I HAVE been in Uzbekistan, Central Asia's most populous and in many ways most crucial state. Every day I've been struck by the contrast between an exuberant young population and a mirthless Soviet-era regime. I hope to write about that once I'm out of the country.

For now, I'll touch on the Aral Sea. Nineteenth-century travellers pinched themselves when on the horizon they saw wooden schooners gliding across the steppe, Russian ships on the Aral Sea. One of my regrets was not being able to gaze upon the more modern fishing boats of the Aral Sea, or at rather upon the boats cresting the sand dunes where the sea used to be. Short of billing my editor for a day's helicopter charter, I didn't have the chance this time to make the long journey out to investigate.

Still, the ghost of the Aral Sea has hung over many a conversation in the capital, Tashkent. Once the world's fourth largest inland sea, king cotton and the command economy have done for it in a few short decades, with its volume falling by more than three-quarters.

Two rivers once fed the Aral Sea, the Amu Darya (the Oxus of the Ancient Greeks) and the Syr Darya (named after one of the four rivers of paradise). Now these run into the sands before reaching it. The Uzbek shore has fled some 200 kilometres (125 miles) north. By 2007 the Aral Sea had divided into three diminished and saline lakes. Last year the south-eastern lake vanished. A fishing industry that once employed 40,000 has vanished too, along with the fish and indeed an entire flora and fauna.

Every year five Central Asian states meet to discuss how to rescue the Aral Sea. In 2000 UNESCO produced a “water-related vision” for reviving the sea. The World Bank has restoration projects. But one development expert I spoke to in Tashkent, who has a deep attachment to the Aral Sea and Uzbekistan's adjacent region of Karakalpakstan, says the sea is “beyond redemption”. If the Amu Darya ran at full flow, he says, it would take 75 years for the sea to refill.

As it is, both rivers continue to be diverted, constricted, bled, channelled and forced into a surrounding desert ripped up to make way for cotton fields. The tragedy is that Uzbekistan's agriculture still runs on Soviet lines, and cotton is approved as Karakalpakstan's saviour.

The reality is that the region has no future at all. The Aral Sea's disappearance has led to drier summers and harsher winters. Soils grow ever more saline, and cotton yields only fall. An island once used by the Soviet Union for testing biological and chemical weapons is now a peninsula. Sandstorms whip up toxic dusts that poison locals and that have been deposited as far away as the East China Sea.

Uzbekistan's 400,000-odd Karakalpaks (literally, Black Hats), a Turkic people that traditionally herded and fished, once had a striking culture. They are now the poorest group in Uzbekistan, and many are destitute. Children are sent out to pick the cotton at harvest time.

Aid donors and NGOs, which the regime tolerates in this part of the country more than elsewhere, attempt to improve the Karakalpaks' plight. But the development expert I spoke to in Tashkent says that such plans, like those for saving the Aral Sea itself, were doomed to failure, so ruined is the land. If you had $50m, he says, it would be better to spend it moving the Karakalpaks to a more salubrious place, even at the cost of destroying an ancient and remarkable people's links to their land. Karakalpakstan, however much was spent on the region, “will be on life support for ever.”

Most journalists covering development are brought up to think in terms of “solutions”—The Economist would hardly be in business if it didn't have prescriptions. So it comes as a shock to be persuaded that human folly and hubris on this monstrous a scale has, in just my lifetime, devastated such a big chunk of Asia. Now only nature and time, probably on a geological scale, have any hope of redeeming it.