When Water Turns to Sand

0:00I'm Aisha Roscoe. You're listening to The Sunday Story. Today, we head to Central Asia, where water is a precious resource that's running dangerously low. Unless something changes fast, the World Bank warns that as many as 2.4 million people across the region could be without water and forced to abandon their homes by 2050. Nowhere is the catastrophic loss of water made more visible and harrowing than at the Aral Sea. This sea, actually a saline lake, was once one of the world's largest lakes. It covered a vast area in the former Soviet republics of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. It was life-sustaining for this arid region.

0:47The sea's ecosystem included a unique mix of saltwater and freshwater species. Fishing communities watering the sea plied the waters for sturgeon, trout, flounder, carp, catfish. But in the 1950s and 60s, the Soviet Union increased its efforts to divert water from the two rivers that sustained the sea. Without that river water, the sea got saltier and saltier and began to evaporate under the desert sun. Today, the Aral Sea is nearly gone. Some estimates say it has shrunk down to about 10 % of its original size. The UN Environment Program has called the sea's destruction, quote, one of the most staggering disasters of the 20th century.

1:34In today's episode, we hear from NPR above-the-fray fellow Valerie Kipnis. She traveled to this region of Central Asia, hoping to understand not just how the sea was lost, but what is being done now to save the little water that remains? Here's Valerie with her story. When trying to make sense of what's happened to the RLC, it's easy to get lost in the details. So let me start with this fact. There's no longer one RLC. As the water disappeared and the sea dried up, it actually split into two. So now there are two seas. The northern RLC sits in Kazakhstan, and the southern Aral Sea in Uzbekistan.

2:17In the spring, I went on a long drive through Uzbekistan to see what remains of the southern portion. To get there, I first had to cross miles and miles of desert, the Aralkum Desert. It's the youngest desert in the world, and it formed as the Aral Sea dried up. After four hours of driving, I reached Moinac. It was once a bustling port city, home to 40 ,000 people, and a cannery that produced millions of cans of fish a year. But no longer. Not here. Not anymore. Instead, Moynak is now known as a tourist site for those inclined towards disaster. People come to see six massive rusted ships moored in a vast, all-encompassing desert.

3:10I made it. I made it to the bottom of the RLC, the graveyard of ships.

3:21Nearby are the abandoned fish processing plants and canning factories, shuttered and rusted like the ships. When the winds blow, as they often do, they serve toxic dust that sweeps through the city, making it hard to breathe without coughing. I get why people come here. The dry lake bed, the whirling gusts of wind, abandoned boats in a desert. It looks rather Mad Maxian, dystopian. I understand the desire to be confronted by the things that scare you most. A world without water.

3:56In 2017, the U.N. Secretary General, Antonio Guterres, visited Moyniac and saw a sort of allegory of man-made natural disaster. After his trip, he issued a statement saying that the RLC's disappearance, quote, demonstrates that men can destroy the planet.

4:21My guide for the trip was a man named Yusup Kamalov. He's an engineer, an environmental activist. Since the 90s, he's been trying to figure out how to solve Uzbekistan's water problem. This was a reef. It was a bay here. When he looks at Moynak, he gets a bit nostalgic. Yeah, I was swimming exactly 50 years ago, in 1973, right here. Yusup grew up in this region, and the majority of his adult life has been spent living in the wake of the sea's shrinking. But now, we had to travel even further through the desert, until we finally reached what's left of the southern portion of the sea. And when we arrived, I was a bit stunned.

5:06I don't know, it feels kind of surreal to be here. To think that it was all one big body of water and now it's just this little part. The water is beautiful, blue, and dangerously salty. So much so that it stings, even with the tiniest cut in your hand. The shoreline is cluttered with tiny shrimp larvae called artemia. The red one is Artemia. Known to survive in the saltiest of waters. Instead of sand, there's all these hard clumps of clay that kind of look just like rocks, but then you step on them and you feel your body just sink in a few centimeters. And there's all these Artemia, and you can tell because it looks like red pebbles everywhere.

5:50In his lifetime, Yusuf has watched water turn to clay and sand. Freedom to our realm!

