Environmental Degradation of the Turkmanistan Border

I’ve heard over and over again in recent times that the next world wars will be fought over access to water. In Central Asia’s five landlocked nations there is not enough water. All the nations are fighting over limited resources. In northwestern Turkmenistan, as we crossed the border, I saw this more starkly than I ever have seen it before. What you see might look like a light snow on the ground, but instead it is salt left over from watering crops with highly salinated water.

The issue was only made more stark when the Soviet Union chose this area to grow cotton and it sucked up what water was available. Now as the earth gets hotter there is need for more water and the water available is not healthy or very usable and that land is mostly unproductive and unfarmable.