Tomáš Vančura - Why people need wilderness

The euro is falling. Dow Jones has fallen again below 10 000 points. The Czechs, I think, finished elections, now it awaits us. The atmosphere here is amazing, I see many young people, it's all up to you. When on 10th August in 1996, in the United States, in a country that brags about having everything perfect, the network broke down, the first time I heard the word "blackout", 7,5 million people, many people were stuck in lifts. They wondered, a bit weirdly looking even at me, as if what was this guy trying to say, when he was about to deliver a lecture on wilderness. And they wondered what actually happened. The system was made by humans. And humans should guarantee that everything runs smoothly. Humans also came up with other things, other very positive things. We had the opportunity to hear about one of those, the internet, today's domain. Young people are attached to it like to their blood circulation. However, the internet has problems too. Recently, my gmail was not working and I had to wait a while, until another "human" fixed it. Humans and their nervous system. Very complex. In order to lift my arm, my leg, to speak, someone has to control it all, it is somehow organic. The difference between those two systems is that this one is biological and the other one mentoned before technical. But even the biological one can fail. Then microsurgeons get to work, or rather people who are well versed in that field. Either they patch it up together or not. However, one day it all ends badly, because the person dies. Yet I know another kind of network that doesn't have such problems. And that network is called the wilderness network. I was looking at this picture from a helicopter, after the 19th November in 2004, when the "Tatras fell." We were diverse people sitting there. Some whooped: "Jesus Christ, how are we going to process this?" "This terrain is difficult. It's going to cost us a lot." And I saw in it an amazing opportunity. An opportunity to finally do something, as I was the director of the national park at that time. Fabulous job. Fantastic. I am happy even today that I could work there. It's been 4 years since I left. That is also fantastic, as I see it all from a totally different angle. And when I looked at that, I saw a network. Sort of an information network, exactly like TEDx here, interlinked. Everything is connected. In contrast to human technical networks, it still works. It's been going on for thousands of years. The forest lives, with its local colour, its cycle, it even remembers things that happened before, which leads to improvements of the entire network and the system. Wilderness. Europe has one big problem. For instance, I entered this on the internet. So I type this in google, as my children would say "daddy google it", so I put "wilderness SK" and no hits at all. Then I typed just the general "wilderness" and among the hits were an animated Walt Disney film, then Rihanna and that you should savour the taste of weeds. Europe has a great difficulty grasping wilderness. It's logical because Europe was the first land to be populated by humans and it was industrialised very fast. As a result, there were actually few areas unaffected by human activity, so it was not a problem. Do people really need wilderness? I was trained to be a forester, seventh generation. Sometimes, my brother and I we joked that we even sleep in our duffle coats. A duffle coat is a forester's coat, a green one. Everywhere I reached, there were books, pictures of woods. I spend my entire youth with my dad in the forest. A marvellous time that really has given me a lot and I still hang on to that very much. Naturally, I attended a forestry school. I couldn't possibly go anywhere else. I graduated from university. My favourite subject, the one I liked best was "forest exploitation". A chain saw, when turned on, it feels great. Because you stand under a tree, they teach you the technique, so that the tree falls where it's supposed to. And you decide, where it falls. Whether it's there or there. After school, I started working for Lesoprojekt ("Forest Project"), an organisation, devised by people. Maria Theresa realised people should pay attention to the forests, so that we don't cut them all down. And we call it a second college or second university. I had a sharpened HB2 pencil in order to erase my notes more easily. So when I wrote into my notebook, for example "cut down 20 cubic metres in the north-eastern corner " and made a mistake, I just erased it and then it was 25 or 26 cubic metres. We played God. I thought of my field in all honesty that I was helping nature. My thinking changed owing to an experience I underwent when we had a meeting in the Berchtesgaden national park. That's in the lower corner of Germany. On that hill, in that eagle nest, the event was not very positive from the historical aspect, yet for me it was very positive. We were on a terrain with a forest, where the national park was created a few years ago in 1980. In that park, Germans, truly a nation of foresters, who have only "artificial" trees, which are all supposed to be even, pruned, everyone already sees planks, glued cuboids... and they dared to create a national park saying that they want to leave it completely to nature. We also thought we would leave it to nature. There was one situation: We were among young plants of the forest stand, where animals had grazed before. They exchanged it with the owners and then I, a furious forest engineer, asked the director: "Why don't you help, why do you take it too easy?" "Take that tree out, the crooked one." And he asked me: "Why should I remove that curved tree?" "I was taught that curved trees should be removed, right?" "And also the thin one, take it out as well and when you leave only the thick ones, everything will grow faster and then it will become wilderness." And he asked me: "How do you know that?" "Well, that's what I've learned." "And who taught you that?" "And why?" And he asked me: "How do you know that the crooked tree won't live up to 300 years?" "How do you know that the thin tree next to the big one won't also live up to 300 years?" "And how do you know that the big one won't be knocked over by the wind tomorrow?" On the way home, I thought about what was actually going on, for in my head, everything turned over. I began to understand that the situation with the forest was quite different after all, that humans in the whole system of the forest are merely a pathetic episode and they are not entitled to decide upon its fate. A forest is a very complex system. When I listened to the lecture of Ďuro Lukáč, who also provided this clip, with his permission, he is a cybernetician, I am a forester, when I listened to him, I thought: "Boy, what do you think you're talking about?" And he started enumerating: In one