Tigers to return to extinct Caspian tiger range
& what it means for global wildlife conservation
Hello! My name is Saxon. Thanks for joining us here on Beyond Catastrophe’s first “story”. I’m a documentary filmmaker currently producing a series about the future of the Aral Sea region, called Mission: Find Aral. Here, I would like to share a remarkable wildlife conservation story that I became aware of in my time living…
Environment and Post-Soviet Transformation in Kazakhstan’s Aral Sea Region: Sea Changes
Abstract: The Aral Sea is well known for its devastating regression over the second half of the twentieth century, and for its recent partial restoration. Environment and Post-Soviet Transformation in Kazakhstan’s Aral Sea Region is the first book to explore what these monumental changes have meant to those living on the sea’s shores. Following the…
Video: Aral: is there life after death?
This video explores the ways that the drying of the Aral Sea has created a new desert habitat and how ecologists can learn from this process. Have a look at some of the creatures in the Encyclopedia of Life. Russian with English subtitles [Warning: contains unsettling images and offensive language].
Journal article: The Benefits of Marginality: The Great Famine around the Aral Sea, 1930-1934
Abstract: Based on research in Kazakhstani and Russian archives, this article is a regional study of the 1931–1933 Soviet famine. It compares Soviet policies in the southern and northern “halves” of the Aral Sea region. While the Kazaks in the northern part of the region suffered from the famine, the Karakalpaks in the south did…
Journal article: The Fluctuating Aral Sea: A Multidisciplinary-Based History of the Last Two Thousand Years
Abstract: The Aral Sea (an intracontinental saline lake in western Central Asia) is of great interest because of its rapid shrinkage during the last 50 years, which caused catastrophic environmental and socio-economic consequences for the region and its population. Geoscientists established the existence of similar multiple fast and deep lake level fluctuations in the past;…
Book: Pipe Dreams: Water and Empire in Central Asia’s Aral Sea Basin
Abstract: The drying up of the Aral Sea – a major environmental catastrophe of the late twentieth century – is deeply rooted in the dreams of the irrigation age of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a time when engineers, scientists, politicians, and entrepreneurs around the world united in the belief that universal scientific…
