3. The Earth’s Most Polluted River
On the island of Java near the Indonesian capital of Jakarta, the Citarum River supports up to 30 million people, but years of chemicals dumped by textile factories, garbage from villages, and human waste have rendered it one of the world’s most polluted waterways. Although the water in the Citarum is laden with heavy metals and toxic chemicals, it’s still used for drinking, bathing, cleaning, watering crops, and cooking, and it’s the main water source for Jakarta. Too contaminated to support fish populations, poor former fishermen have instead begun trolling through the trash-strewn waters looking for recyclable plastic to sell.

4. The Shrinking Aral Sea
In the 1920s, Soviet politicians decided to divert the two rivers that feed the Aral Sea—a saltwater lake located between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan—in order to irrigate the desert to produce cotton. Since the ’60s, what was once the world’s fourth-largest lake has lost about 80 percent of its volume. A booming fishing industry vanished as the sea shrank and became saltier, leaving residents unemployed and without a fresh water source. The salty, chemical-ridden dust exposed by the drying water blows all over the region—sometimes as far away as Scandinavia—and is blamed for serious public health problems such as drug-resistant tuberculosis, cancer, liver disease, eye problems, anemia, kidney disease, shortened life expectancy, and increased maternal mortality. The dust storms have also resulted in longer, colder winters and hotter, dryer summers, while making it impossible to grow other crops in the area. In 2005, a dam was constructed to try to route water back into the sea to save the region; while the Northern branch of the sea is expected to grow, many scientists believe that the southern part of the sea will be lost forever.

5. Somalia’s Sea of Toxic Waste
Since the government of Somalia collapsed in 1991, many other nations and private companies have taken advantage of the lawlessness in the country’s coastal waters to not only fish illegally but also to dump their waste. After the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004, barrels of toxic waste washed ashore and broke open, littering the coastline with radioactive uranium waste, medical waste, chemicals, heavy metals, and all matter of other hazardous materials. The waste blew inland, causing residents of coastal villages to develop respiratory infections, skin infections, mouth ulcers, and even radiation sickness. The UN envoy for Somalia has repeatedly insisted that it’s significantly cheaper for unscrupulous companies and nations to simply abandon their trash in the unregulated waters off of the coast than to dispose of them properly; the dumping continues to this day. The United Nations Environmental Programme asserts that some Somali “pirates” are merely a makeshift Coast Guard, trying to expel illegal and unregulated fishing boats and trash vessels from Somali waters. The result of the dumping (as well as overfishing) is that the coastline has been ravaged and the waters poisoned, eliminating legitimate fishing jobs and driving the people of the nation deeper into poverty.

Sadly, these are not the only environmental crises in progress today. Chinese coal fires belching carbon, detergents contaminating fresh water, and mountaintop removal mining are all ongoing and very real threats to our environment and our way of life. No matter how often we hear about mining tragedies or oil spills here in the United States, the problem of environmental degradation—especially in countries without laws to prevent it—is truly a global one.

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