'There Are No Alternative Routes': Performing Afforestation in the Aral Seabed in Uzbekistan

• In Event: Legacies in Leaf: A Century of Making and Mapping Greenery in Soviet and Post-Soviet Contexts

Abstract

European environmental thinking about forests has left its literal mark on the worlds’ drylands. Afforestation initiatives, such as the planned shelterbelts of the Great Stalin Plan for the Transformation of Nature, have been a key tool to “improve” the desert and to allay state anxieties around arid lands. In this paper, I explore recent large-scale afforestation efforts of the Uzbek state on the dried Aral Seabed, the stated goal of which is to disable the movement of sand, dust and salt and slow the movement of air across the dried seabed. Viewing these trees as more-than-human infrastructure, I probe how both the “promise” of this infrastructure and the trees themselves are performative. Interweaving remote sensing analysis and ethnographic data, I show how the planting of trees on the Aral Seabed is not simply an effort to create a forest, but to perform global environmental stewardship to the world. Restoring functioning landscapes or ecosystems becomes less important than narrating hectares planted and showing tractors moving in unison. These statistics and images in turn shape ongoing mitigation of the Aral “catastrophe”, as large-scale tree plantations become seen as the only solution. I suggest ecosystem restoration instead requires taking a polyculture approach: slowing down, accepting non-scalability, and appreciating the quiet complexity of drylands, without orderly lines, countable trees, or forest aesthetics.

Author

• Kate F Shields, Rhodes College