{"id":1201,"date":"2004-06-18T18:28:44","date_gmt":"2004-06-18T22:28:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=1201"},"modified":"2022-10-09T13:51:05","modified_gmt":"2022-10-09T17:51:05","slug":"elegy-for-the-aral-sea","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=1201","title":{"rendered":"Elegy for the Aral Sea"},"content":{"rendered":"

This is news<\/a>?<\/p>\n

Anyone who knows anything about environmental disasters knows about the drying up of Aral Sea and has known for a long time.<\/p>\n

Quote from the article:<\/p>\n

“You may say that the Aral Sea has already disappeared,” said Bo Libert, a regional adviser for the U.N. Economic Commission for Europe and an author of a report on water use in central Asia.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Yes. The sea is not drying<\/i> up, it is gone already.<\/p>\n

Just caught this <\/b>bit of nonsense in the article I posted:<\/p>\n

Drought and excessive use of its main feeder rivers, the Amu Darya and Syr Darya, are mostly to blame. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Uhm – no. That’s not right. That makes it sound like it was semi-natural, and had nothing to do with the ridiculous environmental policies of Communism – which is exactly why the Aral Sea has been destroyed.<\/p>\n

What you SHOULD have said is that the Sea has dried up because of the ravages of Communism and because of the USSR’s boneheaded plots to try to make cotton bloom across the deserts of Uzbekistan.<\/p>\n

This is a man-made <\/b>disaster. The Aral Sea has died because of human stupidity and the careless and rapacious way Communist regimes treated nature.<\/p>\n

The UN is just picking up on this disaster now?<\/p>\n

It’s done. Let it go. Let the Aral Sea go. It’s a disaster, nothing can stop the disappearance now, let it fade into a memory. Let those ships which now sit in the middle of the desert (photo below) stay there. As warnings and reminders.<\/p>\n

Not of the dangers of drought but of the dangers of stupid people in power who end up engineering droughts through ridiculous use of state power.<\/p>\n

\n\"\"<\/p>\n

\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This is news? Anyone who knows anything about environmental disasters knows about the drying up of Aral Sea and has known for a long time. Quote from the article: “You may say that the Aral Sea has already disappeared,” said … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[142,2428],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1201"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1201"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1201\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":177992,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1201\/revisions\/177992"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1201"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1201"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1201"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}