Slashdot Mirror
Aral Sea Basin Almost Completely Dry
An anonymous reader writes: In 2000, NASA began taking satellite images of the Aral Sea in central Asia, which was once the fourth-largest inland lake in the world. At that time, there was an expansive eastern basin, and smaller basins to the north and west. In images recorded just last week, we see that the eastern basin is completely gone, and the western basin just a thin strip of water. The local fishing industry has been devastated, old ship graveyards now rest on dry ground, and salt-heavy sand is being blown around the region, causing health issues.
Most of the lake's decline is attributable to human intervention: "In the 1950s, two of the region's major rivers – the Amu Darya and and the Syr Darya – were diverted by the Soviet government to provide irrigation for cotton production in Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan, starving the Aral. It has been diminishing ever since, with the sea level dropping 16 meters between 1960 and 1996, according to the World Bank. Water levels are believed to be down to less than 10 per cent of what they were five decades ago." Low levels of rain and snow didn't help.
Most of the lake's decline is attributable to human intervention: "In the 1950s, two of the region's major rivers – the Amu Darya and and the Syr Darya – were diverted by the Soviet government to provide irrigation for cotton production in Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan, starving the Aral. It has been diminishing ever since, with the sea level dropping 16 meters between 1960 and 1996, according to the World Bank. Water levels are believed to be down to less than 10 per cent of what they were five decades ago." Low levels of rain and snow didn't help.
Why do you declare it a fuckup? They diverted the water, and now have farmland where before they had desert. That was their plan. If you're telling me that they wanted farmland in the desert as well as the Aral Sea to stay the same, then yes it was a fuckup. But I don't think that was the intention.
As an environmentalist, that's so incredibly simplistic, I'd almost call this post an attempt at parodying environmentalist positions. Luckily I'm aware that people who sometimes agree with me do so for simplistic reasons.
Organized, structured, large scale farming does less ecological and environmental harm than the people those farms would feed instead scrounging for food or running ad-hoc microfarms. Not to mention the human costs to those changes, like malnutrition and economic loss.
Now, if we pave every forest, turn every grassland into grazeland for cattle, and net every fish in the ocean, we've fucked up. We've fucked up badly. Good environmentalism is about being stewards who recognize our planetary ecosystems are irreplaceable and providing incredible value to us as a species, as well as the unique and unmeasurable quality that each species and ecosystem represents that can never be replaced once gone.
No one is saying you can't worship nature as some manifestation of perfection, just that we'll take it as seriously as we take any other religion.
Yup, this is what you get when a short-sighted totalitarian government messes with the water cycle to enable farming in a desert, consequences be damned.
Come to think of it, California is what you get when a short-sighted democratic government messes with the water cycle to enable farming in a desert, consequences be damned.
Let's face it, environmental concerns wasn't really on any government's radar until the 70s. (And a lot of countries still try to ignore them...)
Even the people that want to restore the lake don't argue the benefits of redirecting the water. The problem is how it's been redirected. The soviets litterally dug trenches through sand to get it where they wanted. It's not in pipes, it's not through pumps. The water travels over sand through an open air canal in the desert. Estimates are that less than 15% of it actually gets to the farm fields. If they fixed the canals they could have both the farm land and the sea.