March 24, 2002
Speaking of depressing, Harpers magazine (must be the Feb. issue, since I can't find it on the website's March edition preview) has an extremely troubling article on the death of the Aral Sea. What was once a thriving seaport and fishery is now basically a poisoned, dry desert, where winds blow the lakebed's remnants of Soviet-era pesticide residue into what's left of the former seaside communities. I don't have any quotes from the article, since it's not online, but basically, all 24 species of fish which once lived in the sea are dead, the rivers which once fed the sea have all been diverted to maintain a tenuous-at-best cotton industry, and the people who subsisted on resources of what was once the fourth largest lake in the world have either left the area or are now trapped in one of the largest environmental disasters in human history.
Here's something from oneworld.com:
As far as the eye can see, the former seabed is now a salt pan desert, a virtual graveyard littered with the rusting remains of fishing trawlers and barges and the bleached bones of cattle, which died from eating salt-poisoned vegetation.
This is a unimaginable catastrophe, which is no doubt well documented, but probably unknown to most Americans. Including myself, of course. It's not the only depressing piece I read this weekend. The New Yorker has a remarkable report, written by Jeffrey Goldberg, on the Iraqi campaign against the Kurds in the late 80s, which was carried out through the use of poison gas.
There are remarkable similarities between the two disasters. Both are man-made, and both resulted in devastating health problems for the victims. Both are criminally under-reported, although certainly there are those who have tried to expose the truth. And both serve as warnings, in different but equally insidious ways. The gradual drying-up of an inland ocean probably isn't as interesting as chemical attacks and a possible Iraqi link to Al-Qaeda. But on a grass-roots level, your average human may be able to do more about it.
eric 9:49 PM
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