I spent hours just walking around these rusting skeletons in an empty sea. A monument to man trying unsuccessfully to master nature. The scale of the environmental disaster is huge. Not only has the fishing industry been destroyed by the Soviet masterplan to turn the surrounding desert into massive irrigated cotton farms. The shrinking of the sea has greatly affected
weather patterns, with the region now 10 Celsius degrees hotter in summer, and
10 Celsius cooler in winter, which had badly disrupted the growing of crops, including the very cotton farms that started this whole economic misadventure.
The
occasional disaster hunting tourist does not make up for the complete
collapse of Moynak's economy. It is an astonishing site to see the local trawlers rusting in sand with no
water in sight for hundreds of kilometers, but it does leave you feeling empty
and depressed, and hoping that maybe just for once we can actually learn something from this. The words of the Spanish philosopher George Santayana never ring so true as to when standing next to these rusting hulks, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it".
For more on the Aral Sea and Moynak see this post
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