1 Introduction
Entering the Anthropocene, humans are confronted with a grim yet peculiar state of increasing natural landscapes inching closer to extinction. Natural lakes, such as the Aral Sea in Central Asia, the Owens Lake and the Great Salt Lake in the USA, and Lake Chad in Africa, all teeter on the brink of disappearance due to a combination of mismanagement, water exploitation, and climate change. Notably, the Aral Sea retains a mere 10% of its original volume
[1], highlighting the urgency of the situation. This article proposes a theoretical landscape design intervention for this desiccating lake, exploring approaches to designing a beautiful demise for such fading natural wonders. Given that extinction is irreversible, it also questions how landscape design can adapt to these "new-sublime landscapes" and investigates the role of landscape architects in assisting the public to process and navigate ecological grief.
2 Theoretical Support
The Aral Sea, originating at the end of the Neogene Period and fed by the Amu Darya and Syr Darya rivers with meltwater from the Tianshan Mountains
[1], was once the fourth-largest lake in the world. Intensive water diversion for cotton plantation across Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, and Turkmenistan since the 1960s has resulted in its significant reduction (Fig.1). Meanwhile, the desiccation of the Aral Sea leads to the emergence of a new desert—Aralkum Desert.
Fig.1 Timeline of the Aral Sea's desiccation and the exploitative history. |
Full size|PPT slide
This transformation introduces sand, salt, and dust across the Aral Sea Basin, causing salty dust storms that carry toxic pesticides from cotton fields, leading to respiratory issues, soil degradation, and decreased crop productivity in nearby areas
[2]. Moreover, the disappearance of this substantial water body has altered regional climate, resulting in colder winters and hotter summers, and accelerated the melting of adjacent glaciers
[3] (Fig.2). The decline of the Aral Sea has far-reaching effects, as dust from the lakebed spreads globally to areas as distant as Europe, the Himalayas, and even Antarctica
[4].
Fig.2 Regional spread of dust in the Aralkum Desert. |
Full size|PPT slide
The desiccation of the Aral Sea foretells the increasingly frequent experience of losing landscapes, ecosystems, and existing cultural man-land relationships. This encapsulates the concept of "ecological grief, " a "natural response to ecological losses" as defined by Ashlee Cunsolo and Neville Ellis
[5]. The following session will discuss various theories and approaches related to ecological grief.
2.1 Approaches to Ecological Grief
In the book
Mourning in the Anthropocene, Joshua Trey Barnett further delves deeper, portraying ecological grief as a multifaceted emotional response to humans' overpowering and uncontrollable relationship with nature
[6]. According to Barnett, this encompasses feelings of "awe, fear, disgust, enchantment, wonder, sympathy, empathy, anxiety, despair… gratitude." Building on ideas of environmental philosopher Glenn Albrecht, Barnett criticizes how mere awareness of the planetary crises is insufficient for mitigating the learned disasters. He warns that the acknowledgment of our guilt for intensifying ecological disasters might exacerbate "resignation and self-loathing" reactions since "enormous challenges can only be solved through collective action."
There are two approaches of ecological grief examined here: a self-resignation approach adopted by Michael Heizer in his artwork City, and a human-centric problem-solving mindset based on Owen Lake's geoengineering approach.
In Heizer's
City, he critiques the built environment through the abstraction of vast urban structures
[7] and symbolizes the extensive capacity of human activity to transform natural landscapes. Its immense scale is to serve as a marker of human existence should human disappear on earth. The artwork successfully demonstrates the magnitude of human destruction. However, this earthmoving project is yet another destructive, human-centric project with negligence to the local site context and ecologies.
Geoengineering presents an alternative approach to addressing landscapes altered by human activities. For instance, Owens Lake, which, like the Aral Sea, is a drying lake threatened by severe dust storms. The region has adopted geoengineering-heavy waterless dust control measures that might provide valuable references for similar interventions in the Aral Sea. These measures include managing vegetation and designing tillage and sand-fence arrays for dust control and the retention of the lake, albeit requiring continuous maintenance to curb dust storms effectively. Such projects face criticism for their anthropocentric focus, neglecting the potential for symbiosis with non-human entities. Non-human as agencies is a concept from New Materialism advocated by Jane Bennett, Bruno Latour, and other anthropologists. They hold that all living things, abiotic chemicals, materials, and energy processes can impact and shape our environments
[8], acknowledging that humans are not in control of every aspect of the world in the Anthropocene. Thus, designing anthropogenic landscape calls for a more inclusive approach that actively embraces coexistence with non-human entities.
This perspective emphasizes reevaluating landscape interventions to foster ways of mourning ecological loss, suggesting that material performance studies and collaboration with nonhuman agencies could inform a new aesthetic for designing landscapes amidst ecological decline. This approach advocates for transforming ecological guilt into appreciation and, eventually, propels a deeper connection with non-human entities as a means to navigate ecological grief.
