Russia has spoken out against a Caspian pipeline which would bypass Russia. ‘Any gas or oil pipelines across the floor of the Caspian Sea would be environmentally unacceptable’, says the Russian Natural Resources Ministry.

‘Double standards’ says everyone else, as Russia builds a pipeline on the Baltic floor to bypass Poland.

As it happens, the Baltic isn’t in good shape. The Baltic is what they call ‘pollution sensitive.’ It’s almost as closed as the Caspian, since water renewal takes 25 - 30 years. There are, however, greater threats than pipelines.

One threat is the amber mine in Kaliningrad. Sewage produced by the Yantarny plant is one of the world’s biggest culprits in the environmental crime of . . . anthropogenic suspended material expulsion. Basically, the sea cannot dissolve the waste and becomes turbid, impeding the natural flow of water.

It is estimated that Kaliningrad has around 90 per cent of the world’s deposits of natural amber. Amber is a very beautiful metalloid - another new word I learned today - but mining is a fairly crude process. The shore is dredged and the sediment loaded on to freight cars. In old tin sheds, high pressure hoses separate the amber from the sludge. The sludge is returned to cloud and stagnate the sea.

Although amber has a reputation of being ‘rare and precious’, most of what is extracted is poor quality and goes into making varnish, oil and acids. Only about 10 per cent is ’sparkler quality’.

The other major threat to the Balltic is agricultural run-off, in the form of nitrates from EU intensive farming. In Autumn 2002, thousands of dead fish were washed ashore along the east coast of Jutland, Denmark. Thanks to the nitrates, those that are left are breathing with difficulty.

So, along with anthropogenic suspended material expulsion you can add exceptional oxygen depletion to your environmentalist vocabulary, as well as eutrophication - a condition in which the sea contains too high a level of fertilizer. How appropriate that the word begins with ‘EU’.
Anyway, I’m off to Kaliningrad again shortly. Think I should order the fish?