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. ...

Kazakhstan was once a nation of nomads wandering vast steppes. They herded cattle, goats and camels. On the country’s western edge lies the Caspian Sea. Towns grew up along the shore there, hauling in catches of sturgeon and black caviar.

But otherwise, Kazakhstan was an empty desert. Even in the days of the old Silk Road, traders would skirt Kazakhstan’s southern border rather than try to cross that hell of a desert. It was remote. Desolate. The Soviets used parts of the northeast to test nuclear weapons.

The Aral Sea, site of one of the greatest environmental disasters ever, is in Kazakhstan. A century ago, carp, perch, caviar-bloated sturgeon and much more filled the Aral Sea. Fisherman hauled hundreds of tons of fish per year, fed themselves and loaded trains full of fish headed to Moscow. Then the Communists had some harebrained scheme to use the water for irrigation.

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