2.2 Learning "Ecognosis"
In
Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence, Timothy Morton introduces "ecognosis" that encapsulates a process of "becoming accustomed to strangeness"
[9]. Given the new normal of ecological extinctions, he advocates for a shift from depression to ecological awareness, urging a reimagination of human existence that incorporates the non-human realm at the "earth magnitude, " instead of moralistic illusions of destruction. This perspective challenges us to accept and adapt to the unsettling coexistence with the non-human.
3 Material Performance of the Aral Sea
Incorporating insights from anthropologist Anna Tsing, this article emphasizes designing non-human entanglement, i.e., to "recognize the liveliness of the material through the liveliness of our knowledge apparatuses for engaging with it"
[10]. With the emergence of new lands from the desiccated Aral Sea, and new materials of salt, dust, and sand traversing the region, it is necessary to understand the material performance (Fig.3).
Fig.3 Material catalog of the Aral Sea. |
Full size|PPT slide
The development of Anthropo-markers relies on the natural processes of the Aral Sea, particularly focusing on how salt and sand contribute to the area's changing topography. Lessons from the Owens Lake show how salt crystallization and crust formation can mitigate dust storms by trapping moisture in the lower layer while forming salt surface
[11].
Meanwhile, the evolving desert floor of the Aral Sea, creates both depositional and erosional landforms based on wind directions and the abundance of sand, including barchan, linear, and star dunes, as well as common yardangs near the Aral region
[12].
These processes informs the design approach for the demise of the Aral Sea, which aims to highlight the aesthetic of the landscape by developing experiences that encourage "noticing, exploring, wondering in, and learning about the surroundings"
[13]. Using sand table tests that simulate wind forces, this project explores how various wind-related interventions affect landscape formation and examines the resulting spatial qualities. Four properties of carving, diverging, braiding, and deposition emerge, guiding the design aesthetic and language representing the Aral Sea's ecological shifts (Fig.4).
Fig.4 Performance of sand under simulations of the sand table test. |
Full size|PPT slide
4 Designing the Aral Demise
4.1 Site and Stakeholders
This project introduces a series of Anthropo-markers for the transformation of the Aral Sea. Collaborating with potential organizations such as German Corporation for International Cooperation (GIZ), the Aral Sea Fund by the German Federal Foreign Office, the initiative seeks to mitigate dust impacts and address ecological grief, emphasizing synergy with non-human elements. Local forestry and farmers, as well as local ecological restoration and reconstruction, will benefit from the suggested strategies.
One focus of the project is the Vozrozhdeniya Island (Rebirth Island) straddling the border of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan within the Aral Sea. It is previously a clandestine bioweapon test site
[14] and now exposed due to the receding waters (Fig.5). In the past, tourists have approached this location without being informed the site's hazards. Thus, the project prioritizes the safekeeping of this historically and ecologically sensitive area, proposing design strategies that secure the buried toxins and promote ecological restoration like accumulation of soil. Highlighted intervention sites include the burial site (Aralsk 7) and a coastal zone impacted by the lake's retreat, aiming to memorialize the site's complex legacy while safeguarding against its hazards.
Fig.5 Site condition of Vozrozhdeniya Island. |
Full size|PPT slide
4.2 Strategies of Setting up Anthropo-markers
This proposal introduces strategies of "Anthropo-markers" for the Aral Sea advocating for humans to be an integral part of the alliance between humans and non-humans—in other words, to focus on evolving in ruination rather than attempting to halt it. In the design of anthropogenic post-human landscape for the Aral Sea, we can make human devastation noticeable by revealing the slow death of the lake. These markers shall be memorials and educational tools guiding us to properly adapt to Aral Sea's evolving ecosystem. They aim to document the gradual ecological changes, fostering new forms of coexistence between humans and non-humans, as well as highlighting the significant impact of human activities on the planet.
This project integrates local materials, including salt-tolerant plants, sand, water, and iron, honoring the site's inherent characteristics. It outlines four strategic approaches—stasis, accumulation, slowing down, and amplifying decay—to developing Anthropo-makers with respective design programs and travel modes (Fig.6).
Fig.6 Design strategies of the anthropomarkers. |
Full size|PPT slide
4.2.1 Stasis—Existing Anthropo-marker
This strategy identifies an existing star-shaped airfield as an Anthropo-marker, highlighting its historical role in bioweapon testing. By preserving this airfield, the project designates it as a monument that underscores the extent of human intervention in the area.
