Aral Sea disaster
I saw a disturbing report on SBS news last night about the Aral Sea disaster in Kazakhstan. The world’s fourth-largest inland sea has been decimated by commercial exploitation and mismanagement. Here are some of the facts:
Forty years ago the Aral Sea surface was 66,100 square kilometers with an average depth of 16.1 metres and a maximum depth of 68 metres. Salt content was 1%. Then in the 60s, the flow of water into the Sea began to drop alarmingly. Upstream irrigation schemes, for the growing of rice and cotton, consumed like a sponge more than 90% of the natural flow of water from the Tian Shan mountains. As a result the Sea’s surface area declined. Some 27,000 square kilometres of former sea bottom became dry surface. About 60% of water volume was lost. The sea level declined 14 metres. Salt concentration doubled.
Needless to say, this catastrophe has had a huge impact on the local population. Hundreds of thousands of people have lost their livelihoods and suffer adverse health effects. I saw footage of fishing boats abandoned on a dry lake bed.
The communist rulers of the former Soviet Union created this inexcusable nightmare.
It’s disappointing how little coverage we get in mainstream Australian media about real news like this. I’m tired of hearing about Iraq and its political problems when there is so much else happening in the world. The cynic in me suggests the presence of cameras in Iraq guarantees coverage, while events in Kazakhstan and Sudan, among others, go unobserved.
It’s also sad that Australian environmentalists do little to highlight problems in the former communist world. The Chernobyl tragedy created severe ecological impacts and there are numerous other examples.
Again, the cynic in me suggests the communist sympathies of left-leaning greens precludes them from facing the reality of what that evil system created. It’s easier for them to rally against capitalism as an ogre that exploits the environment for commercial gain while ignoring that worse examples of this exist in the former Soviet Union.
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Tags: environment
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