"Comrads"

Trev, as charming at the Baltic itself is, especially during the
Northern Lights when the sun doesn't set (as happened while we were
there), the sea is quite dead after many, many years of pumping all
kinds of industrial waste into it by, mostly, Russia and the old Soviet
Union states and those controlled and aligned to them. Finland, Sweden
and Denmark had absolutely no say in the matter, as much as they tried
to improve or remedy the situation with cleaner air and controlled
effluent disposal. I know that today they are doing their best to
remedy the situation, but it's going to take many years before they can
say that there's been any change.

I actually wondered why I didn't see anyone fishing amongst the
beautiful Swedish islands, but was told that the water is still too
brackish to encourage any decent (and edible) fish life. Global
warming is adding new threats to marine life, says Alertnet, in the
almost land-locked Baltic Sea, where the fish are already struggling in
the polluted, brackish waters. Higher temperatures are likely to mean
more rain and snow in the Baltic region, from Copenhagen to St
Petersburg, and where 85 million people live. That might make the sea
even less salty and add to a polluting runoff of fertilisers from
farmland. Many stocks of fish are already living on the edge of their
ranges in the brackish Baltic, and lower salinity would further cut
survival rates of fish larvae. Decades of pollution, as I said, largely
from the former Soviet Union, mean that concentrations of poisons
ranging from dioxins to cadmium are far higher in the almost enclosed
Baltic Sea than in more open seas or in the oceans.

Ja well, I guess that's where we'll end up if our government agencies
-- DEAT included -- don't keep driving away our most talented
scientists just because of their skin colour. The watchdogs are gone,
the nation's conscience with it. I guess that your "Green Police" are
long overdue up there in the ou Transvaal, though I don't hold out much
hope for success with corruption as rife as it is.

Excerpt from a letter received from Dave Rorke

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