hectare of forest, there are that many bacteria, that many single-cell organisms etc. He asked: "Can you imagine how much is 6*10^9?" "You know what that number is?" Look at the sky. All those stars, that's nothing. That's just 15% of the 6*10^9. A huge important number, he paused for a while and then snapped like this, where we and those beautiful things were. Those marvellous things we think of as being wild. Folks, the constitutional majority of decision-making, those aren't pretty things, I'm not talking about people, it's precisely about those things that were at the beginning. It was about the springtails, about the bacteria … So when decisions are made on whether wilderness should stay as it is, whether we will exploit or not, we should call all of them. In that corner, we will be there with the beautiful animals and all this will be filled by the 80%, insignificant to many of us, but which should make the decision. With my colleague, who told that remarkable story about the new agriculture, we agreed that the soil is the placenta of the forest. It's the basis for everything. The same applies to the forest. Soil, we can quickly skim this through. Its properties are very important. And if we just compare, whether we cut it down or leave it, so at present, when we have that grave situation with the high water levels and a lot of drains, the forest can obviously retain a half more water and of course more of it permeates the soil. That soil in the original forest is intact, not pressed. The density or specific weight is exactly the other way round. I don't mean nitrogen, which can bind. So the whole chemical essence of the earth and its physical properties are several times better if the forests are left to themselves. Water - the basis for life That's clear to everyone. Something interesting: From one hectare, 4 million litres of water can evaporate. I'm not saying this is a remedy to our problems with floods. But we need to realise what the system of the forest really is about and how complex it is. Forest. In order to understand wilderness, we need to grasp the durability of the forest. This is basically a spiral explaining the diverse stages. We have two ways of solving that situation. First option: We interfere, but then we can't call it wilderness. We may think that we're helping the forest. We may think that we're trying to make it green as soon as possible, but the reality is the opposite. And sometimes, we end up like that man in the middle, lost and forlorn. Second option: We can leave it the way it is… One more thing to the previous option: That situation may even lead to a total loss of genetic information and actually to a complete zero-setting or reset of the story we talked about. Yet we have a story that can happen, that we do not take care. When we don't take care, we start perhaps with a similar story from the beginning but with a different ending. With this picture I'd like to say, so that people understand and I very often say it to my children, for my wife is a teacher and she says: "Always explain it as you would to pupils of the first level of primary school." So this is the best clip to apprehend wilderness in its essence and that essence is, when compared to a family, that the way small children live with their grandparents, who are grey-haired, many of them dying, but not completely, they still communicate and share advice for life. A dying father and that's the beauty of it, when the son is with his dying father, in most cases, these last hours are crucial for the son's future. That way, he is passing down the information. The same happens in the forest. Under usual circumstances, all these things needed for the transfer of genes leave and are transmitted outside that area. We were at a lecture and one man asked: "Do you think trees should grow vertically?" When the trees in the Tatra National Park fell, all of them were horizontal, some of them even lived 4 years. 80% of that area was exploited. We exploited "living trees". If the trees had been left, they would have lived for 3 more years, bearing fruit, telling a new story, bearing new seedlings, and living their own lives. England offers a few examples of deciduous trees that continue to live without any difficulty, because those branches will create trunks and they keep growing. All these things are quite specialized. Nowadays, after some time, I hold the opinion that if we want to understand wilderness, it is actually the mystical aspect that comes into play here. Who of you slept in the mountains, alone or with a friend, or completely alone? That's great! Wow! So we can finish the lecture right now. That's awesome! I discuss these things quite often and very few children or people have that experience. Yet owing to such adventures when being alone in the forest, in that contemplation or understanding, or in these questions that run through your head, you realise many times, that this is something we can't explain and that's the mystical side of wilderness. It is why wilderness enjoys a growing popularity nowadays, for people are tired from their world of technology surrounding them, as has been proven by various analyses and surveys that people are willing to accept this story. It can also be an alternative to tourism. On this day, a special event takes place. Shares of a land are being sold, a piece of land somewhere in northern Slovakia, I think. It would certainly be more profitable offering something unique. In 1964, the president of the United States signed the Wilderness Act and there is still 16% of land in the US unaffected by humans. I believe that one day in our Presidential Palace, something like this will be signed leading to the creation of special areas in Slovakia, where no human will intervene. At present, such areas are national natural reserves, areas protected by the state, but unfortunately, they don't fully meet their objectives. The catchphrase: The nature is harmed, we need to protect it. We need to protect it, but from us humans, from chain saws, chemicals. Let nature be nature. One last thing to conclude with: We have two options. Either we will only think back and memories will be the only thing left to us or we will develop an active approach to the problem. I know that not all of you understand wilderness, not all of you may need it, but there is a group of people who want to preserve it. It's like with a book you read at an early age, I read London's short stories of the wild, and as it's important for you to have these books in your bookcase, for me and a certain group of people, it's important to confer that kind of protection to certain areas making the world richer, so that in a couple of years, we can go there as into a pantry and collect information and gain what we can't figure out by ourselves and to find some explanation to what is going on in the nature. Thank you. �