I recall my anticommunist high school history teacher kicking up quite a bit of dust over the destruction of the Aral Sea. My understanding is that the sea was drained to irrigate cotton plantations, but that’s the extent of my knowledge on the subject.
It’s often cited as an example of environmental degradation under socialism, and functions well as a “whataboutism” when someone suggests that socialism leads to better environmental outcomes and ecological justice.
Even though I feel it’s an apples and oranges comparison, I do think it’s worth discussing how such missteps can be avoided in current and future socialist projects. What were the incentive structures in place that resulted in the drainage of the Aral Sea, and how can we ensure something like it doesn’t happen again? What have AES states done to this effect?
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The fact is that development always has costs. There was a cost that had to be paid for developing agriculture in Central Asia to be able to firstly feed the growing population there and secondly to establish an economic base to support further industrialization in a region that has always been environmentally precarious. What is often ignored in this discussion is a comparison of the living standards of the local populations before and after the Soviet agricultural, industrialization and urbanization projects. Was it worth the cost to lift millions of people out of a miserable existence at the edge of the subsistence minimum? It depends on who you ask - those who were lifted out of poverty would say yes.
In the same vein we can ask if the environmental cost of China’s rapid development has been worth it. And remember that the environmental cost of Europe and North America’s industrial development was far higher historically, it just happened a century prior. The difference is that socialist states are the only ones that have the ability to then, once the rapid development has been achieved, mobilize the vast resources necessary to repair said damage, and the only ones with the will to adopt more sustainable future policies like China which is now leading the world in green energy and combatting desertification.
Westerners believe that it is worth letting people in the global south continue to suffer from poverty and underdevelopment just so long as their favorite tourism destinations remain pristine and untouched by industrialization, meanwhile their own comfortable first world lifestyles are maintained at huge cost to the global environment.
If the USSR was still around it would have found a way to deal with the Aral Sea problem, after all it was under Stalin that some of the first ever environmental protection policies in the world were put in place such as the protection of soil from erosion by the planting of thousands and thousands of kilometers of forest belts. In fact it is precisely because of the dismantling of socialism and the re-emergence of corrupt bourgeois capitalist regimes in Central Asia in the 90s that the plans that had been developed during Soviet times to address the issue - which had already been recognized - were abandoned.
If you look up the satellite photos of the region and pay attention to when the shrinking started to really accelerate you see that most of the Aral Sea did not start to disappear until after the breakup of the USSR. The policies of post-Soviet republics were disastrous, they sacrificed everything for the sake of short term profits, living standards, industry, infrastructure, and yes the environment too. Everything was cannibalized for private profit and Western financial interests got extremely wealthy off of this looting. So it is the height of hypocrisy to blame socialism and the USSR when the capitalists have done and do far worse.