Product Description

In January 2000 Rob Ferguson went to Uzbekistan to work on an environmental project to save the Aral Sea. By the time he left Central Asia a year later, he was under suspicion for murder. And the project had achieved almost nothing: once the world's third largest lake, the Aral is down to 20 percent of its 1960 size; some say it will be gone by 2010. This is a true tale of a well-meaning Canadian who heads off to one of the earth's poorest regions to try and change the world. Instead he encounters corrupt officials, anti-Western hostility and deep-seated problems. Only the ancient cities, friendly people and a sharp sense of humour keep Ferguson on the right side of sanity. The Devil and the Disappearing Sea is a tragi-comic tale told with panache and a storyteller's eye for detail. The backdrop includes an environmental disaster, life amongst the ruins of the Soviet empire and Rob's travels through the legendary cities of the Silk Road. Part Robert Kaplan, part Graham Greene, it is above all a story of memorable characters, led by Mr. G, a chain-smoking humpty-dumpty who has spent 40 years milking Soviet and Western donors.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1106832 in Books
• Published on: 2003-09-12
• Released on: 2003-08-28
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 280 pages

Amazon.ca
The "Aral Sea disaster" is often compared to some of the most notorious man-made environmental catastrophes of the planet, up there with ozone depletion and global warming. Yet it's also called the "quiet Chornobyl" because it's so little-known. The Aral Sea, once the fourth-largest inland body of water, has lost over half its surface area and 80 percent of its volume since 1960. Experts say it could vanish entirely by 2020. The former seabed is now a 38,000-square-kilometre toxic desert of salt, chemical waste, and stranded fishing boats. Birth abnormalities along with kidney, respiratory, and liver diseases have affected millions of people living nearby. Soviet planners caused the disaster when they decided to turn Central Asia into a vast cotton bowl. They built huge, inefficient irrigation systems that today let half of the water seep into the ground or evaporate.

Into this mess ventured Rob Ferguson, a Winnipeg-born public relations expert hired by a World Bank-affiliated project, to save the Aral Sea. His job was to help convince the public and government officials to conserve precious water. His year in the corrupt region, recounted in The Devil and the Disappearing Sea, devolved into a minor disaster of its own. Ferguson is a keen-eyed storyteller who tells an entertaining yarn about his frustrated attempts to work with despotic and shady local officials. His communications efforts go nowhere, and the trip ends ignominiously when Ferguson's assistant is murdered and he decides to get on the next flight out. Weak points of the book: the tone is often too glib considering the circumstances; the author speaks none of the local languages so most of his encounters with other people are filtered through an interpreter; and his point of view is too much that of the cynical outsider. On the plus side, it's an important story, and Ferguson has told it in a lively way. --Alex Roslin

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. The pith of Ferguson's fascinating debut—a hybrid of sightseeing travelogue, political history lesson, dire ecological warning and unsolved murder mystery—is that the Aral Sea, once the fourth-largest inland body of water on Earth, is shrinking fast. As of a couple of years ago, the sea, which is near five politically volatile Central Asian states (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan), had dwindled to one-fifth its 1960 size. Estimates are that it will completely evaporate by 2020, done in by decades of inept agricultural planning, gross water mismanagement and, more recently, wasteful nongovernmental organization funding, corrupt bureaucratic infighting and intractable nationalism. In 2000, communications specialist Ferguson came to the International Fund for Saving the Aral Sea as the determined head of a Public Awareness Team, partially funded by the World Bank, that was intended to educate the region's populace about water conservation. He left a year later, overwhelmed by ineffectual oversight and anti-Western hostility—and accused of a murder he couldn't possibly have committed. His wry account of a turbulent year clearly articulates the tragic consequences of what he now deems inevitable failure—millions of acres of arable land reduced to poisoned, salty plains—with skilled reporting and detail-rich writing. Readers will finish the book knowing with certainty why the Aral Sea disaster has been described as a slow-motion Chernobyl. (May)
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Outpost
"A weird, entertaining and informative amalgram of a book: part memoir of Ferguson's time as an NGO worker in Uzbekistan, part ecological nightmare, part satire, part absurdist noir. From the unavoidable tragedy of the disappearing Aral Sea, to the machinations of a corrupt bureaucracy, Ferguson finds himself in one bizarre scenario after another, always with his wit intact."