The Sea That Disappeared

In 1960, the Aral Sea stretched across 26,000 square miles of Central Asia — the fourth largest lake on earth. Fishing boats crowded its harbors. Villages thrived along its shores. Soviet engineers looked at all that water and saw opportunity: divert the rivers feeding the Aral to irrigate cotton fields across Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. The harvests were enormous. The quotas were met. The economy boomed.

Scientists warned the sea was shrinking. Officials dismissed them. The cotton was too profitable, the irrigation too convenient. Year after year, the rivers were drained. Year after year, the shoreline retreated.

By the 1990s, the Aral Sea had lost ninety percent of its volume. The fishing port of Moynaq sat sixty miles from the nearest water. Rusted hulks of ships lay half-buried in sand where waves once lapped. Former fishermen wandered the dry seabed, searching for a livelihood that had vanished. The very water that sustained generations was gone — squandered for short-term gain.

Amos saw a similar reckoning. While Israel's merchants trampled the poor and could not wait for the Sabbath to end so they could cheat their customers, God showed the prophet a basket of ripe summer fruit — not a sign of abundance, but of an end. The coming famine would not be of bread or water, but of hearing the words of the Lord. People would stagger from sea to sea, desperately searching for a word from God they had once taken for granted. Like Moynaq's fishermen scanning an empty horizon, they would find nothing.

What we refuse to honor, we eventually lose.