I went there (Aralsk, specifically) four years back, while en route to shymkent from aktobe. It's a sad, sad place. Photos don't do it justice - you drive for hours through barren desert, passing next to nothing, and then you reach Aralsk - a nothing harbour city in the middle of nothing, with a tide that went out to never return. Everything is dilapidated, dusty, everyone is old, the smell of diesel mixed with shit and mud is overpowering - the sea looks dry, but under a thin crust is meters of gloopy dumped oil and sewage. Learned that the hard way.
It used to be a bustling place, full of greenery, and the desert around it was green - but the Soviets drained it from the Uzbek side, and whether it can ever be refilled more rapidly than it evaporates is anyone's guess.
Central kaz could have been a place. Instead, it's nothing, and probably will remain such.
Easy to go "oh it's just a lake", but it turns out humans need water.
Interestingly, the Soviets planned to take Siberian rivers that drain "uselessly" into the Arctic sea and divert them southwards towards Kazakhstan and into the Aral sea.
Ah! That makes it much better. At least I'm not to blame. (Sarcasm)
I think "we"(humans) need to take more responsibility as a whole. If one of the people in your life boat is drilling a whole in the bottom in the middle of the sea, being able to place blame doesn't matter so much. "We" are all going down if "we" can't do something about it.
Subsuming responsibility for things that one could have prevented is one thing; accepting responsibility for something that nothing short of war could have prevented is another.
Sorry: I meant that as a response to the notion that the Soviets made a unique error with the Aral (hence the "don't blame us" stated in the parent) rather than being a common symptom of water diversion worldwide. It was not meant as to be a whataboutism, which is an awesome word for bad moral equivalence. I am so stealing that.
Whataboutism is lame when used to excuse a behavior, but completely valid when used to rebut accusations of unique malfeasance. There is a big difference between something being your problem vs our problem.
Wikipedia is wrong there. It lists a maximum surface area of 1,780 km^2 (690 sq mi) for Tulare Lake, while Lake Iliamna in Alaska is 2,622 km^2 (1,012.5 sq mi).
