Leadership Quote by Harri Holkeri

Holkeri’s line reads like a warning disguised as civics homework: simple nouns, blunt repetition, and a moral target that’s deliberately fuzzy. “More and more polluted” isn’t poetry, but that’s the point. A politician reaches for a phrase that can travel across borders and party lines, the kind of language that works in committee rooms and evening news clips alike. The rhythm escalates: problem, blame, stakes.

The most telling move is the passive, almost diplomatic rebuke: “Not everybody living near the shore... is protecting it.” He doesn’t name industries, governments, or specific offenders; he creates a category broad enough to include citizens, municipalities, shipping, agriculture, and corporate polluters without triggering immediate defensiveness. It’s accountability by implication. The subtext is Nordic: responsibility is collective, but so is shame when the collective fails.

Calling the Baltic “the water of life” is strategic emotional engineering. For Finland and Sweden, the sea is commerce, identity, food, and security. Holkeri ties environmental policy to national continuity, turning pollution from an abstract “green” issue into something closer to infrastructure and sovereignty. It also hints at a geopolitical reality: the Baltic is shared, and shared resources turn domestic negligence into international friction. You can hear the quiet pressure for cooperation - and for stricter regulation - without him ever saying “treaty” or “sanctions.”

Contextually, this sits in the late-20th-century Baltic awakening, when eutrophication, industrial discharge, and Cold War-era pollution became impossible to ignore. Holkeri’s intent is to make protection feel less like charity for nature and more like self-preservation with a coastline.