Pirates of the Baltic Sea:Non Player Characters

Johanna Feldt

A Swedish born marine biologist and a daughter of the Swedish Green Party politician Erik Feldt. Her father was a staunch environmentalist and avowed pacifist, who was aghast at the pollution and violence in the present day Baltic Sea. For years, he kept lobbying for support for the overturning of the Hanseatic Convention and bringing the sea back under government control, but kept getting stymied by corporate lobbyists who kept pointing out the costs that the increased bureaucracy would bring – surely the governments had enough money sinks in their territories.

Then Feldt changed tactics and started lobbying for the restoration of the Polluter Pays Principle, a more than century old part of the Helsinki Convention on the Protection of the Marine Environment of the Baltic Sea Area, that the corporations had managed to get removed during their rise to power. Basically, the Principle says that when pollution occurs, the party responsible pays for the damage and cleanup. Naturally, the megacorporations operating in the Baltic Sea area were aghast. Especially the large shipping companies who had gotten used to just dumping their bilge water and shipboard trash overboard to avoid the costs, and Reclaim International, who was afraid that they’d be held responsible for the runoff from the Northern Fallout Zone they were leasing.

What made Feldt’s lobbying especially threatening was that the Helsinki Convention was still in force, and restoring one particular principle would take far less political will and effort than overturning the entire Hanseatic Convention – and since the costs would fall to the corporations, their lobbyists had a much harder time arguing against it. Feldt also kept pointing out that the Polluter Pays Principle would lessen the violence in the region when radical groups like the Dead Zone would no longer have as great an agenda.

Then Erik Feldt was found murdered in his home, with the symbol of Dead Zone spray painted on the wall. The response from Dead Zone was swift: “Not us. Murder is not one of our methods, and we would have no reason to harm someone we agree with.” But corporate lobbyists were swift to associate the Polluter Pays Principle with Dead Zone, and Feldt’s attempt to restore the principle largely died with him. It gets occasionally mentioned by other Green Party politicians in the region, but has little support among larger parties.

Johanna was convinced that her father’s murder was a corporate hit, and she was not afraid to state her opinion online despite increased online harassment. But as the killers were not found, the murder eventually started to become yesterday’s news. Frustrated, she became increasingly more radical in her quest for answers, and after she was involved in hacking and data theft of Reclaim International office, it ended her career at the Tjärnö Marine Biological Laboratory. Soon after that she moved to Åland, but was far from the first person with her education to have done so. With no openings in her field, she made a career of what had once been her hobby – dancing. And used her education to start fighting for the Baltic Sea – literally. If the governments won’t make the polluters pay, then Dead Zone will. And now she is a member of the group once accused of murdering her father.