Unruly Places: Lost Spaces, Secret Cities, and Other Inscrutable Geographies (5 page)

Removing the weeds from
Time Landscape
maintains it as past art. Without all that grubbing up, its temporal direction would get much harder to read: it would be less clear whether it was pointing backward or forward. Critics say
Time Landscape
has been “museumified,” that it’s now a dead place and of little public benefit. In fact, its layers of preservation have combined to make it ever more complex and disconcerting.
Time Landscape
has gotten weirder, for it now confronts us with an uncomfortable paradox: as we try to revere nature, it slips through our fingers, leaving us holding something we never expected, something unnatural.

The city is a place where nature is excised and then mourned, killed off then raised from the dead, only to be entombed in caged-off spaces of floral tribute. The weeds that infest
Time Landscape
’s sepulchral landscape are pulled up and stuffed into black plastic garbage bags and removed for incineration. They form their own kind of monument, off to the fires, our revenge on the revenge of nature, enacted again and again. The carefully maintained remnants of nature that remain are too anemic to evoke a fertile or meaningful past, even as they secure
Time Landscape
’s status as a memorial to both past nature and past art.

Time Landscape
’s protocol of purity is echoed across countless parks and gardens but also in the kind of environmental or land art that tends to get commissioned in cities. A lot of land art creates disorientingly human places within large natural landscapes: a straight stone path amid a chaos of boulders, a spiral jetty thrust into a remote lake. But for artists working in cities the temptation to confront paved streets with pure nature seems irresistible. Apart from
Time Landscape
, the best-known work in this genre seen in New York was
Wheatfield—A Confrontation
, a two-acre vacant lot in downtown Manhattan that was planted with wheat by Agnes Denes in 1982. It was a more political piece than
Time Landscape
. The fertile field and the one thousand pounds of wheat yielded were symbolic of the hunger caused by Wall Street’s “misplaced priorities.” But the golden grain and the simple moral message were also designed to contrast with the corrupt and fallen city. This was another place made pure by nature.

Denes’s
Wheatfield
was soon reaped, and wasn’t around long enough to get drawn into difficult debates about land use or to start looking outdated.
Time Landscape
suffers a different fate. The
Village Voice
reported the atmosphere of one weeding and cleanup day turning slightly sour as the director of a local community alliance declared that “the time has come for something new” and that “Time Landscape is a piece of ’80s art,” all “within earshot of the artist.” It’s true that over the past couple of decades the pursuit of prelapsarian eco-art has gone out of fashion and a fascination with weed-infested urban decay has taken root (see “The Archaeological Park of Sicilian Incompletion,”
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). An influential essay by John Patrick Leary on the “exuberant connoisseurship of dereliction” labeled the trend “Detroitism,” because for artists and photographers, that city has become “the Mecca of urban ruins.”

Time Landscape
and Detroitism are very different starting points, but they both converge on a central worry for urban civilization: How can we live without nature? What do we become without it, or what can we pretend to be? Sonfist never claimed to have the answers, and what
Time Landscape
means has long since escaped his control. Today it is a troubled and paradoxical place but also somewhere that hints at the remorse for lost nature that lies just beneath the surface of even the shiniest and blankest cityscape.

44° 45′ 37″ N, 62° 09′ 27″ E

The Aralqum Desert is too new, too large, and its outline too changeable to be on any maps. It’s a desert that used to be called the Aral Sea. The new name is gaining favor, although it’s not quite as exotic as it sounds.
Qum
is Uzbek for “sand.”

The map captioned “Geography: Physical” is usually seen as an impassive affair when compared to “Geography: Political.” We are used to the latter requiring regular updates but continue to imagine that the physical outlines and natural features of the planet are slow-moving or even rock-solid. The love of “natural places” is, in part, built around the conviction that, unlike our fragile settlements and fickle borders, they are self-reliant and age-old. It’s an outdated perspective, as New Moore (see
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) demonstrates, and encourages a belief that natural systems can always cope with change; that when one set of flora and fauna die out, a new set will happily move in. The Aralqum is a natural place, an empty desert, but also an unnatural one that shows that organic adaptation can no longer keep pace with human impact.

It’s also a place of disconcerting memories. The Aral Sea was once enormous. At 426 kilometers long and 284 kilometers wide, it was the fourth-largest lake in the world. Any schoolchild tracing her finger across the map of Central Asia will still find it and pause and wonder how such a big blue shape could have formed so many miles from the ocean. It was once called the Blue Sea and was first mapped in 1850. Soon the Aral Sea was supporting several fishing fleets and a cluster of new villages, and by the middle of the last century it was fringed by nineteen villages and two large towns, Aralsk in the north and Muynak in the south. Today these towns’ harbors are many miles from water.

The Aral Sea was fed by one of the longest rivers in Central Asia, the Amu Darya, which flowed north for 1,500 miles to spawn an island-flecked delta. Along with the Syr Darya, which fed the Aral’s northern shore, the Amu Darya pumped the Aral Sea full of fresh mountain water. Soviet planners were not slow to see the potential of these rivers to feed cotton and wheat irrigation systems. Starting in the 1930s, huge channels were constructed, diverting water from both the Amu Darya and Syr Darya and spreading it out over millions of acres of fertile land. One of the Soviet Union’s most eminent experts in desertification, Professor Agajan Babaev, explained in 1987, in an article for a Soviet economics magazine, that “the drying up of the Aral is far more advantageous than preserving it.” Even more oddly, he also concluded that “many scientists are convinced, and I among them, that the disappearance of the sea will not affect the region’s landscapes.” The death of the Aral Sea was not only foreseen but actively pursued.

