Reflections

On Climate and Empire

In many respects, Uzbekistan felt like an entirely different world. I say that with an awareness and in spite of orientalist mythology of Central Asia. As much as I do not want to admit it, I did come to Uzbekistan with an inkling of interest for exotic spicy dishes and silk markets. My visit shattered those illusions. Uzbekistan is not like any place I had ever visited in my life, with a profoundly distinct history of development than that in the West and certainly far from the West’s imagination of Central Asia.

Prior to my trip, I had seen firsthand and in my research the relationship between conquest over the environment and conquest over other peoples. I grew up in the American South, where colonization cleared vast forest and swamp land to make way for plantations, backyards, and highways. The same dynamics that produce those inequalities exacerbate the impacts of destructive weather events. Urban flight shifted the flows of infrastructure investment to serve the few in far suburbs. The highways and parking lots they produced to support automobile transportation lead to greater runoff. At the same time, lower income families find housing along the highways due to its relative affordability. As a result, flooding hurt working class families the hardest. The challenge was not only local but regional. I remember in 2004 when Louisianan Black and Hispanic residents found new homes in the neighborhood after they had lost theirs from Hurricane Katrina.

The relationship between climate and empire in Uzbekistan is vastly different than the ones I had explored in my youth and adulthood. In Uzbekistan, I learned from locals that the Aral Sea has diminished more than a few times in human history (a fact confirmed in the archaeological record). As early as 1220, the Aral Sea was once drained to a level lower than previous states due to climatic and anthropogenic forces. Legend has it that the Aral Sea was restored when Genghis Khan demolished upstream dams in his trail of conquest across Asia. Up until this point, I had only conceived the relationship of empire with the environment as one of expert management vis-a-vis engineers and infrastructure. While this is certainly true in the case of the American and European imperial power, the recent history of the Aral Sea begins with empire unleashing the capacity of the Earth to capture and control territories.

This point is important - there is nothing inherently contradictory between ecology and empire. Empires can and often do depend on and improve their environment to preserve their hold on power. Likewise, resistance to empire can often take the form of environmental warfare. A critical component of the Ukrainian defense of Kyiv rested on intentional flooding to slow the advance of Russian forces. The scenes of empire in Samarqand and Khiva showcased a profound relationship with animality and sustainable water management. They too were empires.

Soaked cotton field (Zaki Alattar, March 31, 2022. Kegeyli, UZ)

The answer may lie somewhere in the history of empire in Uzbekistan and the history of empire more broadly. There is so much here to unpack but here is an outline. The successful colonization of America set off a race amongst European powers. Following their model, the Russian tsars took up the colonization of their southern neighbors. Accelerated by cotton shortages from the American Civil War, the cotton khanates of Khiva became a prime target. The Bolshevik Revolution sought to utilize the valuable cotton resources to fuel their rapid industrialization. By the 1960s, the Cold War had driven central planners to continuously raise production quotas beyond the limits of the fragile desert river environment. Uzbek soviet leaders began to defraud their superiors in Moscow by inflating their production levels. The exposure of the fraud was one factor in the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Today, the environment is still heavily exploited to sustain Uzbekistan’s position in global trade networks.

March Geography and Economics Month School Board (Zaki Alattar, March 24, 2022. Kegeyli, UZ)

There are many questions left to answer. How does cotton, a water-intensive, highly durable fiber source, connect modes of empire from the American South to the Egyptian Nile Delta, to Soviet Uzbekistan? What can be said about the liberalization of Uzbekistan under the new president? Is the Ecological Party of Uzbekistan a legitimate environmental movement or a greenwashing effort to placate the devastated agricultural communities of Karakalpakstan? To many of these questions and more, only time will tell.

