From her home on an island in the Stockholm archipelago, Pella Thiel wakes each day to the brackish wind of the Baltic Sea. The water surrounds her life, it is the view from her kitchen window, the soundscape of her mornings, and the reason behind much of her work. For years, she has watched the sea change. The algae blooms grow thicker, the fish fewer, and the water more poisonous. What once sustained the archipelago’s communities now carries the weight of pollution and loss.
Seeing Beyond Symptoms
Pella has long been passionate about nature. Early in her career, she worked within environmental NGOs, believing in their power to drive change. Yet over time, frustration crept in. Not from a lack of effort, but from what she calls a lack of systemic understanding. The environmental movement, she felt, often treated symptoms, but not causes. This realization led her to seek deeper, more holistic forms of change, which she found through the Rights of Nature (RoN) movement. It was around 2012 that Pella first encountered the idea that ecosystems could be recognised as legal subjects. While she understood the necessity of the campaign for legal personhood, what truly captivated her was the deeper change it brought forth: the paradigm shift in how humans relate to nature, a worldview in which ecosystems are subjects, not objects. She first implemented this shift in her own career and activism. Alongside Polly Higgins, Pella dedicated a part of her life pushing the issue of ecocide law in Sweden. Yet, as meaningful as the ecocide movement was, it still felt too anthropocentric, rooted in human systems of justice rather than in nature’s own ways of being.
The Sea in Her Backyard
Another shift that unfolded as Pella’s thinking evolved, was the growing importance of local resilience. In the early years of her career, she devoted herself to rainforest preservation, working to protect ecosystems far from home. Yet a quiet question began to trouble her: why was it easier to care for the rainforest on another continent than for the sea just outside her door? The Baltic Sea, after all, was her own backyard. A place she loved deeply. And yet, its problems felt overwhelming, even impossible to face. Still, she could feel the sea, its slow suffocation, its loss of vitality, as something personal. “My son will never fish a cod here,” she reflects, recalling how the fish that once defined the region’s life has vanished. That sense of grief, coupled with a strong belief in care, became the seed for what would later grow into the Embassy of the Baltic Sea. It was born from the conviction that if people could learn to represent the sea as a living being, rather than a resource, they might begin to restore its dignity and shift their societies to enable living with respect for the more-than human world.
A Sea in Crisis: The Baltic Case
The Baltic Sea is often described as one of the most polluted water bodies in the world. A semi-enclosed sea that has borne the weight of industrial, agricultural, and urban pollution for more than fifty years. Its condition presents a troubling paradox: the countries surrounding it, especially Sweden, Finland, Denmark, are often celebrated as sustainability leaders. However they have nonetheless contributed to its decline. Their prosperity has come, in part, at the cost of the sea that connects them.Geographically, the Baltic is unique. Covering an area of about 420,000 square kilometres, it is the youngest sea on Earth, formed only 10,000 to 15,000 years ago as the glaciers of the last Ice Age retreated. It is also one of the planet’s largest bodies of brackish water, where saltwater from the North Sea mingles with the freshwater flowing in from rivers and streams. Seven major rivers feed its basin, creating a watershed four times larger than the sea itself. It is a home to more than 85 million people across nine countries.Brackish water is unstable and the biodiversity is low, making it a fragile ecosystem. More than 94% of the Baltic is affected by eutrophication, caused by nutrient runoff from agriculture and industry. This has created vast dead zones: oxygen-deprived regions now covering an area one and a half times the size of Denmark. Cod populations, once a cornerstone of local economies and identities, have collapsed beyond recovery. The European eel teeters on the brink of extinction, and the Baltic harbour porpoise, the sea’s only whale, counts fewer than 500 individuals. Each summer, toxic algae blooms paint the water an opaque green, a visible reminder of how far the ecosystem has drifted from balance.Moreover, climate change deepens these pressures. A warmer, more oxygen-poor Baltic is not only less capable of supporting life but may also become a source of greenhouse gas emissions, releasing more carbon and methane than it absorbs. The very sea that once moderated regional climates could, in time, exacerbate them.Yet the Baltic should also be understood as a failing cultural and moral landscape. For centuries, it sustained communities through fishing, trade, and recreation. Its decline now threatens not just food and income, but a shared sense of identity. In the islands and coastal towns of the archipelago, people like Pella Thiel see this not merely as an ecological crisis, but as a moral one too. There is a rupture in the relationship between humans and the living systems that make life possible. To recognise the Baltic sea, the ecosystem, as a living community, is the first step toward healing both the sea and ourselves.
A Laboratory of Care
The Embassy of the Baltic Sea was born from this belief. Healing this fragile sea requires much more beyond policy reform. A profound systemic shift can only happen if inspired by a profound cultural shift: a new way of perceiving and relating to the living world. Inspired by the Embassy of the North Sea in the Netherlands, the initiative was founded by Pella and a group of collaborators who wanted to create what they call a “laboratory of care.” It is a space where dialogue, collaboration, and representation can nurture both human and ecological well-being.At its heart, the Embassy promotes the Rights of Nature perspective, recognising the Baltic Sea as a living entity with the right to health, development, and regeneration. It serves as a platform to inspire and support initiatives that strengthen the relationship between people and the sea with the goal to strengthen what Pella describes as ecological literacy. This is an important facet, as she observes a widespread disconnection from the natural systems that sustain life.Volunteer-based and community-driven, the Embassy’s structure reflects its values of participation and inclusivity. It is guided by a board of four members and supported by around twenty founders, facilitating a broad alliance of organisations and individuals from the whole Baltic watershed.. Together, they aim to create the moral and cultural foundations for recognising the rights of the Baltic Sea, before formal legal personhood can take shape in the institutional landscape of the countries surrounding the Baltic Sea.The Embassy defines its mission through three intertwined principles: representation, collaboration, and action. Representation means practising how to give voice to the more-than-human — all ecosystems within the Baltic watershed — in decision-making processes that affect their wellbeing. Collaboration invites dialogue between actors at all levels, combining insights from law, science, art, traditional ecological knowledge, and regenerative design. Action manifests through concrete projects that demonstrate how human flourishing can be integrated with the life of the wider ecosystem. The guiding vision is rooted in the idea expressed by cultural historian Thomas Berry: “We must say of the universe that it is a communion of subjects, not a collection of objects.” In this spirit, the Embassy challenges the deep cultural assumption that humans stand apart from, and above, nature. Recognising the rights of the Baltic Sea is, therefore, an act of reimagining what it means to belong to a living community as well as a legal act.
Toward a Sea with Dignity
Since its inception, the Embassy has begun to take tangible form as a foundation, to provide a stable base for its projects and administrative work. The same year, the Embassy took part in the inauguration of Sweden’s first marine national park in the Baltic Sea, where Pella served as curator of an exhibition dedicated to the sea’s ecological and cultural significance. Alongside these efforts, the Embassy has drafted a Declaration on the Rights of the Baltic Sea, which emphasises recognition, responsibility, and participation as guiding principles for a renewed relationship between people and the sea.For Pella, the recognition of legal personhood for the Baltic Sea remains secondary to the deeper task at hand: rebuilding the moral and cultural context necessary for such recognition to thrive. Institutions, she believes, can only uphold what society is ready to honour. And so, the Embassy’s quiet but radical work continues: cultivating care, restoring connection, and reminding those who live along its shores that the Baltic is not an object to be managed, but a being to be respected.