As the Aral Sea began to shrink, in the 1960s, the irrigation continued, the volume of water drained off the rivers only peaking in 1980. Without the rivers’ infusion of fresh water, many of the Aral’s shallowing pools became almost as salty as the ocean. A new dusty and denuded landscape emerged. Windblown pollutants turned the area into one of the world’s unhealthiest places to live, and infant mortality rates shot up along with respiratory diseases. The loss of the Aral Sea also had an impact on the climate. Such a large body of water had long kept the land warmer in winter and cooler in summer. With its disappearance came more extreme and more destructive localized weather systems.

Since 1960 the Aral Sea has shrunk by more than 80 percent and its water volume has fallen by 90 percent. The size and shape of the Aral Sea on recent maps varies enormously: sometimes it is represented quite accurately, as fragmented and shrunken, but it is still common to see it portrayed as undiminished and unbroken. With cotton production still an economic priority in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, and no real prospect of rehabilitation in the foreseeable future, it is time the Aral Sea was removed from the world’s maps and the “Aralqum Desert” inserted.

Visitors to the Aral today are faced with whipping winds across a barren plain. It is littered with bleached seashells and the remnants of scavenged boats—a desiccated land that stretches to the horizon. The Aralqum Desert is fringed with ghost towns, abandoned fish factories, and rusting boatyards. Barsa-Kelmes, which translates as “the land of no return” in Kazakh, was once the Aral Sea’s largest island and used to be a nature reserve, renowned for its eagles, deer, and wolves. Today it is just another dead stump of land. By 1993 it was empty except for one resident, who refused to leave, and a few stubborn wild asses. It seems that the holdout, an ex-ranger named Valentin Skurotskii, was rooted to the island by the fact that his mother was buried there. His body was discovered in 1998, sitting in a chair with his head in his hands.

In Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan people have grown tired of sad tales and bad news about the Aral. Much of the regional news coverage about the Aral over the past two decades has been about the damming and “rebirth” of the so-called Small Aral Sea in the north. The implication is that the rest of the Aral should be abandoned to the sand. The newly built dam that keeps the waters of the Syr Darya in the Small Aral further restricts their flow farther south. In 2008 the president of Kazakhstan, Nursultan Nazarbayev, stood on a new dam near Aralsk and declared that one day the waters would return to the town’s harbor. Thanks to the new dams and locks, he may be right. The waters of the Small Aral have risen and become fresher. But it is a meager triumph compared to the loss of the “Large Aral Sea.”

The Aralqum is not simply a vast new desert; it is also a huge experiment, the world’s largest example of anthropogenic primary succession. Primary succession refers to the development of plant life on land that is devoid of any vegetation. The classic examples are volcanic islands like Surtsey, which emerged from the Atlantic, twenty miles south of Iceland, in 1963. The first plant on Surtsey was spotted two years later, and today much of the island is covered with mosses, lichens, grasses, and even some bushes. While it’s a natural process, it’s the anthropogenic, or humanly caused, part that turns it into something less predictable. These days most examples of primary succession are caused by humans, and they have nothing to do with volcanism or glaciers. They occur in the wake of the dead landscapes caused by nuclear testing or are found on top of slag heaps or at battle sites or in the cracked tarmac and paving stones of our cities.

These plants seem such doughty invaders that it is easy to assume that, given time, the green world will always grow back and take over. It’s early days yet, but at the moment it seems that the Aralqum is suggesting otherwise. The salty, dust-blown, and often poisonous seabed makes conditions very hard for new life. A German team from the University of Bielefeld has studied the limited plant life that is taking root. Along with other experts they predicted that the desert will only be greened by people going in and planting species that are not just salt resistant but can withstand the extreme temperatures and winds of the dry sea floor. Yet 70 percent of the Aralqum is salt desert. To turn it into something living would be an expensive, long-term, and probably thankless task. The Aralqum appears to be showing us that, at least in the short term, nature cannot cope. A problem created by us can only be solved by us, but so far it appears to be beyond us. We have gotten used to seeing natural places as places that can be protected and nurtured, but the story of the Aral Sea indicates a daunting challenge, of moving beyond designating zones of conservation toward rebuilding entire ecosystems and landscapes on a vast scale.

In the meantime, the new desert is sharing its secrets. It seems this is not the first time that the area has been dry. On the old sea floor Kazakh hunters have found the remnants of a medieval mausoleum along with human bones, pottery, and millstones. Satellite images have also revealed the courses of medieval rivers meandering through the desert. These findings confirm a local legend that the Aral Sea was once land. The area’s folklore has since been updated. Now old-timers look forward to a second inundation, a new flood to give them back their blue sea.

Lost places have an uncanny presence in our lives. In a century that has seen the obliteration of so many places, it might be thought that these ghosts would have been exorcised. But that’s not how humans work; place means too much to us for its disappearance to ever feel easy or complete.