Soviet Utopianism & Neoliberal’s Cruel Optimism

It is worth pausing here to discuss the recent interest in the concept of the ‘anthropocene’ embellished by Dipesh Chakrabarty. The discourse instructs us to imagine the omnipresence of climatic collapse. Everywhere, all at once. Change is coming - we are told - it is already here. The ‘anthropocene’ is a conception of nature and humanity that could have only originated in a colonial context. It reimagines the a past, unmarked Earth and a present poisoned planet. Such a move centers the European industrial revolution, and more greatly, the settling of the American west. It is not surprising how the concept of the Anthropocene conjures a sense of doom and inevitably. Envisioning the Earth disturbed from a prior state of relative equilibrium, it mirrors Christian eschatological visions of the fall from the Garden of Eden and the coming Six Age as a time of reckoning for humanity’s sin. The human, of course, are not the Soviets who drove Karakalpakstan into a cotton-induced environmental disaster, but white men in the West. Mel Chen’s work Animacies speaks directly to this conception of hierarchies of agency and animation in painstaking detail.

The villagers of Karakalpakstan had no such apprehension. Their relationship to the coming storm is that it has largely already come. The depletion of the sea, the salts, the lack of clean water is a past tense for them. The lifeblood to these remote desert khanates are its twin rivers: the Sir Darya and Amu Darya. They were concerned about how shifting climate patterns could lead to sharper winter frosts and drier, hotter summer days. Somewhere between a soviet utopian vision and neoliberal freedom from restrictive quotas, Uzbeks are hopeful that technological advancement and the strength of their community and nation will allow them to continue to adapt to the coming challenges just as they have during their own lives and the lives of their predecessors.

World War II Memorial Park Renovation Plans (Zaki Alattar, March 26, 2022. Kegeyli, UZ)

As hopeful as they are, their efforts may be a stretch. Proposals for their future seem comically far from scope. A project proposal at a construction site I found in Kegeyli with thick grasses in the middle of a desert and a full size rollercoaster (that seemed to have been designed in Rollercoaster Tycoon 2) could have only been the conjuring of a bizarre fusion of Soviet Utopian thinking and neoliberal fantasy.

Sufism and Eschatology in the ‘Anthropocene’

Sufi Water Artworks (Zaki Alattar, April 3, 2022. Tashkent, UZ)

At the center of Tashkent City, a glittering glass and silver playground reminiscent of Gunel’s description of Abu Dhabi’s Masdar City in Spaceship in the Desert, we had run into a haven of Sufi spirituality and Zoroastrian counter-mythology. It was puzzling. No doubt the reemergence of religious practice in the capital could be traced to the recent political and economic liberalization. It felt like Uzbekistan had not gotten the message that finance capitalism and Sufist ideology mix as well as water and oil. Funnily enough, that is exactly what we were there to do, dripping oil in a vat of water to print mesmerizing patterns onto paper.

Exploring the art gallery within the mosque that had only reopened after being sealed for decades, I was struck by the melding of animal/human agencies. I was reminded of the enormous mosaics of tigers on the madrasas of the Registan in Samarqand. Animal figures are rarely depicted in Islamic art in Arabia. The works reminded me of Anand Taneja’s work in Jinnealogy on the merging of human/non-human agencies in ‘peripheral’ Islamicates. While there were no jinn here, I could not help but feel the cultural embodiment of pride, expression, and joy in animal beings. While Soviet architecture and art often demonstrated rigid utilitarian prowess, Sufi works emphasized a sort of chaotic harmony. Reading Anna Gade’s Muslim Environmentals offers insight into the Sufi relationship to the environment as one between creator and creation. Sufis engage the world as a means to God, often replicating what could be considered a form of environmentalism and conservation in their efforts.

In this odd place, I heard of stories that elaborated a future beyond empire and economy, of ancient water tunnels and temples lost to time. Here there was a form of environment hope and a method of being directed toward the future that not sutured to empire. I hope to learn more about these projects, whether to restore qanat systems and aquifers and to think beyond borders in aim of a clean water for the people of Uzbekistan and beyond.