A Sea Change

The AP offers us the strangely poetic tale of the Aral Sea.  Under the aegis of Soviet industrial planners, the Central Asian Sea, at one point the world’s fourth-largest body of fresh water, became little more than a glorified irrigation system for immense cotton fields supplying the USSR and Cuba.  This resulted in the disappearance of 90% of it, an act of ecological pillage described as ‘unprecedented in modern times’, which almost entirely extinguished the local fishing economy.  Most unusually for a news story, particularly one that concerns the ineluctable pace of environmental destruction in industrial Russia, it looks like there may be a happy ending in sight for some.