6:03But he's not the only one. Everyone here is a kind of historian of water. To understand what's happened to the RLC, I need to turn from the sea to the two major rivers that feed it, the Amodarya and the Siridarya. These rivers are born from glaciers and mountains near China. Then they traverse Central Asia through six different countries for thousands of miles. They've yielded and sustained human life for over 40 ,000 years. Medieval Islamic texts refer to them as two of the four rivers of paradise. There are songs and stories written about them. The Seer Daria feeds the northern Aral Sea, where there's more water in part because Kazakhstan built a huge dam there.

6:45The Amu Daria feeds the southern sea in Uzbekistan, where I was. It's like the Nile of Central Asia. But the Amudarya is tapped all along its course. In the past few years, the Taliban even started building a massive canal to take a bunch of water from the Amudarya for Afghanistan. Civilizations have been doing this, taking water from the river to irrigate their crops, for thousands of years. But it wasn't until the 19th century, when Imperial Russia took over Central Asia, that the approach to altering the river's course really changed.

7:26Back then, there was a common understanding that RLC should die. And that instead, the Sriva should be used for economic development of Central Asia. This is Rahat Khromanbaev, a biology professor in Kazakhstan who studies the RLC and its long history. He says the imperial Russian leadership thought it was wasteful to let valuable fresh water go to a salty lake. And so they diverted, dammed, and drained the river to grow cotton in the desert. White gold, as it's sometimes called. Then, the Soviets took over, and they ramped up the cotton industry by building a network of unlined, uncovered irrigation canals.

8:11Their mission was to bleed the Amadaria into Uzbekistan's vast deserts in an attempt to turn the Central Asian steppe into a cotton oasis. By the 1980s, it was reported that water from the river had almost entirely stopped reaching the sea. In 91, the Soviet Union collapsed. Uzbekistan became its own country. And yet, the cotton harvest continued. Today, Uzbekistan is the world's sixth-largest producer of cotton. 70 % of the country's land is devoted to the crop. And Uzbekistan directs 90 % of its scarce water to agriculture. As for the Amudarya, it eventually turns into a delta, made up of a collection of small streams that remind me of a tangle of snakes.

9:00Eventually, even these disappear into the desert. I went to the Amadaria Delta to get a closer look. You're listening to The Sunday Story. We'll be right back. Support for this podcast and the following message come from Betterment. Don't just imagine a better future. Start investing in one with Betterment. Betterment helps people and small businesses put their money to work by automating to make savings simpler, optimizing to make investing smarter, and building innovative technology backed by financial experts. So be invested in yourself. Be invested in your business. Be invested in better with Betterment at Betterment.com.

9:40Investing involves risk, performance not guaranteed. This message comes from the NPR Wine Club, which has generated over$1.75 million to support NPR programming. Whether buying a few bottles or joining the club, you can learn more at nprwineclub.org slash podcast. Must be 21 or older to purchase. This message comes from NPR sponsor Walmart. Did you know that Walmart is one of Fortune's 100 best companies to work for in 2025? It's no surprise. Walmart is investing$1 billion in training and development to help associates build lasting careers with or without a degree. In fact, 75 % of Walmart management started in hourly rolls.

10:24With benefits like healthcare, paid parental leave, and tuition support, Walmart isn't just a place to work, it's a place to grow. Learn more at walmart.com slash spark. This message comes from KeyBank. Growing a successful business has never been easy. That's why KeyBank offers curated strategies to help your business grow today and into the future. Reimagine business as usual. KeyBank opens doors. More at key.com slash b2b. One day, Yusup and I drove out into the Amudaria Delta, where the land flattens into desert and farmland. Large white crystals of salt adorn the sides of roads. I wanted to see how this last section of the river water was being used by the people who rely on it most, farmers.

11:16Old irrigation canals cut through the agricultural fields. When Yusup pointed to them, he shook his head. Let's start from irrigation canals. We are losing about 40 % of water before the fields. The canals are extremely inefficient. They leak water and allow much of it to evaporate. When I got closer to the fields, I noticed another thing, the texture of the soil. I had never seen dirt like this, pale gray and hard to the touch, encrusted by sand and salt. The quality is so poor that farmers told me they have to flood the fields with water to wash some of the salt away before even planting anything.

