The race to save Polesia, Europe's Amazon | Hacker News Reader

The race to save Polesia, Europe's Amazon

theguardian.com

91 pointsjxub32 comments

To me this sound like a crappy piece of propaganda. This project is in the national interest of Poland, Belarus, and Ukraine. They would profit from this route, obviously. The underdeveloped region would get a nice boost. The project is also against national interests of so many other countries that profit from lack of such route, many in the EU, notoriously Russia, and many others.

The caption “colorfully painted log cabin” under a photo of a dissolving uninhabitable shack is priceless. Really makes me want to protect the region from evil humans.

Wish the title had "Rainforest" because the current title makes it seem like Polesia is a european competitor to Bezo's Amazon that is struggling to survive.

Also, isn't calling Polesia, Europe's Amazon as silly as calling Thames, England's Nile? The amazon rainforest is almost the size of europe itself.

It is used to evoke an understanding of how "wild" it is. It is probably not that accurate but I don't think it is silly, it made me curious and after reading the article I learned something new.

Took me a while to make sense out of the title. It's a confusing analogy, Amazon is river, Paliessie is mostly forests, bogs, with a number of rivers. I understand the biodiversity context, but even changing the title to spell Amazonas (it's a salad of meanings anyways) would make it less ambiguous, perhaps more exotic.

I highly recommend buying a kayak to kayak through one of the swamp areas in your region on a nice spring or summer day. Its really an experience for the soul! Even in a cooler/cold climate, the amount of noise from birds chirping really does make it seem like you're in the amazon. A total sensory experience worth having. You can get a kayak for $300.

And the noise from the bugs. The bugs and frogs in the south US are incredibly loud. Plus bugs are pretty dangerous, and on the water here you have snakes.

Idk I grew up next to the James river and it would take something incredible to make me go back there.

Humans are more dangerous and make the most noise, I'd gladly brave bugs and snakes to get away from them for a while.

Nice to sea Polesie on hackernews, even if for such reasons. My grandparents lived there (in the Polish part near Włodawa), I spent every holidays in 90s and 00s swimming in these lakes and biking through these forests.

It's a very pretty region, great for tourism (the default is forest, there are clearings with lakes every few dozen kilometers, there's also some villages and farming land, but mostly it's one huge forest).

It's very flat, and the roads (except the one that connects Lublin to Włodawa and the country border) are almost always empty - so it's a paradise for biking.

The villages are very poor even for eastern Poland standards, most young people leave cause there's no jobs except for farming and some tourism in the summer but still not much. I'd say the median age is over 40 in the countryside or possibly more.

My grandfather was working for a local farming cooperative there during communism, and they tried to dry the swamps for agriculture reasons. They were also searching for coal (there's a coal mine in the region and there is a possibility for some more).

The end result was that in that particular part (near Stary Brus - Kołacze - Hańsk) it got much too dry, the ground water level dropped and it's almost a desert now - ground is mostly sand, only pine trees and a few kinds of grass grow there.

In the Polish part there is already an artificial lake (Wytyczno) and a channel between some rivers (Wieprz-Krzna), but nobody really uses it for transport. I don't think it makes much sense to build waterways there at the cost of nature.

- there's no industry to speak of

- the population is sparse and poor

- the border between Poland and Belarus on the Bug river is the external border of the EU, it separates 2 opposing economic unions and blocks almost all the trade

- the next part downstream (Mazury lake district) is also underdeveloped sparsely populated countryside with little money and lots of rare nature

If Poland, Ukraine and Belarus joined one economic union (preferably EU) - it could maybe work, but as is it's useless investment with lots of harmful side effects.

You mention it is great for tourism. I am intrigued. As a tourist, how would I best get around in this area (longer distances), if I would not be cycling? Rental car?

If you want to travel fast you need a car there, yes. Public transport only works well along the few main roads, outside of that it's like 2-3 buses a day or none at all.

In any case traveling fast kinda misses the point, the fun stuff is in between. If you don't want to bike you can rent a kayak and go down one of the rivers.

IMHO the best way is to get a tent and a bike, take a train to some city (Włodawa works), and bike for a week or two camping elsewhere each day. Best time is June - late enough that there's lots of cheap fresh fruits everywhere (you can buy them from farmers along the roads or just gather the wild fruits in the forests), but before the school ends so even the popular lakes are empty.

Also there's that https://greenvelo.pl/en/map a bike-only road that goes for over 500 km through most of the tourist spots in the Polish parts of Polesie (and also later Warmia and Mazury). Less wild but still cool. Easy flat terrain starts north of Chełm and continues all the way to the Baltic sea,

BTW choosing a smiling scenic mask icon for museums wasn't the best choice on that map, especially when you have a museum of a german death camp there :/

I crosschecked that with https://www.darksitefinder.com/maps/world.html#7/51.283/22.7... so there should be some pretty good nightskies enjoyable with a large binocular, or even a 5 inch Maksutov. How do you remember the weather to be on average for the time (June) you suggested? Cloudy, hazy, or clear? With clear i mean, could you when you camped somewhere in the forest, the campfire out, your eyes used to the dark, see the milky way or some other faint smudges of nebula with the bare eye?

