Richard Collins on how a Cold War crisis produced a wildlife miracle.
The Ireland of my youth was so anti-Communist that I resolved to visit the Workers’ Paradise. It was easier said than done in the early ’60s but, somehow, I got visas to cross what Winston Churchill, borrowing a phrase of Joseph Goebbels, called the Iron Curtain. This massive barrier stretched from the Norwegian-Russian border in the Arctic to the Turkish-Bulgarian frontier on the shores of the Black Sea. The 1,393km-long German section was particularly formidable.
It took several hours for this gob-smacked Irish student to get through a crossing-point to the German Democratic Republic. The atmosphere there was paranoid. Photos of Walter Ulbricht, the GDR supremo, which one saw everywhere, caught the anxious mood. I befriended some off-duty guards in a pub. Their job was to man the machine-gun towers along the curtain. They claimed to believe in what they were doing, but I wondered what they really thought. No criticism of the regime was possible; it was risky for them even to talk to a Westerner. One guard, however, was quite forthcoming. He hailed from Wittenberg, scene of Luther’s revolt, and our discussion inevitably turned to religion and ideology. Border guards, he told me, never served close to home; security personnel must have no ties in the locality.
The curtain was a communist creation and had to be located on their side of the border. Just 50 metres wide in some places but extending to 200 metres in others, you could get close to it on the West German side. A barbed wire fence ran along the actual border, inside which there was a ditch. Mines were planted in the central area. Sometimes this was covered with sand, so that an escapee’s footprints would be immediately visible.
A track for military vehicles ran through the centre of no man’s land. Beyond that there appeared to be another ditch, and then a second barbed wire fence. Guards peered ominously through binoculars at spectators; one felt like a bird being ogled by twitchers!
There were tank-traps, X-shaped steel structures protruding from the ground, to prevent people escaping on bulldozers or tractors. Dogs were also used, although I didn’t see any. Lengths of cable strung out like clothes-lines had rings to which leashes were attached. A ring could slide along the wire enabling the dog to patrol a stretch of territory and attack anyone who ventured within its reach.
But, as they say, every cloud has a silver lining. From a nature conservation standpoint, the Iron Curtain was a blessing, a vast strip of land in which wildlife thrived. Freed for 40 years from disturbance hunting and farming, wild animals and plants prospered. When nature reserves are isolated from each other animal populations can’t mix and gene pools become impoverished. Along the curtain, however, such islandisation was avoided; creatures could move freely.
The ecological importance of the strip of land was first realised in the 1970’s, when BUND, Germany’s Friends of the Earth, began to study it. Starting in 1976, ecological surveys were carried out from the West German side. Rivers streams and marshes accounted for about 15% of the enclosed area. About 20% was forested, while grasslands covered some 37%. More than a hundred habitat types were identified, half of them seriously threatened in Europe. Liana Geidizis of BUND, speaking on RTÉ’s Mooney Show, claimed that the curtain supported more than 600 endangered plants and animals.
It had red-backed shrikes, whinchats, black storks and otters, now very scarce elsewhere in mainland Europe. This is a haven for lynx and, though not in Germany, bears.
Then, in 1989, the barriers came down. Roads and paths were re-established and East German farmers, dispossessed when the Curtain was created, claimed back their lands. A meeting, held in the Bavarian-Czech region, was attended by 400 nature conservationists and Operation Green Belt was launched. This, the first conservation project of the reunited Germany, seeks to have the curtain’s most important habitats protected.
So far, nature reserves encompass 28% of the area, while a further 38% is proposed for Special Protected Area status. BUND has been buying out landowners.
But the work is not confined to Germany; Green Belt Europe, with Mikhail Gorbatchev as patron, proposes to establish an 8,500km-long pan-European network of cross-border reserves. The outlook for the Iron, or perhaps ironic, Curtain seems bright.
a d v e r t i s e m e n t
This appeared in the printed version of the Irish Examiner Monday, November 17, 2008
