The Aral Sea Disaster

The Aral Sea stands as one of the monstrous environmental catastrophes of the 20th Century.

Before 1960, it was the world's fourth largest inland sea – behind Asia’s Caspian Sea, North America’s Lake Superior and Africa’s Lake Victoria – with an area of 68,000 km². It had a vibrant fishing industry employing 40,000 people. Today discarded fishing boats lie on the sand 20 kilometers from shore.

In the 1950’s and 60’s Soviet engineers began diverting its two major inflowing rivers to irrigate cotton fields. As a result Uzbekistan has become one of the world’s major cotton producers. But this drawdown had a disastrous result as the sea lost most of the inflow of its source waters. The mighty Aral Sea began shrinking – and shrank steadily until, in 2004 it was only 25% of its original surface area, and by 2007 it had declined to 10% of its original size.

Polluted Well

Keeping water clean takes a lot of vigilance.

Proverbs 25:26 says, “like a muddied spring or a polluted well are the righteous who give way to the wicked.”

Everybody using a spring or a well depends on the purity of the source. If a well-shaft is not kept secure things will fall into the well and pollute the water. If animals foul the ground around a spring, or if industries drain toxins into the ground nearby, the aquifer can be compromised and the water made undrinkable.

In the same way, a leader who accepts a bribe destroys trust and fouls the credibility of the workplace. An inspector who looks the other way, instead of being true to her duties, undermines the system she was hired to protect.

Water Cycle

Round and around it goes, steaming up as vapor and then falling as rain or snow. It’s the hydrologic cycle and it goes on endlessly day after day, night after night all over the world. A billion tons of water every minute - up and down. Every day about 12% of the vapor in the atmosphere falls to the earth and is replaced by a fresh supply.

And everywhere this enormous gift of rain or snowfall accomplishes a variety of essential services for our earth by cleansing the air, moderating the temperature and, most obviously, nourishing the plants and animals on the earth.

Ashes of Death - Water of Life

Today is Ash Wednesday.

Ashes and water combined to form a sacred part of ancient Israel’s purity code.

Not just any water – it had to be fresh spring-water, literally living water. And not just ashes from any old fire, but the ashes of a special sacrifice.

The animal had to be a red heifer, free of blemishes, one that had never calved and been put under the yoke! . . .

World Wetlands Day

I used to think that February 2 was simply Groundhog Day.

But apparently it’s also World Wetlands Day – a day to celebrate and appreciate the rich bio-diversity and economic benefits of an under-appreciated wonder of water. Forty years ago on this date, the world signed the Ramsar Convention to protect the world’s wetlands.

I had never heard about Ramsar until this year. I used to think of wetlands simply as wastelands – ugly, mosquito-breeding eyesores on the landscape. I considered them like the Dead Marshes near Mordor in Lord of the Rings whose mists and vapors gave off a terrible stench.

Actually, wet-lands serve us very well. Mud-flats and mangrove swamps buffer the coastline and reduce erosion. Swamps, bogs, marshes and fens are huge sponges that absorb flood-water, filter out pollutants and hold them in the soil, improving water quality. They filter rainwater run-off, minimizing the silting of rivers and streams.

If it weren't for the Sky . . .

Day two and three of the Great Creation Story witness two stunning wonder-of-water events – the emergence of the atmosphere and the separation of dry land from surrounding oceans.

Two crucial environmental events that define the Earth as we know it! Today we’ll consider the first – and in the next post, the second.

The troposphere – what we commonly call Sky, but including the air around us – is a fragile and invisible membrane between us and the cold dark. A mere 15 kilometers of space between sea-level and the highest clouds holds most of our air. It’s where most of our weather happens.

Even the 50 kilometers out to the ozone layer is proportionately thinner than the skin of an apple, but it is a complex and highly functional domain.

What Really Made the Nile Turn Red?

It was the first of the Ten Plagues – and it wasn’t pretty. The great River was bleeding and undrinkable. In a land with no rain, people were desperate. It was an ecological disaster – and it became even worse.

Hungary's Red Sludge
Photo Credit: Newscom

There were no industries to blame – no BP Oil Spill, no Hungarian Alumina tailings leak. This was a natural disaster with serious religious undertones.

Scientifically, there are various perfectly natural explanations. The Nile normally floods every year in late summer. If the annual flood were excessively high, it may have brought microorganisms such as Pfiesteria piscicida which could redden and poison the river and cause conditions that would kill the fish. Epidemiological theories and counter-theories abound.

Rain Forest

Forests are the lungs of planet earth.

They consume our CO2 and exhale oxygen.

They filter our pollution and purify the air; they re-cycle back to the atmosphere vast amounts of water through transpiration and thus help to regulate the climate patterns for the world.


Deforestation is like planetary lung cancer; it takes our breath away. We simply can’t survive without the forests; they breathe for us. We didn’t plant them but they sustain us. Reckless logging and large-scale burning for agriculture destroys a crucial balance of soil, water and air. And we all pay the price of that wanton short-sightedness.