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Near Baku, Azerbaijan, 1997

"Oil wastes on the Caspian Sea bear witness to notorious pollution in the region. In 1949 the Soviet government decided that the Baku region would be a model for the petrochemical industry. Moscow drove the industry to meet rising quotas, but ecological issues were not taken into account. As a result, hundreds of thousands of tons of toxic wastes were released each year in the atmosphere or dumped into waterways that fed them to the Caspian Sea."

Photograph and caption by Reza