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2024/09/25
In the middle of the Eurasian continent there once was a large, mighty sea, fed by two strong rivers plenty with water, originating in the mountains of Pamir and Tien Shan. Ptolemy, the geographer, spoke about the Oxiana Palus, the delta of the Oxus river, whence the large body of water was visible.
Two rivers fed that sea. The one in the south was called Oxus and the one in the north was called Iaxartes. Today the sea is known as the Aral Sea in native Turkic languages, and the rivers are called Amu Darya (south) and Syr Darya (north), from their Persian names.
This sea was around the size of the entire island of Ireland before 1960. But today it is extinct.
Along with the sea, several endemic species were gone as well. Gone is the Aral Trout (Salmo trutta aralensis), a salmonid native to the sea and the two rivers. So are the several native sturgeon species: Aral Sea ship sturgeon (Acipenser nudiventris), Syr Darya sturgeon (Pseudoscaphirhynchus fedtschenkoi), its cousin Amu Darya sturgeon (Pseudoscaphirhynchus kaufmanni). As well as a whole myriad of Cyprinidae (carp) species, its local Esox (pike) population, and others, which are now either critically endangered or plain extinct.
What do women have to do with this? Bare with me.
The rivers feeding the Aral Sea flow through Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. The northern river - Syr Darya - flows into the North Aral lake, which to this day remains intact, primarily due to the Kazakh government following through on its promises to implement measures to combat the Aral Sea's extinction. Such measures included the World Bank-funded 2005 North Aral dam. But also due to the fact that the Syr Darya river is not exploited nearly to the same extent as Amu Darya.
Unlike Kazakhstan, which can afford to have its budget gaps filled with exports of the country's vast oil and natural gas reserves, Uzbekistan has fewer options. Enter the Soviet legacy - the cotton industry.
It was during the Soviet era when the Aral Sea began shrinking in size, and the dissolution of the Soviet Union has not reversed this trend.
Uzbekistan's heavy dependency on the cotton exports is supported by the Amu Darya's waters and the 40-million strong population, with enough surplus of teachers, schoolchildren, students, petty bureaucrats and the conscripts, who are called on seasonally to gather the cotton harvest, which is then exported to textile mills overseas.
Notwithstanding the mandatory, unpaid labor by the Uzbek government - infamous for its near-totalitarian practices and repression - the ecological damage alone is immense, as the sea is starved of the water that is diverted to the cash crop. Alas, the true culprit is elsewhere. After all, the Uzbek state-owned or state-directed cotton enterprises only follow the same laws of supply and demand that their Soviet antecedents did, supplying the world markets with cheap carbon fuels, grains and other raw materials (while using the export income to build an invasion military force, but I digress).
The textile mills receiving the cotton are located primarily in countries like Indonesia, Vietnam and Bangladesh. There they receive orders from wholesalers from OECD countries, major economies from all over the world, to supply certain textile products.
T-shirts, blouses, underwear, socks, etc. All of these end up on the shelves of major clothing stores in your local malls. Whole multi-story hangars of freshly sewn clothes, in all sizes, colors, textures and visual flavors. Made cheap in Bangladesh from cotton picked by (all-but-in-name) slave labor in Uzbekistan, grown on the cotton plantations at the cost of life itself.
But why is there a need for so much of that cotton, so many textiles and so many clothes? Different colors, shapes, textures and sizes, seasonal variations, quickly coming and passing fashion fads, new patterns and designs, etc. Where does it all come from? And if it's all so redundant, then how does the industry stay afloat?
Enter the women.
I am under no illusion that women alone can afford all that clobber. It is no doubt that a lot of that comes in the form of husbands' and boyfriends' money, be it gifts or "shared" budget expenses.
Worse, when it does come from the woman's purse, it's the clueless young girls who waste their allowances to satisfy their own envy and pride. In more horrifying cases, it's the single mothers putting that cash into the ephemeral indulgence, often at the expense of their unfortunate child's future. A piece of unneeded thread that she will throw out or store in a basement in a few months, with the cash that could otherwise go into a well-paying index fund, saved for posterity.
And this leads me to mention the worst culprit. Mothers. Single or married, they will spend a fortune on buying rags for the kids, ever growing in size, and ever requiring new clothes to be "fit" for school.
A mother is never satisfied unless her son or daughter becomes the extension of her own pride and arrogance. Kids, especially girls, will internalize this attitude, and will start passing judgement on their peers sheerly out of their looks. Thus children never learn indifference, but only shame. Shame for their poverty, their inadequacy, their sense of staying out of touch with their peers.
What a shame indeed it is to not be a part of the mass murder of life in the name of a woman's vanity.
It is no wonder that upon entering the clothing store in any large city, the first thing you encounter is the women's department. Perhaps there are several of them in the same store. In order to get a pair of men's jeans, a leather belt and a t-shirt you may need to go back and forth on the escalator a few times. Finally, once you get to the checkout counter, a female clerk will process your order.
The thought of the extinct sea and its unique fauna doomed to oblivion will never pass her thought. Nor will the thought of those teachers and students who broke their back from morning till dawn picking the cotton in Uzbekistan.
Just like the same thoughts never enter the heads of the women during their weekly stroll to buy another piece of cloth they will never wear. Yet, these very women will brag about how they only wear non-animal products, how they are ethical eaters who consume only vegan-friendly slop. As if the dead fish of the Aral Sea cares. The non-animal raw material (cotton) was used to make their non-animal-made clothes. Just like their non-animal food crops they consume for lunch are made with agricultural produce that requires water diverted from wildlife, while the Merino sheep at the wool farms are being slaughtered en masse due to the drop in demand. How much more suffering in this world have they brought with their "ethical" consumerism?
Is it then safe to say that not only men's finances but the environment will only benefit if women's consumption disappeared overnight? I cannot say that for the people involved in the clothing industry. Perhaps they will suffer as much as the textile workers in Bangladesh, Vietnam or Indonesia, but I am sure that if the Aral Sea fish could talk and they knew why the water is gone, they would not object for there being no women left on earth.