11:58The farmers I met were reluctant to talk. Uzbekistan is technically considered an authoritarian state, and people have little to gain from speaking up against the government. This place belongs to the autonomous region known as Karkalpaxtan, and what's happening here could be a story of its own. But for now, let me just say that the Karakalpaks are an ethnic minority who have suffered the brunt of the RLC's disappearance. Two years ago, they experienced a brutal government crackdown during large-scale protests. So the people here are understandably distrustful of reporters. But one farmer, Khalif, was willing to share a little, if I kept his last name private.

12:42He wore his suit jacket over his worn T-shirt, a flat hat to shade his eyes. He walked me over to his plot of land and explained that recent rains had destroyed his crops and that he was now in the process of retilling the soil. This was a difficult loss, he told me. He also told me how he learned to grow cotton from his parents, how for years he was a migrant worker in Kazakhstan but came back home to try his hand at what he knows best, farming. These days he grows cotton because he says the government requires him to do so on this land. But getting a decent yield of the crop gets harder with every year.

13:19The weather is unreliable.

13:29The summers are really hot. The rains that we're supposed to get on time, they're either early or too late. Overall, the climate has changed and it's affecting us. Central Asia's temperatures are increasing at twice the global average. Experts say this is a consequence of the loss of the RLC because the presence of a large body of water once helped moderate the temperatures in the region. But the fact remains. Here, on the Central Asian steppe, the water crisis is largely a human-made problem. It started with Imperial Russia, remained with the Soviets, and continues to this day with the Uzbek government.

14:10Because the farmers still work as slaves for government, not as a free businessman or free entrepreneur. During our drive along the cotton fields, Yusup explained to me that Uzbekistan still sort of functions like it did in the Soviet days, like a planned economy. Farmers don't own their land. They lease it from the government. And the government has closed ties to these private cotton production companies, which pressure or force farmers to sign contracts specifying which crops they must grow, like cotton, and how much they should sell it for, usually at a very low price. You're sure of this?

14:54Absolutely. So they're buying it at a low price, and then they're turning it into textile or whatever. And then they sell it for a much higher price. Much higher price. So it's farmers who lose out on the fruits of their labor, which means that their relationship to their crops and land is fractured. And using water efficiently is often one of the last things on their minds. It is useless to tell them that safe water because they don't have any incentives or stimulus to safe water. Even as the water disappears. I spoke with other farmers too, even more reluctant to discuss the details of the water crisis.

15:43And most of them would take me to their irrigation canals, which were bone dry, and explain how little water they got this year, how they wished for more. And they were leaving it up to chance.

15:59God willing, one said, the water will return.

16:05When I spoke to government agriculture officials, they told me farmers are actually free to grow what they want. But what some farmers told me was this. They're unable to get loans, fertilizers, export licenses, and even cotton seeds without signing contracts with these private companies. For Yousoup, this whole system is driven by a kind of post-Soviet inertia. We are still in the past. We are still in the Soviet life by Soviet agriculture, Soviet economics, Soviet management. That is why it is the biggest problem to somehow to open it and to open your eyes for the future.

17:00You're listening to The Sunday Story. Stay with us.

17:07I wanted to hear what the government thought about all this. And so I spent a lot of time talking to government water officials during my reporting to hear them out. And here's the bottom line. The government admits that there are a lot of inefficiencies to address. After all, Uzbekistan is among the 20 most wasteful countries when it comes to water use and agriculture. But officials maintain they're working as fast as possible to find solutions to the water crisis. President Shavkat Mirzaev has declared 2024 the start of a, quote, emergency regime of water conservation. He's also budgeted$2 billion to the water sector, prioritizing efforts to line the out-of-date canals to prevent so much water from leaking before even reaching farmers' fields.

17:52And I witnessed it happening with my own eyes. I watched as canals were lined with concrete, slowly but surely. I was also invited to observe government-sponsored workshops that helped farmers transition out of using so much water. At one of them, I wound up in a back room with several local officials, all of them ready to show me what they'd been doing, holding stacks of papers with details of the plans they were executing to save water. They really wanted to tell me about lining the canals and all the farmers they had bussed into their water management schools to teach them how to modernize their irrigation methods.

