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Politics : The Environmentalist Thread -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Elmer Flugum who wrote (867)	6/6/1999 9:29:00 AM
From: Edwarda	Respond to of 36921

No, dear, it's now N'yak, N'yak. You have been away too long.

To: Elmer Flugum who wrote (867)	6/6/1999 1:20:00 PM
From: Thomas M.	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 36921

<<< ... The Aral Sea is a tragic example of Soviet economic planning gone badly awry. In the 1960s, Moscow built an 850-mile canal designed to facilitate the irrigation of cotton fields. It got the water for this by diverting two rivers, the Amu Darya and the Syr Darya. These two rivers, though, were the primary sources for the Aral Sea. I suppose the Soviet engineers figured that the Aral might dry up a little and that towns and villages on the shore might find themselves no more than, say, a mile from the water's edge. To help make up for the loss, they did plan to divert water from Siberia, but somehow this never got done. Result: Over the next 30 years, two-thirds of the Aral Sea vanished, leaving behind a dry bed of poisonous salts and killing the sea's fish and its seaside vegetation. Now more than 100 million tons of salty dust gets blown into the air each year from the dry seabed. This is a toxic silt composed of salt, sand, fertilizers, DDT, and industrial and household poisons. Local children have become ill from these toxins. Life expectancy here has fallen. The Aral salt bed has become as dangerous to the entire planet as a large active volcano. It sits in the path of strong east-to-west air currents that carry these deadly contaminants to the upper layers of the atmosphere, where they are spread around the Earth. The signatures of Aral toxins have been found in the blood of penguins in the Antarctic. Its distinctive dust has fallen on glaciers in Greenland, forests in Norway, and wheat fields in Belarus ... >>> worth.com Tom