Welcome to my nature protection page. This place may evolve in the future to be a forum where people can discuss questions about nature and politics. In the meantime I am always grateful for e-mails from other people about their experiences with the official nature protection. I offer here the opportunity to make them public. Tell me what hurts you and I will try to help.
I do strongly believe that the official nature protection is one of the biggest lies of this century. Industrial and academic interests are always more important than the wishes of individuals who want to see and use the nature. People who want to conserve rare endemic species are threatened and outlawed while the most delicate biotopes are overgrown by alien weeds and finally abandoned and used as garbage dumps. People who stand with both feet in practical work like gardeners or forresters are insulted and devalued by arrogant specialists who don't want to work together with anybody except themselves. The laws are perverted to match the needs of industrials and corrupt politicians and make the introduction of genetically engineered plants and animals more easy than the reintroduction of extinct wild species. I do even think that the current disinterest for nature in general is supported by political interest groups. It is about time that the silent majority stands up and fights for the right to get back into the lost paradise.
This fight will be twofold. One half of the battle will be to organize resistance against political forces and create a legal foundation to work upon. The other half will be to regain the mental and spiritual consciousness to be able to live together with the nature in harmony. Even farmers have lost much of this consciousness and see only the financial aspect of animals, plants and soil. But the inhabitants of the big cities live in a nightmarish, degenerated world of neon, trash, sex and crime, shrink-wrapped junk food, overpriced electronic equipment, bad air and constant stress. Even in the suburbs there is no room left for a frog croaking in the garden, for a colony of wild bees in an old wall, for a colourful caterpillar in the herb bed, for a patch of wildflowers in the accurate lawn. Most people have lost the contact with the living nature so long that they feel uneasy about living together with it again. Television is a weak substitute for the real thing.
I am realist enough to know that finances are important in this world which constantly feels the vampire bite of banks and transnational companies. But there is no excuse for throwing poison on the last patch of poppies near the edge of a corn field, for cutting down the last tree in a concrete city, for replacing the last forest or meadow with rare plants with one more monoculture. I am not speaking about the diseases for plants, animals and humans which such actions may cause, I am speaking about the loss of life quality. Diversity is the thing which gives the life colour and restoring diversity means restoring the love for the nature which is needed so much.
Love can be restored if modern people get the opportunity to enter, see, feel, smell, hear and even taste nature. I will never forget this young high-tech mountain biker which I met in the forest near my college. He asked me for directions, we chatted for a while and I was shocked when I discovered that he did not even recognize the wild strawberries near the edge of the path. I picked some for him and he tried them with a facial expression as if I planned to poison him, but finally he had to admit that they tasted very good, and also different than the well-known big strawberries from the fields.
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"Eventually we will only preserve what we love. We love only what we know. But we know only what we have seen ourselves."
Baba Dioum
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Gallery of exotic weeds in Germany
Gallery of empty distribution maps
Related pages about nature and nature politics:
Link to an official Cypripedium reintroduction campaign in Switzerland (in German)
Why can we not have something like this here, too?
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Patiently the D.H.C. explained. If the children were made to scream at the sight of a rose, that was on grounds of high economic policy. Not so very long ago (a century or thereabouts), Gammas, Deltas, even Epsilons, had been conditioned to like flowers - flowers in particular and wild nature in general. The idea was to make them want to be going out into the country at every available opportunity, and so compel them to consume transport. "And didn't they consume transport?" asked the student. "Quite a lot," the D.H.C. replied. "But nothing else." Primroses and landscapes, he pointed out, have one grave defect: they are gratuitous. A love of nature keeps no factories busy. It was decided to abolish the love of nature, at any rate among the lower classes; to abolish the love of nature, but not the tendency to consume transport. For of course it was essential that they should keep on going to the country, even though they hated it. The problem was to find an economically sounder reason for consuming transport than a mere affection for primroses and landscapes. It was duly found. "We condition the masses to hate the country," concluded the Director. "But simultaneously we condition them to love all country sports. At the same time, we see to it that all country sports shall entail the use of elaborate apparatus. So that they consume manufactured articles as well as transport. Hence those electric shocks." "I see," said the student, and was silent, lost in admiration.
Aldous Huxley, "Brave new world"
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