Paper short abstract:

This paper explores local experiences of environmental change in the Aral Sea region of Kazakhstan, and uses them to re-cast the vulnerability and resilience paradigm which is often applied in the study of climate change.

Paper long abstract:

The desiccation of the Aral Sea is famous across the globe as one of the most serious anthropogenic disasters of the twentieth century: over a matter of decades, the fourth-largest inland body of water in the world receded dramatically owing to extraction of water from the sea's feeder rivers by the Soviet authorities to grow cotton and rice in Soviet Central Asia. The fishing industry collapsed and the climate in the region changed, with less rainfall, hotter summers and colder winters, and dust storms became frequent, with deleterious effects on health of local populations. However, my ethnographic research in the Kazakh part of the region shows that locally the sea's desiccation is not conceptualised as a disaster, not least because the Soviet authorities ensured that there was still work, in the fishing industry, even after the sea had dried up. Hence today, narratives of economic collapse following the collapse of the USSR overshadow narratives of ecological change, and complaints about toxic dust in the air are intertwined with commentary on corruption in Kazakhstan today. Therefore I argue, first, that experience of environmental change is always entangled with experiences of other forms of change and stability, especially economic, which may be only indirectly connected with environmental change; and, secondly, that the dominant framework for understanding resilience, as adaptive capacity of small-scale, bounded communities, needs to be re-thought in terms of the connections between different scales.