the Aral
Sea, but the driving force was the capitalist mode of production, which
requires the maximum profit in the shortest time….
The environment
and the social system
Two-thirds
of the services (food, water, medicines, pollination, etc.) provided by nature
to humankind are in serious decline worldwide, according to a 2005 UN report.
About half of the rain forests have vanished. All this has been mainly caused
by capitalist economic activities. But what is also important is that much of
this environmental devastation is concentrated in parts of the world dominated
by imperialist powers. The imperialist powers consume a hugely disproportional
share of world resources and the oppressed nations bear a terribly
disproportional share of the burden of the environmental crisis. Therefore the
struggle to save the planet is bound up with the struggle against imperialism
on the world scale.
The
natural ecosystems of our planet have already been seriously damaged. If we do
not protect and preserve fast-vanishing ecosystems, and do not move to stem
climate change, this planet could become inhabitable. It urgently needs a
radically different social and economic system, one that would take into
account the short and long term effects of any project on humanity as a whole
as well as the sustainability of such projects.
To
reverse the relationship between people and nature as it is under the
capitalist system, first the relationships among people must change. As long as
unjust, oppressive and exploitative relations exist in society, nature can not
escape plunder, abuse and destruction. What else do you expect from a system that
has no respect for people, let alone nature?
Any
given economic enterprise or sector of production has impact beyond its own
operations, on the larger economy and society. Under capitalism, capitalists do
not take into account these larger environmental and societal costs of their
activities. The devastation of our planet is a living/dying example of that.
In
a genuine socialist economy, the larger costs and benefits of economic activity
must become the concern of the society. This means analysing problems and
contradictions that any economic activity may create, not just in the country,
but internationally. It means acquiring humanity's most advanced understanding
and unleashing the creativity of the masses in solving problems and
contradictions in the service of preserving and the further flourishing of our
planet's whole environment.
The
capitalist-imperialist system is not capable of meeting the needs of the people
as well as nature. They are not capable of protecting it but will do everything
to destroy it if that is what profit commands.
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