You may not enjoy being there, but that doesn't make it not worth saving.
That said, the more dead the sea becomes, the less it smells. The Salton Sea smelled so much worse when there were will fish to die off [0]. The fish population would go through population boom and bust cycles. I haven't seen a dead fish there in about 10 years now. Now that it's mostly dead and sterile, the smell isn't as bad. And that's not necessarily a good thing....
[0] https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1999-aug-12-mn-65092...
Not that you are arguing that they aren't though. It's an interesting anecdote. A dried-up salty lake doesn't sound inviting.
I'd be more generous though...it's not Mordor. It's where Mordor residents go on vacation. The beach in Death Stranding was cleaner, but a beach is a beach even if it's full of jagged rocks, hot sand and dead organic matter. I walked it barefoot and came down with blisters and a bacterial infection so nasty I couldn't walk for a month.
Not saying it's not worth saving, only that it's not worth advertising as a recreational venue. It's gross. It's literally a sump tank.
In this video, he gives a talk about some various projects. In the first one, he uses these methods to clean up a site contaminated with the top 15 pollutants (at least at the time). Heavy metal were sequestered by algea; 14 of the 15 toxins were below detectable levels, and the 15th was reduced by 99.999%; solids were eaten by armored carp. The output is drinking standard water, and it takes 10 days for the contaminated water to flow through the system.
The key design principle is putting many species across all five kingdoms, from different biomes, and they start self-organizing around the pollutants. The resulting communities break down the pollutant, but are all new.
In a different interview, he talks about microplastics — and while he has not worked on it, he believes a solution can be found in incorporating all five kingdoms. So not just sequestering them, but breaking them down so they can be useful in the ecosystem again.
It's enormous. 950+ square miles.
It's a salt lake. Far saltier than the ocean. No carps are going to be eating solids. The algea or other biological methods described in the video will not work to reset a lake of salt that is nearly the size of Rhode Island.
Revitalizing an area of that size would likely be a far larger undertaking than solving the problem of reduced flow into the lake due to agricultural overuse.
I'm all for clever solutions, but they can also lead people into thinking that it's a problem solved, and that addressing the root cause of the problem isn't needed. It allows people to be complacent and allow abuse to continue. When it all implodes, those who caused it get sit back and see how the rest of us deal with it.
We can try taking Sauron to court?
I’d even say save it if it was always disgusting. It’s certainly unique.
Today, it's disgusting and obviously sick. That same beach is a sandy field a mile from the water, and when you do get to the water, it's a sludge that's probably not healthy to be around.
Running out of water is a concern, but it's not because we won't be able to farm or wash or cars or whatever. It's because if that sludge dries, it turns to dust, and all the very nasty stuff (arsenic, mercury, and other heavy metals), starts polluting our air.
And when it comes to air pollution, even without a dry lake of nasty stuff, the Salt Lake City metro area is one of the worst - especially so in the winter. We get an inversion later that traps air pollution in the valleys, and the air becomes brown. Not even a hint of brown, but just brown.
Very bad things will happen to the health of everyone in this area should the lake go dry.
And then yes there were occasional times where the lake would recede a bit and the smell could make you flinch from miles and miles away.