18:29At one point, they even brought in this massive glass container with a new species of less water-consuming cotton that they were planning to introduce to farmers. And I just kept pushing back. But where was all this years ago, when the region had started running out of water? How about when the sea dried up? And how quickly could they really get all this done now? Mostly, I wanted them to engage with me on a bigger picture, existential level. What was the point of all this if the Uzbek government wasn't really willing to give up their attachment to cotton? What was the point of promoting conservation efforts if at the very same time the system was encouraging overconsumption?

19:09And I mean, we really got into it. I think they sort of felt like I was ignoring all their efforts. And I felt like they were talking out of both sides of their mouth. Ultimately, I couldn't shake the feeling that the onus of change was falling onto the people with the least amount of power, the least amount of money, and the most to lose. The farmers. At the end of our meeting, there was this moment where the official in charge of lining the canals turned to me and said, Your shirt, what's it made of?

19:44Cotton, cotton, cotton. They pointed out my shirt. They pointed at the tablecloth. It's everywhere. It's in everything. What would you have us do? But there is a lot being done. By scientists and engineers and economists, all working tirelessly on solutions of all kinds, thinking about how to change infrastructure or create new drought-resistant crops. They're all trying to move the dial for the sake of the future. This is all licorice, right? This is all licorice. I visited an outdoor garden laboratory growing hardy plants and soil collected from the former lake bed. It's run by a man named Bahidjan Habibulayev.

20:28He switched careers to do this work. I saw how people are fighting against the desert. It brought tears to my soul. I said, I'll not be a diplomat. Let me take this direction. And since then, I've been doing it. Now he spends his time teaching farmers how to reduce their water use. He helps find species of crops that require less water and money to grow, which farmers can then sell on their own as a way to supplement their income. His lab feels like a garden of Eden in the middle of the endless desert. There are various crossbreeds of apples and licorice and mung beans. What's that? — What's that?

21:06— What's that? — Khabib Ulaevich's latest obsession is with getting farmers to use runoff water from the Amodarya to farm carp and underground ponds, and then use that same water, filtered by the fish, to grow strawberries in greenhouses. He's not particularly nostalgic, or interested in bringing water back to save the RLC. He's interested in saving the environment that's here, today, and in preparing farmers for a future that's fast approaching. And at the end of the day, he's an optimist, uninterested in being bogged down in all the faults of the system that I point out.

21:44Many people are changing. If you look at what people were doing 15 years ago, and compare it to now, things have changed for the better. But so many questions remain. Will it be enough? Will it come fast enough? And who will bear the costs and burdens of change? These are the same questions people and places face across the globe as temperatures rise and demand for water grows. Who will make the sacrifices and when?

22:17There's actually a moment, a person who looms in my mind when I think about the sacrifices that will one day be asked of this region and what all of this means for the future. She's 17. Her name is Isulu, and I met her in the city of Nukus. Nukus sits in the northwestern corner of Uzbekistan, a couple hours away from the RLC. It's also one of the last places the Amudarya still flows as a river. For centuries, Nukus was an important settlement on the banks of what was once the wide Amudarya, a stop along the Silk Road. Now, the city of 300 ,000 struggles with one of the highest poverty rates in the country.

22:57And for a time, as the sea dried up, residents here struggled with mass cases of tuberculosis and cancer. It's a hard legacy that's been passed down to a younger generation. I met Isulu at a local coffee shop called Cinnamon, a place with the best coffee in town. So I went often. She actually came up to me and just plopped herself down next to me. You're from America, she asked. Yep. Isulu freaked out. Plainly walking in the streets of New York, oh my God. That's like American dream, have American dream. Like living in America is like a dream for us. But in a way, anywhere but here is the dream.

23:36Everybody is aiming for abroad. 50%, at least 50 % are trying to study abroad. It's not just the students. Many families send away children to study or work. To Russia, Korea, and Kazakhstan. For now, Isulu lives with her family. right by the Amudarya. She invited me to go there.

24:03Isulu's father, just like Yusuf, has vivid memories of the water that was here just a few decades ago.