Singing the Danube blues

This spring, the Danube, brown and swollen from rains, spilled over its banks where it still can, turning the forests along its channel into swamps. After a few days or weeks the flood waters will recede, as they have for centuries, leaving behind the nutrients and minerals that make floodplains so fertile.

The Danube Basin is shared by 11 countries, connecting them through shipping and transport like an enormous transcontinental highway. It gathers the waters of half a continent - from alpine streams in the Swiss Alps to the sluggish bayous of southern Ukraine - during its 2000-mile journey to the Black Sea.

But where pollution is concerned, the sharing goes in only one direction: downstream.

"Until the early seventies, people were catching six-foot sturgeon around here," Janos Zlinsky recalls, as he walks through the flooded forests on a squishy dirt path. In spring the 10-mile stretch of the Danube between Budapest and Szentendre was once choked with shoals of spawning sturgeon that had migrated a thousand miles upstream from the Black Sea.

Peasants grew tired of eating the caviar-producing fish, which grew to 24 feet long and could feed half a village.

But over the past century, the sturgeon shoals thinned out as kings and nations worked to tame Europe's mightiest river. The Danube was straightened and frequently walled off from its flood plain by ramparts and levees. The sturgeon hung on until 1973 when they encountered a barrier they could not pass: the enormous Iron Gates dam down river from Hungary on the Romania-Yugoslavia border. The sturgeon haven't been seen in Hungary since.

"For Hungarians, that severed our last palpable connection with the Black Sea," says Dr. Zlinsky, now a senior scientist at the Szentendre headquarters of the Regional Environmental Center for Central and Eastern Europe. "What we put in the river helped destroy the Black Sea, but most people in Hungary could care less."

Until the mid-19th century, the Danube meandered through floodplains and wetlands, shifting from one bend to another with each spring flood. Fish laid their eggs in them, turning the marshes around Szentendre into enormous hatcheries.

But over the past 150 years, governments channeled and straightened the river, filling in "unhealthy" wetlands and building dams to generate power and improve navigation. During the 20th century, 80 percent of the floodplains were lost, according to the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF).

Hungary and Slovakia are at odds at the International Court in The Hague over a Communist-era hydroelectric program that's triggered a drop in northwestern Hungary's water table and overall water quality. Hungary pulled out of the joint project after the end of communism, but Slovakia pressed ahead with its Gabcikovo dam. In 1992, Slovakia diverted the entire river into an artificial canal and away from a vast Hungarian wetland. Hungary says the river was stolen.

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