<$How Communism (Almost) Killed the Black Sea
Click on the image to see it largerThe November 2006 issue of Scientific American has a fascinating article on "Reviving Dead Zones" which goes into the details of how the Black Sea was almost lost to heavy pollution but made a miraculous come back during the '90s.The culprit? Not anything you would suspect.Believe it or not, the culprits were the communist regimes that ruled Eastern Europe and to a certain extent, Ukraine. This is my summary of the amazing causality chain between the nature of a political regime and environmental pollution:1) The centralized communist regimes, as well as highly industrial European countries like Germany, heavily subsidized the use of fertilizers. They have also encouraged huge animal production facilities, like the 1-million head hog farm in Romania which produced as much sewage as a city of 5 million.2) The increased nitrogen content, phosphorus effluent and sewage washed off to the Black Sea mainly through the Danube River. 3) "As nutirent effluents [kept pouring into the Black Sea] dense phytoplankton blooms appeared in the surface waters [see the satellite photo above]."4) "Such luxuriant growth lowered water transparency..."5) "... which in turn deprived the bottom algae of light and eventually led to their loss, which altered the entire natural ecosystem [of the Black Sea]."6) Oxygen levels in the water started to fall, which led to...
Click on the image to see it larger7) ... the death of mollusks en masse, which led bacteria and other organisms to consume the remaining local oxygen...8) ... which basically led to the slow suffocation of the Western Black Sea region [see the infra-red before-after satellite photos in the insert].So how did the recovery happen?"The area began to recover only when the communist regimes in eastern Europe fell at the end of 1989, ending central economic planning. Suddenly farmers there had little capital to buy fertilizer, so agricultural activities slowed. Likewise, many giant animal farms closed, thus profoundly reducing nutrient runoff... Within six years the profound drop-off in nutrient influx led to shrinkage of the dead zone."Read the whole article for a more detailed explanation of how Western Black Sea turned from the brink of extinction, thanks to the collapse of the centralized planned economies that fed junk into Danube.