The environmental safety of a nation is determined by its environmental philosophy or a concise statement summarizing the set of official views and principles worked out by political leaders, a declaration of primary goals, trends, and ways a nation's activities can achieve an optimal interaction between society and nature.

To harmonize the interactions between society and nature it is essential to create conditions for environmental stability manifested as the ability of the ecosystems to sustain their structural and functional features under direct and indirect stress of anthropogenic impacts. Environmental problems that emerged in the Aral Sea basin are an integral part of the socio-economic policy pursued in the former USSR.They cannot be solved isolated from other acute issues facing society.

Creeping environmental phenomena in the Aral Sea basin have resulted from:

• orienting agriculture and industry toward maintaining the cotton independence of the former USSR at the cost of large-scale development of new (virgin) lands without improving the quality of those lands;

• widespread introduction of cotton and rice monocrops;

• large-scale non-dose-related ‘chemicalization’ of agriculture;

• use of water-wasting technologies and irrigation techniques resulting in enormous losses of irrigation water during its transport;

• irrational siting of production activities in locations with a deficit of water resources and without regard to air pollution.

These factors emerged under the then-dominant socio-economic and political conditions of the former Soviet Union, which can be characterized by the following factors:

• centralized command-and-control-type administration of the national economy based on state ownership of the means of production and natural resources with an absence of economic responsibility (i.e., penalties) for environmental damage;

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