Re- filling the Sea

Kazakhstan is, succesfully, beginning to re- fill their portion of the Aral Sea.

"Now, thanks to a new 8-mile-wide dam and other projects by the Kazakh government and the World Bank, the northern part of the Aral is filling again with fresh water. That in turn is restoring hope and a modest degree of prosperity to a region devastated by the double whammy of a disappearing sea and the Soviet collapse.

"Fat carp flop wildly as fishermen pull nets tight around them, and salted fish hang to dry in the semidesert region's processing plants.

" "I'm happy. The sea is coming near my village. I had a son born yesterday. And along with the sea, the fish come to the nets," Zhanarbek Kelmaganbetov, 30, said as he paused from hauling in 2-foot carp near the new dam."

Interestingly, as greener and more liberal Kazakhstan does this, the grim dictatorship in Uzbekistan does nothing good with their (luckily separate) section:

"The southern sea, which lies mostly in Uzbekistan, continues to shrink and is too salty to sustain even ocean fish. Instead of trying to reverse the environmental damage there, Uzbekistan's government is seeking to find and develop gas and oil deposits in the dry seabed."

I have several scientist friends in Kazakhstan whom I will ask about this. One, ornithologist Andrey Kovalenko, is near the sea for the summer, studying birds there.

One more passage reminds me almost nostalgically of Kazakhstan:

""The water was right here," he said, motioning to the slope at his feet. "Starting from 1961, it started to go away. At that time, it was a very beautiful place. There was a beer bar. My brothers and uncles would drink beer, and we were fishing here.""

Moslems. Who fish. And drink LOTS of beer (and vodka). Those are Kazakhs as I remember them.