Nice to sea Polesie on hackernews, even if for such reasons. My grandparents lived there (in the Polish part near Włodawa), I spent every holidays in 90s and 00s swimming in these lakes and biking through these forests.<p>It's a very pretty region, great for tourism (the default is forest, there are clearings with lakes every few dozen kilometers, there's also some villages and farming land, but mostly it's one huge forest).<p>It's very flat, and the roads (except the one that connects Lublin to Włodawa and the country border) are almost always empty - so it's a paradise for biking.<p>The villages are very poor even for eastern Poland standards, most young people leave cause there's no jobs except for farming and some tourism in the summer but still not much. I'd say the median age is over 40 in the countryside or possibly more.<p>My grandfather was working for a local farming cooperative there during communism, and they tried to dry the swamps for agriculture reasons. They were also searching for coal (there's a coal mine in the region and there is a possibility for some more).<p>The end result was that in that particular part (near Stary Brus - Kołacze - Hańsk) it got much too dry, the ground water level dropped and it's almost a desert now - ground is mostly sand, only pine trees and a few kinds of grass grow there.<p>In the Polish part there is already an artificial lake (Wytyczno) and a channel between some rivers (Wieprz-Krzna), but nobody really uses it for transport. I don't think it makes much sense to build waterways there at the cost of nature.<p>- there's no industry to speak of<p>- the population is sparse and poor<p>- the border between Poland and Belarus on the Bug river is the external border of the EU, it separates 2 opposing economic unions and blocks almost all the trade<p>- the next part downstream (Mazury lake district) is also underdeveloped sparsely populated countryside with little money and lots of rare nature<p>If Poland, Ukraine and Belarus joined one economic union (preferably EU) - it could maybe work, but as is it's useless investment with lots of harmful side effects.