Today is Sweden's National Day! There is plenty of room to realize that National Day is something bigger and more remarkable than we seem to think. In Norway, the national day on the seventeenth of May is slightly bigger and really big. What explains the difference? I think it's the war when the Nazis suppressed, looted, executed and humiliated in Norway. I remember the peace ending too 75 years ago.
And above all, I remember the young people from Norway who lived at our house. They were my best playmates, which was most important to me. I couldn't even say that they were refugees and resistance fighters. One of them remains in Hede. In the cemetery. I tend his grave. Two had to borrow my sisters' new Christmas skis to get into Norway and resist. Neither the skis nor my playmates came back.
Today, on the national day itself, I would have fished in the restored current stretches of Långåljusnan. Corona got in the way. Finally, I would have experienced what I experienced sixty years ago, before the so-called development turned the river into a channel for timber transport to the coast and electricity production for light, power and heat. The benefit was valuable and good, but the consequences for the river were appalling and terrible.
Christmas weekend 2014 contained mulled wine, butterscotch, ham and peace as usual. The calm gave me a moment at the computer to write down thoughts that we thought and talked about in the fishing association's board for a long time. The 12 January 2015 the board decided according to the proposal and now it will soon be ready. At least half of the seven kilometers that is Långåljusnan as it was meant to be is now opened, by and for nature.
National Day is a big day for all of us and for everything that makes Sweden Sweden. This is where our fairies belong. Four sheep are called national fairies. They are Torne-, Calyx-, Drink- and the Vindelälven. They are called national rivers because they have not been expanded with hydropower and are protected. It is good! But then everyone else?
In February 1998 asked the Riksdag member Torsten Gavelin a question in the Riksdag, which the then Minister of the Environment Anna Lindh answered as follows: "It is very important to protect the unaffected watercourses from the expansion of hydropower in order to preserve the natural production capacity, the biological diversity, cultural environment values, conditions for outdoor life as well as the ecological and hydrological function of the landscape".
"I have no intention of submitting any proposal to the Riksdag that entails a weakening of the protection of the rivers or of the pristine watercourses", said Anna Lindh!
It was good. But what can be done and what is being done for the "disturbed" rivers, which are also 'national rivers' converted to electricity, but where there are still some splashes of water that can be made something of? A lot, it turns out. The long eel light is an example. Fishery conservation associations, municipalities, The state and the EU are betting more than ever that they too, despite power extraction, can become functional biotopes.
It is important for Långå fishing, but above all for our fish and other aquatic organisms. The fact that anglers are number two in our prioritization is simply due to the fact that if there are fish, you can fish.
Happy National Day!
/Helgi Jonsson