Worst ever?

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Atrios muses that BP may end up being credited with the worst-ever human-caused disaster. Well, I won't necessarily argue about that because it remains to be seen. But take a look at these pictures from The Boston Globe online (as seen on Eschaton, op cit.). Photos 13 and 14 do a good job of conveying the general sense of what's going on in the water and the puny human response to same.

Even ignoring Hiroshima and Nagasaki as outliers, there are some other pretty heavy contenders for the Worst-Ever Human-Caused Environmental Cataclysm Award. Chernobyl, the flower of Ukraine, would certainly be a finalist. But I think it might be hard (for the moment) to top the utter destruction of the fourth largest lake in the world in Uzbekistan, formerly known as the Aral Sea. But still... maybe we can.

U!  S!  A!    U!  S!  A!    U!  S!  A!

Editor's note: attentive readers may notice that in yesterday's post on this topic I besmirched Russia only half-accurately as the villain behind certain apocalyptic environmental cockups. Neither aforementioned holocaust actually took place on Russian soil (conveniently for Russians), but were instead "a USSR joint." So take my inexcusable journalistic lapse with a grain of morphine.