4.2.2 Accumulation—Ecological Markers of Sand-capturing Dunes
The strategy of accumulation can be adopted in the bioweapon burial site and Aral Sea shores to form an evolving ecological marker in the meadow Solonchaks
[15]. They are sand-capturing dunes each 10 m in height and 30 m in width. This involves deploying machinery to spread a decomposable geotextile sand net over the area, designed to capture wind-blown sand and facilitate soil accumulation at low points based on historical water flow. Seeds of salt and drought tolerant plants are then dispersed by airdropping to encourage plant growth. Supported by wind pollination, seed reproduction will contribute to the enhancement of humus and moisture retention, thus promoting the formation of seed banks beneath shrubs, solidifying the sandy, saline terrain (Fig.7).
Fig.7 Sand-capturing dunes. |
Full size|PPT slide
This strategy relies on non-human agencies such as wind and drought-resistant halophytes for soil deposition and habitat restoration
[16], gradually creating thousands of islands that serve as ecological markers of the rejuvenated landscape and allowing a self-sustained ecosystem to expand (Fig.8). These processes symbolize a transition of the site from desolation to renewal where ecological markers shall cover the toxic ruins and form a new legacy, and the established islands along the old access road shall become new windbreaks, and new landform formations.
Fig.8 Growth of the ecological markers. |
Full size|PPT slide
4.2.3 Slowing Down—Brine Pool System
To mitigate the spread of salt, dust, and pesticides along the shrinking shoreline, the project takes cues from the dust control tactics employed in Owens Lake, integrating brine, gravel cover, braiding ridges, and tillage design
[17]. The goal is to lessen desiccation effects by constructing brine pools in the seabed's recesses, each spanning 50 meters in width and half a meter in depth. Evaporation leaves behind a dense brine, crafting a protective salt crust over the underlying soil (Fig.9).
Fig.9 Section of the brine pool systems. |
Full size|PPT slide
The project envisions a unique ecosystem emerging around the brine pools, supported by the thriving halobacteria and halophilic microorganism community. As the depth of the brine pools increases, a gradient of colors becomes visible. This micro-habitat, nestled between the salt crust and brine pool, provides a sanctuary for various arthropods. The newly formed protective crystalline crust effectively locks soil and moisture below, fostering a salt microbe spa for life to adapt to and thrive under extreme conditions (Fig.10).
Fig.10 Overview of the brine pool system. |
Full size|PPT slide
4.2.4 Amplifying Decay—Shipwreck Salt Marker
Within these brine spa pools are the vestiges of shipwrecks, which now undergo a unique transformation. The high saline content of the brine accelerates the deposition of salt on these wrecks, hastening their corrosion and decay, ultimately morphing them into distinctive salt sculptures. During this process, these shipwrecks become unique salt markers in the brine pools (Fig.10). The intensified decay of the shipwreck indicates the magnitude of past destructions and the power of the non-human agencies such as salt.
4.2.5 Tillage Mounds of Resistance and Erosion
As tractors traverse the site, creating a landscape of furrows and trenches, the soil excavated from the seabed can be strategically placed beside brine pools to form tillage areas. This process follows the patterns of the receding waters, marking another aspect of the Aral Sea's legacy. By roughening the soil surface and generating turbulent eddy current, these areas not only reduce wind speed at ground level, enhancing resistance to wind erosion
[11], but also act as traps for airborne soil particles (Fig.11).
Fig.11 Tillage mounds along the retreating pattern of the Aral Sea. |
Full size|PPT slide
Collaborating with the non-human agencies, all these markers collectively foster a system that gracefully transitions the Aral Sea into new life forms, marking a beautiful end and a new beginning (Fig.12).
Fig.12 Overall section of the strategies. |
Full size|PPT slide
5 Discussion
There are numerous fragile, vanishing, anthropogenic yet beautiful landscapes like the Aral Sea. These new sublime landscapes, marked by their impurities, demand a novel aesthetic appreciation, attention, and remembrance. Through design intervention, this project aims to demonstrate the transformative power of materials and their ability to reconnect us with these fading landscapes. The proposed design—encompassing ecological markers, brine pools, tillage mounds, and sand-capturing dunes—seeks to address the ecological grief.
The design initiative for the Aral Sea's demise explores approaches to reconceiving landscape at different scales, from microscopic level of the halophilic organism to regional scale of salt flats. It is crucial to acknowledge that landscapes are defined not solely by their scale, but also by their material performance, which is frequently underestimated. Across various scales, micro, human, or mega, each material contributes significantly, necessitating human comprehension and collaboration. As we move forward, the new legacies we create, in partnership with non-human entities, ensure that life in its diverse forms continues to flourish. ACKNOWLEDGMENT The author would like to thank Rosalea Monacella at the Harvard Graduate School of Design for her relentless, constant support and guidance.
{{custom_sec.title}}
{{custom_sec.title}}
{{custom_sec.content}}
PDF(17831 KB)
Fig.1 Timeline of the Aral Sea's desiccation and the exploitative history.
AI Summary
