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Comment by agentgt | Hacker News Reader

No the same thing did not happen to the Aral Sea. What happened to the Aral sea was far far worse and far far more of our fault (humans).

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You are right. That said, diversion of water for agriculture is also a confounding factor in the case of Lake Poopó.

That was far far more the Soviets' fault, not "our" fault.

Ah! That makes it much better. At least I'm not to blame. (Sarcasm)

I think "we"(humans) need to take more responsibility as a whole. If one of the people in your life boat is drilling a whole in the bottom in the middle of the sea, being able to place blame doesn't matter so much. "We" are all going down if "we" can't do something about it.

Subsuming responsibility for things that one could have prevented is one thing; accepting responsibility for something that nothing short of war could have prevented is another.

And the US eliminated the largest freshwater lake West of the Mississippi [1].

[1] (largest by area) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulare_Lake

A. Whataboutism is lame B. The Aral Sea was 10x larger [1] C. I do appreciate the irony of A D. the scale of both is mindblowing, so I upvoted you

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aral_Sea

Sorry: I meant that as a response to the notion that the Soviets made a unique error with the Aral (hence the "don't blame us" stated in the parent) rather than being a common symptom of water diversion worldwide. It was not meant as to be a whataboutism, which is an awesome word for bad moral equivalence. I am so stealing that.

Whataboutism is lame when used to excuse a behavior, but completely valid when used to rebut accusations of unique malfeasance. There is a big difference between something being your problem vs our problem.

Wikipedia is wrong there. It lists a maximum surface area of 1,780 km^2 (690 sq mi) for Tulare Lake, while Lake Iliamna in Alaska is 2,622 km^2 (1,012.5 sq mi).

We're all humans, and we're all responsible for the Earth.

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