Posted on 07/30/2003 4:31:33 PM PDT by blam
Umm, weren't these communist countries when these irrigation projects started? |
Doing just fine. It is the deepest lake in the world
Where are the enviromentablists (as Mike Tyson would say on Rush)?
And a bunch of academics and researchers of various ilks looking for research grants are seeking a way to blame it on Global Warming.
Along with a bunch of displaced socialists who are desperately looking to any excuse to become the "Worldwide Commissariat of Energy Usage".
There you go...being all logical again.
I don't know. Check post #15, maybe your answer is there. I saw a documentary a few years ago about the locals complaining about being ill from the dust off the old lake bed.
The Salton Sea in California is a similar situation except that water sprinkling systems have been installed to hold down the dust.
“We got environmentalists and told them, ‘Capitalists spend any amount of money even if it does destroy your precious nature.’ Well, at the time, the Soviet Union was the most polluted country in the world,”
Oleg Danilovich Kalugin. Major General. Soviet KGB1
It's The Tragedy of the Commons, writ large.
The Tragedy of the Commons is what happens when you have "Group rights" or "collective rights" rather than individual rights.
The classic example of a Tragedy of the Commons is in Africa, where two or more tribes "share" a common hunting area given to them by their government.
Well, the financial incentive for each tribe is to hunt as much as possible, under the theory that whatever their tribe doesn't kill and sell, the other tribes will get.
So these common lands are hunted into oblivion, and once the animals are all gone, then there is no more hunting in that common land, and no more food and income for any of the tribes.
To cover up this fundamental flaw of socialism (i.e. the government gives land to groups to be shared), leftists around the world use such phrases as "sustainable development" and "sustainable growth" and "sustainable grazing" along with the classic "sustainable hunting". Thus, the socialists claim that if these tribes are limited and restricted well-enough by the government, that the activities in these common areas can be sustained rather than exploited until nothing is Left (pun intended).
But the "sustainable" policies are merely band-aids. The core problem is that individuals don't have property rights in the areas that are being exploited into oblivion.
A rancher who owns his own spread won't go wipe out all of the game animals on his property as fast as he can kill and trap them, for instance. This is because the rancher, as a **property owner**, knows that it's far better to have viable herds on his property over the long term than to kill them all right now for a single "good" year at the market.
But the African bushman who is given access to a shared area is placed into a hyper-competitive race to see who can get the most, or even anything at all, before all of the prizes (read: natural resources) are taken by the others who also have access to that common area.
Ditto for common grazing areas, and as this article notes (and as I quoted above), so too for common access to lake water for irrigation. All of the nations that share access to the Aral are exploiting as fast as they can, lest someone else take their water first and leave them with nothing.
Of course, The Tragedy of the Commons means that they will eventually receive nothing, anyway. In fact, it will happen sooner, rather than later.
And it will happen because Socialism in particular, and Leftism is general, is a **flawed** ideology.
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I don't understand how this could happen. I thought this sort of "rape of the environment" was caused by corporate greed. The newsman on TV said that turning land over to the custody of the state is the only way to Save The Planet.