Now consider "natural." Once it meant both "relating to nature" and "of organic causes." But now? Each day, there is less that's natural about nature. What are we doing to Mother?

And what is she doing back to us?

In these pages, you read of the environmental cataclysm man has visited on the region of the Aral Sea. Once the fourth largest inland body of water on the planet, it has shrunk to two large and poisonous puddles, all in the interest of increasing the yield on the area's cotton crop. A staggering rate of birth deformities is part of the terrible toll for shoving ahead without first counting the cost.

Natural disasters are on the rise, but how "natural" are they? In Turkey last year, a massive earthquake was natural enough, but thousands died because corrupt contractors had bribed corrupt building inspectors to allow substandard materials and methods, to their mutual profit.

Even our epidemics are taking on a man-made aspect. Rats once spread deadly disease; now in sub-Saharan Africa and elsewhere, people pass HIV/AIDS among themselves, sometimes knowingly.

The United Nations has determined that 90 per cent of disaster victims live in developing countries. Poor people are far more likely to live in harm's way than the better-off, who do not build on unstable mountainsides or in flood plains.

"A wide variation in the number and intensity of natural disasters is normal and to be expected," U.N. Secretary General Kofi A. Annan wrote in The International Herald Tribune. "What we have witnessed over the past decades, however, is not nature's variation but a clear upward trend caused by human activities. There were three times as many great natural disasters in the 1990s as in the 1960s, while disaster costs increased more than nine-fold in the same period."

Disaster control strategies do work. In 1998, flooding claimed more than 3,000 victims in China. In 1931 and 1954, however, similar floods took 140,000 and 33,000 lives, respectively. Policies introduced over the years saved tens of thousands of lives.

Still, while man is shoring up his flanks in one theater, he is inviting massive frontal assault in another. Mother has always had her tempestuous side. There seems so little profit in tempting her in most unnatural ways.

--Bill Koops

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Fifty per cent of the people in the region had made their living from fishing and related industries. Since the Aral Sea began drying up, the 33 species of fish have been reduced to three. That is but one effect, and not the harshest, of what many believe to be the worst man-made ecological disaster on earth.

Scott O'Connor has lived in Nukus, Uzbekistan, for three years, and still he's able to joke. "How far from the sea?" he says. "Today, 100 kilometers, tomorrow 101, the next day 102."

Mr. O'Connor's top assistant, Valodiya Pak, now 36, grew up in the area. He can take you to a 70-foot cliff where he went as a boy with his family for outings at the beach. Today, the sea is not to be seen from that high point, so far has it receded.

A sea-going vessel remains, but no sailings are set.

At the Aral, the cliffs remain but the sea has receded.

Not only has the Aral Sea shrunk, it has divided in two. In the 1930s and '40s, the Soviet Union began diverting water from the two rivers that fed the sea to irrigate the cotton crop in this fertile region near the border with Turkmenistan. In the '60s, the first effects of the sea's shrinking began to appear. Soviet officials pronounced this a positive development: Now there would be more land to plant in cotton.

When the fish began to disappear, Soviet authorities flew in fish and delivered them to canneries. Now there is no commercial fishing, none since the mid-'80s, and no central government in Moscow to feed the canneries.

Changes in the climate, including more days without rain and earlier frost, have reduced the growing season by about a month. The wind picks up salt and lashes the landscape with storms of it. Concentrations of pesticides, including DDT, up to 50 times those allowable in the U.S. have killed the soil and destroyed up to 40 per cent of the arable land. Salt, up to 500 tons per square kilometer, that has leached up to the surface has created snow fields in summer.

These are not the worst effects.

More than 90 percent of women of reproductive age are anemic. More than 90 percent of newborns are anemic. Of all pregnancies, 85 percent experience complications in the vicinity of a former Soviet chemical weapons factory. Some babies are born without brains.

Mr. O'Connor and his wife have three children. They drink distilled water and eat specially packaged food. They have resolved to stay, to help. He holds a master's degree in agronomy and does agricultural consulting.

With more funding, he could conduct research on the effects of residual pesticides in the environment and set up simple medical clinics devoted to maternal care.

Twenty-five years ago, people in the Soviet Union competed to live in the area. Now, state farm workers go unpaid and drought drives up the prices of staples. Desperate people dig shallow wells -- and drink contaminated water. A cholera outbreak is predicted.

Mr. O'Connor stays. He even tells a joke now and then.

--Ed Fowler Photos Courtesy of www.uzland.uz

• In 1960, the Aral Sea was the world's fourth largest lake, the size of Southern California.

• Volume in the Aral Sea has since decreased by 75 percent, the equivalent of draining Lakes Erie and Ontario.

• Women are the most affected by the environmental crisis, with maternal mortality rates three to four times higher than the national average.

• Ninety percent of women have complications during pregnancy and 16 percent have miscarriages.

• Infant mortality rate is one of the highest in the world, ranging from 4.5 percent to 10 percent.

• The frequency of birth defects is five times higher than in most of Europe.

• Severe anemia is found in 60 percent of newborn babies, resulting in increased infant mortality and impaired language and motor development.

• In the last 15 years, the region has seen a 3000 percent increase in kidney and liver diseases, especially cancer.

• Drinking water is saline and polluted, with high levels of heavy metals, salts and other toxic substances.

• Fish, rice, millet, wheat and vegetables in the region contain high rates of pesticides and strong cancerous substances.

Two Central Asian teachers were so stimulated by the MRDS International Teachers Program that they wrote a letter to Secretary of State Madeleine Albright expressing their appreciation for the education they received in the U.S. "We want to express our thankfulness to the government of the U.S.A., to Millennium and to the (host) families," they wrote. "We dream to keep our friendship between (our two countries) for long, long years."

The program, inaugurated in 1999, was so successful that it was expanded this year to include three nationalities and 11 teachers. Local families hosted the teachers throughout their stay in the U.S.

One teacher who attended the teaching methods training program in Houston in 1999, Yulia Uryamova, has been named a recipient of a Soros Foundation fellowship for advanced education in American Studies.

To Teach, to Serve, to Inspire

A Palestinian teacher demonstrates for classmates and visitors a game she has developed to enhance her work with children back home. She is flanked by another Palestinian teacher and a Jordanian.

These English teachers spent a month in Houston this summer improving their abilities. Included in their curriculum were such areas as assessment strategies, modifications for students with special needs and the teacher's role as facilitator