Once there was a sea. It was salty, fed by two rivers flowing westward into its basin. It was full of life—hundreds of species of fish, flocks of flamingos, oodles of muskrats, and of course, humans. Humans crowded around it, fishing, fur-trapping, sailing, and growing melons and cotton along its banks. It was the last plant that would eventually doom the sea. For the water that fed the Aral Sea was diverted to irrigate vast cotton fields across modern-day Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan. The Soviet Union in the 1960s dug vast channels across the desert, and the rivers Syr Darya and Amu Darya poured into them. Hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children were conscripted to harvest and process the cotton in the name of Communist labor, while the sea the rivers had fed withered and died. The fish died too, the flamingos moved, and the musk rats were turned into coats for the wives of party bosses in Moscow and St. Petersburg. Now the wind blows the dust and salt and toxic chemicals across the dried surface, while the remaining water huddles together in a few basins, slowly shrinking still. The greatest ecological disaster in human history—although we’re now giving it a run for its money with climate change.
The Aral Sea also makes for a great vacation spot.
