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In autumn, the House of Representatives will discuss the proposal to declare Křivokracko a national park. However, most locals are still unwilling to accept the fact that they will have a strictly protected area behind a fence. That’s why Minister Piotr Hladik (KDU-ČSL) came here. In Ráčice, he met with the mayor and then went to the camp of the local people. But he failed to convince them. “They raised the idea that we don’t want it because we don’t understand it. That’s offensive,” said the mayor.
It’s the start of the holiday season, the Monday after the long weekend. At the boating camp on the Vltava River in the village of Racice, it’s alive. Children play around floats, and a few families enjoy fried dishes from the menu at the takeaway window.
In the near future, the number of visitors to the campsite may increase significantly. The government is about to announce the creation of a new national park just a few kilometers away – Křivoklátsko. The House of Representatives will discuss in autumn a proposal to increase the protection of the existing landscape reserve by 16%.
This leads to embarrassment. “Even now, when the camping grounds are full, there are still problems here. There is nowhere to park. And the number of people will increase even more. You know how it will be. Every Prague resident will say to himself, where am I going? On the weekend: to the national park, for example,” he worries, for example, a local resident, a young woman in a summer dress.
On Monday afternoon, she had the opportunity to tell the most important person, Environment Minister Petar Hladík, who visited Krzywokratsko several times last year. “When I called all the mayors, only one of the sixteen came. I called the mayor three times, and today I met him for the first time. So I came to see him. You know, I absolutely did not allow myself not to come. I was invited to a meeting,” says Hladík, who is critical of the city leadership.
On Monday, he first met with Mayor Tomasz Kohut and then took a walk around Racice. He stopped longest at a local campsite, where he listened to several locals. He still had some explaining to do. Most residents and the mayor were strongly against the declaration of a national park.
“I have no doubt that attendance will increase,” Hradek agreed with the woman. However, he stressed that the national park status will help to better control tourism, so that there is no damage to nature and the municipality has sufficient capacity to accommodate tourists. Somewhere, for example, a new parking lot is already being planned. “But you have to tell yourself that there is no attraction for tourists here. There is no Sněžka or Pravčická brána here,” he added.
But possible overtourism is just one of many concerns among locals. They claim that today’s protections are enough and that stricter protections will not benefit nature. “We look at other parks and we are scared. My God, one burned down, another was destroyed by bark beetles and other disasters. Should we leave our forest in the hands of someone who knows he is in trouble?” said Mayor Rachik Kohut.
“The Šumava National Park was declared to protect the three-hundred-year-old forests there. But they no longer exist. Fifty percent of national parks have experienced large-scale forest disasters. In my opinion, this is a very bad calling card,” agreed Mayor Martin Zadražil, who came to the meeting with his young daughter.
The two mentioned the recent devastating fires in Czech Switzerland, and the bark beetle catastrophe that destroyed the forests of Žumava. “But a much bigger catastrophe is happening in the unprotected forests of Vysočina and Moravia. Follow the D1. The claim that the bark beetles are spreading because of nature conservation is completely false,” Hradik countered.
Michal Servus, director of the ministry’s nature and landscape protection department, explained to locals that in certain types of forests even bark beetles, wind or fire can be part of natural processes. “However, this does not mean that if lightning ignites a tree somewhere, we will let it burn,” he added.
The biggest change will be the way Krivokratsk’s forests are managed. Currently, it operates on the basis of a compromise between an ecological approach and the pursuit of the maximum possible profit. Therefore, even in the most strictly protected small reserves, conservationists must negotiate procedures with foresters. In national parks, the economy is already based entirely on procedures close to nature, He explained Two years ago, Aktuálně.cz was the local Liberation Army leader Jaroslav Obermajer.
But locals simply don’t listen to the experts. “We still don’t understand why it has to be a national park. If there is a valuable place here, let’s protect it. But let’s not surround the village with a national park, it would restrict us,” said the mayor of Racic, Tomas Kohut.
Hladik said the mayors were threatening and intimidating
“The minister didn’t convince us,” Martin Zadrazil said after the meeting. He was troubled, for example, by his claim that people wrongly feared they would no longer be able to go to the forest to pick mushrooms after the national park was declared. “This is nonsense, it’s dry here, mushrooms don’t grow here,” Zadrazil said. “This is not nonsense. I rang bells in every village, knocked on doors. The first thing people told me was that they couldn’t go into the forest,” Hradik countered.
The minister reiterated that a large part of the population does not want the park precisely because of lies, such as the threat of limiting access to the forest. He believes that the mayors are to blame for the lack of information about what the change actually brings.
“Where the mayor works, there is a lot of information. Where the mayor deliberately does not inform people, there is none. They do it deliberately, it’s simple. Either I explain and inform, or I threaten and intimidate. That’s how some people deal with it,” the minister said.
But Mayor Racic refused. “There was some information in the beginning. But it’s outdated now. Even if you fully understand something, it may not be for you. They present the idea that we don’t understand it, and that’s why we don’t want it, and that offends you from the beginning, and just because we are in a village doesn’t mean we are less intelligent,” Kohut said.
The key is that the government does not need the approval of the mayors of the surrounding cities to declare a national park. “We do not have a republic run by mayors. In the elections, the people clearly supported the election program, which said that this territory is valuable and a national park should be created here. We will submit the proposal to the government by the end of July, and the House of Representatives will begin to deal with this issue in the fall,” said Hladik, who assured that the government will succeed in declaring the creation of the Krivoklatsko National Park by the end of its term next year.
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