Some environmental disasters happen in the blink of an eye, much too quickly for anyone to react: an oil spill, a nuclear explosion, the sudden collapse of a tailings dam. They are often the result of an operator’s error, or sloppy inspection, or adverse weather conditions no one could have foreseen.

But there is another group of eco disasters that are years, sometimes decades in the making. It is hard to trace them back to a single source because the gradual accumulation of bad judgments, blind ideology, indifference, greed, or plain stupidity is so enormous that it defies all logic.

Such an example is the massive diversion of rivers in the Soviet Union that, over a period of 50 years, has led to the demise of Central Asia’s Aral Sea. Another is the damming of the Colorado River.

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