Šumava – Fairy-tale and Reality
Mojmír Vlašín
Summary: Natural forests, very complex balanced ecosystems, have existed on our planet for millions of years. In contrast, foresters (as a professional group) have existed for only about 200 years. They are trained to plant and cut down trees. In fact, forestry education prevents foresters from truly understanding the functions of forests.
Foresters often confuse a national park with an English park or an amusement park. From a forester’s point of view, storms, floods and mass insect breeding seem like disasters. From a conservation point of view, they are recurring, perfectly natural events.
By the time the United States Congress proclaimed the world’s first national park, Yellowstone National Park, and called in a special detachment of the U.S. Army, known as Rangers, to protect it, two nature preserves had already existed for half a century on the Buquoy estate in southern Bohemia. These were the Žofín forest and the Hojná Voda. The count appointed his foresters to protect them.
The fact is, that Šumava was a border zone for decades with very limited access for the public, and also, the ownership situation was completely disrupted by the eviction of the German population and the subsequent nationalisation.
It is quite liberating when the author identifies forestry, like transport and industry, as a clear obstacle to effective nature conservation. In our country we tiptoe around foresters so as not to antagonise them, but we fail to tell them the essentials. Namely, that they are not the ones who will solve the problems of nature conservation. That they themselves are the problem.
In 2019, an amendment to the Nature and Landscape Protection Act came into force, based on which a decree on the definition of nature protection zones of Šumava National Park was issued on 7 February 2020. According to the decree, the territory of the park was re-zoned to: natural zone (unified areas where natural ecosystems prevail with the aim of preserving them and allowing the undisturbed course of natural processes in them), the zone close to nature (an area where partially human-altered ecosystems prevail, where active intervention is possible), the zone of concentrated care for nature (areas where significantly altered ecosystems prevail, the existence of which is conditioned by permanent human activity) and finally the zone of cultural landscape (areas in the built-up areas of municipalities, intended for their sustainable development).