The 2025-26 CEERES Director’s Lecture
In 2017, United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres called the disappearance of Central Asia’s Aral Sea, “probably the biggest ecological catastrophe of our time.” Once the world’s fourth largest inland body of water, the Aral Sea began to shrink dramatically in the 1960s, as Soviet officials directed water from the rivers that fed the sea towards cotton production. By 1983, the Soviet Union ranked as the world’s second largest producer of cotton following China. The people who lived around the sea, however, were confronting a wide-ranging disaster that encompassed environmental degradation, cultural destruction, economic collapse and sweeping impacts on human health. Centering the people who lived around the sea and their stories, this talk examines the causes and the consequences of the disaster. It shows how the story of the sea and its people challenges our assumptions about the Soviet Union’s demise. And rather than framing the Aral case as a uniquely Soviet story, the talk will consider what we can learn from it, as we confront similar cases of shrinking bodies of water around the globe.
If you cannot attend in person, please register to watch the talk on Zoom.
Sarah Cameron is associate professor of history at the University of Maryland, College Park. She is a historian of Russia and the Soviet Union, with research interests in genocide and crimes against humanity, environmental history and the societies and cultures of Central Asia. Broadly, her work has explored how greater attention to the Soviet Union’s eastern periphery might challenge conventional understandings of the Soviet field. Her book on the Kazakh famine of the 1930s, The Hungry Steppe: Famine, Violence, and the Making of Soviet Kazakhstan (Cornell University Press, 2018) won numerous awards in the United States. It also provoked intense discussion in Kazakhstan where the famine remains a largely forbidden topic, in part due to the country’s close relationship with Russia. At present, she is at work on new book, from which this talk draws, about the causes and consequences of the demise of Central Asia’s Aral Sea. In 2022, she was named a Carnegie Fellow.
Presented by CEERES and the Committee on Environment, Geography and Urbanization (CEGU).