ABSTRACT
The hauntingly iconic images of rusting merchant and fishing ships abandoned in the heavily polluted sands of what was once the bottom of the Aral Sea still capture media attention around the world. Once teeming with the fish that kept canneries humming and drew tourists from across the Soviet Union, the southern portion of the Aral is dead, dried up—a ghost of an inland sea. During World War I, fish were so plentiful that Russian train engines were adapted to burn fish that had been caught and dried for fuel (Bailey, 1946). But central planners in distant Moscow decided that it made economic and political sense to divert water from the two rivers that fed the Aral to irrigate the expanded cotton farming in the desert.
