UN's Ban Calls Aral Sea 'Shocking Disaster'

AP via Yahoo News ^ | 4 April 2010 | Jim Heintz

[STD]

Demon in the Freezer is still a riveting read.

[TigersEye]

Harvest salt.

[Ptarmigan]

Aral Sea is used to be one of the largest lake in the world. All I hear is silence about this from the far left. Oh wait, it happened during the former Soviet Union. Some of the worst pollution happened in the Soviet Union.

[Scotsman will be Free]

I thought that it was a fresh water lake.

[Roccus]

Yes, however there are salts that come in from the feeder rivers. When a lake evaporates, the salts remain. The Bonneville Salt Flats are an example.

[Greysard]

But hey, look on the bright side: Uzbekistan did benefit from being a major exporter of cotton.

And here is the question. If you can afford the project, what plan should you choose:

• Change the flow of rivers, irrigate dry lands, create agricultural jobs, produce useful things, live better life.
• Or leave rivers as they are; the fresh river water will be polluted with salts and will uselessly evaporate. Nobody benefits.

So the question is: why the Aral Sea needs to be saved? Surely not for the few fishes that lived in that tiny patch of water.

[longtermmemmory]

what next? reverse man cause continental drift?

[SatinDoll]

If folks want to see something similiar in the United States, look at the Owens Valley, in California.

Owens Valley is where Los Angeles’s drinking water originates. That valley used to be good productive farmland. The inhabitants sold the water rights to Los Angeles a long time ago.

That was a very stupid thing to do.

[Riodacat]

Nice to see someone post an intelligent and thoughtful comment..

[Scotsman will be Free]

Thanks.

[SoDak]

It used to provide 1/6 of the total fish catch of the Soviet Union. Lenin started the first diversion of water out of the Aral Sea in order to eventually kill off the independent fishing industry and divert the locals onto state-owned farms, where they were easier to control, and where their institutional memory of private enterprise could more easily be removed. Our home-grown watermelon commies would do the same thing in a heartbeat.