Posted on 04/09/2007 3:13:47 PM PDT by blam
Kazakhs get loan to save Aral Sea
By Natalya Antelava
BBC News, Aral Sea
The sea's retreat spells disaster for local people
The Kazakhstan government has secured a multi-million dollar loan from the World Bank to help save the Aral Sea.
The money will be used to implement the second stage of a project aimed at saving the northern part of the sea.
The United Nations has said the disappearance of the Aral is the worst man-made environmental disaster.
But this new project could mean that at least part of the Aral - once the world's fourth largest inland body of water - will be saved.
It is an ambitious project aimed at reversing one of the world's worst environmental disasters.
As a result, the sea that many predicted could never return is already filling the desert.
The story of the Aral dates back to the 1970s, when the Soviet government diverted two main rivers feeding the Aral to irrigate cotton fields in Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan.
Starved of water, the sea began to shrink.
The desert spread, changing the climate, destroying the economy and the ecosystem, eradicating species and forcing thousands of people to leave the area.
By the 1990s only a quarter of the Aral Sea was left, but recently using a $68m loan from the World Bank, the Kazakh government built a dam that split the sea into two parts.
It did not solve the problem entirely. On the Uzbek side of the border, the southern part of the sea is still shrinking, but here in Kazakhstan officials say 40% of the sea has already returned.
Now using the new $126m loan from the World Bank, they plan to build a second dam which they hope will bring the water back to the deserted port of Heralsk.
Communities in the area are already feeling the impact. The fishermen are back in their boats, the clouds and the rain have returned and many across this impoverished region say the future no longer looks hopeless.
Yet another Communist disaster requiring taxpayer money from the West to fix.
There’s got to be a Borat joke in here somewhere . . .
It’s not a Communist thing. We’ve done pretty much the same thing to the Salton Sea.
"I am trying to learn Western jokes - why jokes about me??"
Death Valley alone would create a 3000 square mile inland sea, the Qattara Depression in Egypt would produce about a 8000 square mile inland sea and the Caspian, a sea many times that size which could feed the Aral.
The Salton Sea was man made.
The Aral Sea was a naturally occurring body of water that the Soviets wrecked.
IIRC, the Salton Sea was man-made. An engineering disaster, a breached dam, diverted the Colorado River into the Imperial Valley basin.
Al Gore's book, An Inconvenient Truth, and the movie based on it, imply global warming caused the shrinking of the Aral Sea.
As others have pointed out, the Aral Sea has been here for millions of years; the Salton Sea was a twentieth-century human mistake that nature is gradually correcting.
Comparing the two is sort of like naming Chernobyl and Three Mile Island as comparable nuclear accidents.
I was deployed to Uzbekistan 2003-04. Many young Uzbeks had a mistaken nostalgia for the blessings of Communism and quickly changed the subject when I mentioned the Aral Sea horror. But a quick Google search reveals that, among other Bolshevik initiatives, was the 1918 pronouncement that the Aral Sea was “unnecessary to Nature”. The decision to divert the Syr Darya and Amu Darya rivers for irrigation was made early in the Soviet era.
The Aral Sea began to shrink as early as 1957. But the world’s greatest man-made ecological disaster went unreported due to, IMHO, a reluctance to criticize the USSR in particular and therefore socialism in general.
Bump!
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