Who’s ever heard of the Aral Sea? It’s a rollercoaster story. The stuff of Hollywood. Man meddling with nature. Nature packing her bags. Man repenting.
In 1960 the Aral Sea was the fourth largest lake on the planet. Located between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. Its fishing industry employed 40,000 people and produced 1/6th of the Soviet Union’s entire fish catch.
In the 1960s the Soviet smart set decided to make improvements. Let’s have more rice and cotton, they said. So they drained the two rivers that fed the sea, the Syr Darya and Amu Darya. The consequences: bad for the ecosystem and bad for people, who began to develop respiratory problems (strong windstorms blew salt and agricultural chemicals around – the water had previously mitigated this).
By 2007 the lake had declined to 10% of its original size; it had actually split into three lakes, crumbled like the Union that had meddled with it. By 2009, the south-eastern lake had disappeared and the south-western lake retreated to a thin strip at the extreme west of the former southern sea.
Good news: the “Kazakh Miracle” has been announced – a multi-million government program for the recovery of the Northern Aral Sea and revitalisation of the dry former seabed, partially supported by loans from the World Bank. The powers that be are now committed to undoing the damage done.
Other big lakes are in a bad way too: the Salton Sea in California’s boarder region and Lake Chad in Central Africa (labeled an ecological catastrophe by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization).
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