Aral Sea

It's been five years since the collapse of the Soviet Union but it will take many more years to undue much of the ecological damage done during Soviet rule. Case in point: one of the greatest environmental disasters in the world today is the drying up of the Aral Sea in central Asia. In the 1950s, when the Soviets decided to increase their cotton crop, two rivers that flowed into the Aral Sea were used to irrigate the cotton fields of Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan; the flow of water to the Aral Sea was reduced by ninety percent with disasterous results. NPR's Mike Shuster visits an Uzbek town that used to one of the Aral Sea's biggest ports—now the sea is thirty miles away and the town of Mujnak (Moy-NAHK) is plagued by both massive unemployment and serious health problems brought on by the Aral's demise.