Hope for the Aral

Once the fourth-largest lake in the world, the Aral Sea was effectively killed for cotton, when short-sighted Soviet bureaucrats diverted its main tributaries for irrigation. So drastic is the Aral's demise that it has become for many the poster-child of environmental catastrophe. But now it appears that a new dam on the Aral -- a desperate last-ditch effort, to be sure -- may salvage at least a part of a place many had written off as history. According to reports, the dammed section of the Aral (smaller and less polluted than the larger section) has filled far faster than most experts expected, and the resurgence has brought many people back to fishing villages they had abandoned. Reporting for the New York Times, Ilan Greenberg writes that, "For many in the Aral region, the new water is confirmation that the Aral's past is prologue." May it be so.