It’s pretty easy to get grants for studies of man-made environmental devastation. So why does this clear case of Soviet destruction not get much study?
When Gill asked the team why they weren’t conducting fieldwork at the Aral Sea, they responded: “Are you crazy? No way! It’s too remote and dangerous there, you can’t really collect any data, and it’s so treacherous if you go there you could die!”
7 comments:
It's always easier to look over there where the lamp shines.
Eric Hines
Re-purpose the tech for the Mars rovers.
@ E Hines - I was going to use that street light joke myself. Thank you.
Back when I was active in the Environmental History field, everyone agreed that the USSR had almost the worst track record for environmental destruction (n.b. this was before China said "Hold my beer and watch this.") But no one wrote much about it, because of the lack of access to documents and sites, the lack of language skills, and an unwillingness to criticize the Communists. Capitalism was bad and got you grant money. Communism had been done incorrectly because of trying to compete with capitalism (and paid no grant money).
Even today, the environmental histories of China focus on the pre-1949 periods, or mostly gloss over post Mao (anything the Party says not to criticize).
LittleRed1
And with China, one reason to do that is they'll bar you from entry if you publish academic work critical of them, so you lose access to Chinese universities, archives, etc. At least, they have with one academic I know of. If your field is China, that can make research difficult.
To be fair, the Soviets had built a biological weapons research facility on an island in the middle of the Aral Sea (to contain any infected rats that might escape the facility, which they expected to happen), and basically just abandoned it at the fall of the Soviet Union. An island which is no longer an island, and there is nothing preventing the spread of their engineered diseases from spreading to the nearby countryside.
I personally would not be overeager to visit an area with strains of anthrax designed to be easily inhalable and more lethal. Nor the engineered bubonic plague which, while we have no actual proof has escaped the facility, strangely corresponds with a massive outbreak of plague in the towns surrounding the former Aral Sea. So were I an environmentalist wanting to study actual examples of ecological destruction by humans, and I had a choice between studying computer models in the US and doing fieldwork around the former Aralsk-7 weapons lab... I have to say I'd probably stick with the computer models as well.
Here's a good video detailing the Soviet mismanagement of the weapons lab (which I note is not mentioned in the article linked in the original post):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QMS6MGUtHH0
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