Yes you could see Milky Way pretty well on the moonless nights, even with naked eyes. The weather should be 20-35 C, usually partial cloud cover but no rain, sometimes no clouds at all, sometimes a quick thunderstorm, very rarely you'd get a whole day of rain.

That is good to know since this is so rare nowadays. Thank you. Will consider that for some possible travel in the future.

There is a project with similar aim: the Danube-Oder-Elbe canal. It would connect Black, Baltic and North Seas:

http://www.d-o-l.cz/index.php/en/about-d-o-e-project/current...

What’s the purpose to compare a waterway hundreds of km long and comprised of 5 rivers and various channels to the Panama and Suez channel? This is so misleading.

It's a shortcut just like Panama and Suez channel. It changes travel time from around few weeks to few days.

Panama channel allows you to not to go around America. Suez channel allows you to not to go around Africa. This shortcut allows you to not to go around Europe.

Yes, but most of the new route showed on those maps is existing rivers, so it's not comparable at all as presented.

Is this region comparatively unspoilt because of the Chernobyl disaster? If so, that's a strange kind of irony.

No, it's because it is mostly swamps. Totally unsuitable for agriculture.

Agriculture is not the only thing humans do or settle for. Swamps are historically heavily inhabited by and sometimes even purposefully extended by humans specifically due to endemic biodiversity and ease of hunting and gathering. Also, sometimes because they offer fertile soils or refuge from other humans, and the waterways a strong source of orientation, food, and an artery for transport, trade and taxation. Examples off the top of my head: Bangladesh, Holland, Venice, Hanoi, Bangkok, Shanghai, Hangzhou, Angkor, Amazon, Sepik River of PNG...

Virtually all your examples are seaside marshes, not low-lying inland swamps. But your example of Angkor is a good example of a low-lying inland swampy area and, while for a period of history it was a productive, heavily populated area it then experienced a population crash which has extended through to the present day.

I’d add Tenochtitlan which is Mexico now. It was a swamp surrounded by mountains 500 years ago. Densely populated.

So let's look purely at Hanoi, Hangzhou and Angkor as the subset that matches your requested scope. I still think it's fair to point out that they are all enormously successful areas.

Not entirely true, see https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spreew%C3%A4lder_Gurken from the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spreewald for example. Similar landscapes. I'd guess swampy isn't that bad if you channel it a little, to have some more dry islands.

edit: Cranberries!

It's swamps and forests sitting between 3 countries that went 3 different geopolitic ways (Belarus joined Russia, Poland joined EU and Ukraine tried to alance between the two). If you want to move goods from Ukraine to Poland - going through Belarus forces you to pay entry tariffs to CIS (Russia economic union) AND entry tariffs to EU. And dealing with lots of paperwork. Makes zero sense so all trade goes directly Poland->Ukraine through land south from there.

There's no industry, almost no trade, population is sparse, and even farming isn't very profitable there. And for some weird reason it's not even that well known by tourists.

Region influenced by Chernobyl is just a small part and it wasn't the root cause anyway.

The Chernobyl exclusion zone has greater biodiversity than it did before the disaster. Humans are worse for the environment than concentrated radioactive fallout.

If you are a billionaire and you want to make a wildlife preserve with your billions, just buy some dirty bombs.

More or less the theme behind Hugh Howey's 'Silo' series.

Is it telling that I assumed this article was about a struggling European ecommerce conglomerate?

The article does feel a bit like propaganda. Environmental groups are notorious in the region for being used as political instruments to halt all manner of construction. When a new road is to be built, you’ll have environmental agitators coming out of the woodwork claiming that the road would cross a newly discovered frog habitat and that it would lead to the deaths of many frogs trying to cross the road. Never mind that there are ways to manage even those situations.

The important thing is to weigh the human benefits against the overall negative impacts of a project. Environmental extremism generally smacks of foreign interests trying to keep the status quo and the region from flourishing economically and thus competing with them, or at least making things economically inconvenient.

There is quite a history of such self-serving foreign meddling that involves patronizing appeals to all manner of fashionable sentiment, hence my skepticism.

It seems like the project would be very useful. I wonder what the environmental benefits would be of reducing the distance ships need to travel from AROUND Europe to through the E40 route? Might it outweigh whatever environmental costs there are?

Not quite if you consider geopolitical landscape.

It's strange but when I think about Poles'e I think about 'Come and See' movie and the swamp scene https://youtu.be/Y60mnxzSD1Y?t=2992

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