The Aral Sea

A Study in Side Effects

Pictures really speaks 1000 words, especially ones like this.

The Aral Sea used to be the 3rd largest lake in the world, and is now a literally toxic dustbowl.

Wikipedia has a pretty good history of what happened , so I'm not going to repeat it all here.

I'm just going to point out a few major side effects of some collectively planned decisions.

Between the 1930s and 1970s, the Soviet Union thought it might be great idea to make a bioweapons facility on an isolated island, Vozrozhednia .

It was isolated by water and well within the borders of the Soviet Union. It seemed to make sense at the time. In my mind, bioweapons are generally a bad thing, but I was not yet born and would not have been part of a collective planning decision making process even if I was.

In the 1960s, Nikita Kruschev decided to try to make cotton an export crop for the Soviet Union. So, they just diverted a river or two. Cotton exports soared, and the Aral sea began to rapidly shrink.

These two bad ideas rapidly compounded. That research facility was working on weaponizing smallpox. It might have needed to do more work on containment, because, as the Aral sea began to shrink, Smallpox began to spread from the island .

This was obviously a bad thing, and, after the outbreak was contained, much of the research was literally buried. Anthrax, Smallpox, and God knows what other nightmares of biology were buried in the dirt and forgotten. They were still surrounded by water, after all. What could go wrong?

See the picture.

At this point in time the Aral sea is almost completely dried up.

In fact, the majority of it is now called the Aralkum Desert .

And that island full of lightly buried bioweapons isn't an island anymore.

Winds sweep thru the region, spreading pestilence to anyone unlucky enough and foolish enough to try to cross this hellscape. The Aral sea used to provide 1/6 of the fish in the Soviet Union. Now the Aralkum Desert is home to the rusting shipwrecks stranded as the sea dried up.

All of this could have been avoided if they had an environmental impact study, and is dissent was cherished rather than crushed.

Please keep this story in mind the next time people blithely ask "what's the worst that could happen?"

I believe that Green is Good for many reasons.

I also believe that Ignorance is not bliss.

I share this short tragic story in the hopes that we might all learn something new and might understand that unexpected side effects can be very large and devastating.

Did you know about the story of the Aral Sea?