Boring pictures perhaps, but they each show something about Dresden. The first is yet another renovation underway, nearly every building needs care after years of neglect by the Communist party. They focused on industrial production and trying to compete with the West, and let the environment decay, as well as the buildings. There were towns covered with soot from factories, and factories often had 15,000 employees. One of the most expensive parts of the transition was to adhere to the very strict laws in Germany. Germany's environmental laws are much more strict than those in the US, and supported as much be conservatives as by those on the Left. The Green party introduced environmentalism in the debate in the late seventies, and Der Spiegel even had a cover story in the early eighties "Deutschland wird haesslich," Germany is becoming ugly. Unlike America where there are wide expanses of open land, Germany has 80 million in a relatively small country, smaller than Montana. As an industrial power, that makes pollution more intense, and hence they saw the danger early. The Greens found wide spread support for their environmental policies, and soon the other parties were tripping over themselves to be more active on environmental issues. By the mid-eighties Germany had implemented numerous tough laws on pollution and keeping the air and water clean. The second photo above shows a typical archetectural style of old East Germany. That's it for now, by in a few months I should have more Dresden photos here.