Presents a political ecology of life amid overlapping environmental and political upheaval. Once the fourth largest lake in the world, Kazakhstan’s Aral Sea dried into an unrecognizable fraction of its size during a period of dramatic political change. Through the experiences of local fisheries across the rise and fall of the Soviet Union, Environment and Post-Soviet Transformation in Kazakhstan’s Aral Sea Region explores the diverse ways people in different socioeconomic contexts understand environmental change. In this book, William Wheeler offers a rigorous political ecology of life amid overlapping upheavals, attentive both to the legacies of Sovietism and the possibilities of transnationalism.