Spring 2025 Colloquium -Sarah Cameron

History, University of Maryland

Title: Elusive Water:  The Life and Death of the Aral Sea

Abstract: In 2017, United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres called the disappearance of Central Asia’s Aral Sea “probably the biggest ecological catastrophe of our time.”  But in the more than sixty-year period that the sea has been shrinking, one theme has remained consistent: The disappearance of the sea has been represented largely as an environmental problem (the loss of the sea, the changes to the landscape) rather than as a human catastrophe deeply intertwined with these environmental shifts.  People got pushed out of the story.  We still don’t understand exactly how many people have fled the Aral Sea lands or where they went.  And even as local residents have kept on dying, there have been almost no serious studies of the disaster’s impact on human health.  This talk will explain how and why the people of the sea came to be marginalized.  It analyzes how this process of peripheralization (which spans three different political systems, Russian imperial rule, Soviet rule, and post-Soviet rule) shaped and continues to shape the disaster’s course. And rather than framing the Aral case as a uniquely Soviet story, the talk considers what we can learn from it, as we confront similar cases of shrinking bodies of water around the globe.