I’ve been reading up a bit on Poland, before I head off to the annual European meeting of the Society of Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry (SETAC Europe), to be held in Warsaw from May 25 to 29.
Glaciers shaped the country way back in the Pleistocene, a quick Wikipedia search shows. The ice extended and retreated again and again over hundreds of thousands of years, leaving moraines and glacial lakes sitting on low-lying plains split by rivers. The land seems to have been perfect for agriculture—the CIA World Factbook tells me that half the country is put to agricultural uses, and about a third is forest.
My first thought? It sounds like a Midwestern U.S. state—maybe Minnesota! Well, with the exception of Poland’s mountains—some of which are alpine, such as the High Tatras (known as the Tatry in Polish) between Poland and Slovakia.
That Minnesota connection, in conjunction with the fact that I’m about to attend a meeting on environmental sciences, makes me think about the kinds of environmental problems Poland might be facing. Agriculture and animal husbandry usually means the use of pesticides and pharmaceuticals that end up in surface and groundwater. Large rivers bisect the country, and many of its waterways run directly to the Baltic Sea. That large inland body of water has blossomed with phytoplankton, with at least three major springtime blooms in the past decade.
Sounds to me like the flat lands of the U.S. Midwest, combined with the problems facing the Mississippi River and ending with dead zones in the Gulf of Mexico (see my colleague Erika Engelhaupt’s reporting on the issues there).
Last fall, Poland became one of eight countries pledged to clean up the Baltic by 2021—will those efforts be too little too late, and were the discussions between the member nations as fragmented as they were between American states on the Mississippi, trying to clean up the Gulf of Mexico’s dead zone?
Poland joined the EU in 2004. Since then, the EU has threatened to sue the country or penalize it for several transgressions of EU environmental rules, including a controversial highway project through a conservation area and warnings over its habitat policies, which the BBC News reported in 2006. On the other hand, the country rejected growing genetically modified plants for agriculture earlier this year, which led the EU to tell Poland to desist because it had no valid scientific reasons for banning GMOs.
Of course, this SETAC meeting will not be focused on Poland. A quick glance at the conference lineup [pdf 2 MB] shows me where I’ll probably be for a few days: Listening to a day-and-a-half session on pharmaceuticals in the environment, checking in on the carbon footprint session (SETAC’s first ever?), revisiting LCAs, nanomaterials, genotoxicity, —omics, mixtures in the environment … oh dear. What a feast! It seems I want to attend pretty much all of the sessions.
Instead, I’ll be jumping between them and gulping down as much as I can. Hopefully, I’ll be able to report some of those tiny bites here on this blog.
Thanks !