Jan Korytar

Jan (Honza) Korytar; is preserving and reintroducing native biodiversity in the forests of the Jizerské mountain region. In the face of destructive logging activity, his organization is busy recreating natural ecological patterns and involving citizens from around the nation to lend concrete shape to the idea of sustainable life.

Honza is using the endangered old-growth forests of the Czech Republic to create a concrete, popular vision of environmental health, and showing that it is possible to prevent further forest destruction without implementing any laborious or economically demanding re-forestation programs. His is the first practical realization of the ideal of sustainable life in the Czech Republic.
Honza is pioneering a project to promote an alternative way of growing forests without the use of pesticides, fertilizers, or heavy machinery. In doing so, he not only shows the public that grass-roots environmental movements can yield tangible results, but also persuades professionals–both ecologists and forestry specialists–that education is much more effective when combined with practical work. With the help of a broad network of partners and volunteers, Honza is restoring biodiversity to forests and preserving endangered tree species (and the forests as such) within a significant area of the country. With the help of a strong regional ecological organization endowed with sufficient funds to meet his long-term objectives, he has managed to become an influential partner of government agencies. He cooperates with the Czech Ministry of the Environment, various educational institutions, numerous non-profit organizations, and also with local entrepreneurs.
His work sets a precedent for successful grassroots environmental movements that is helping highlight the urgency of citizen action and spreading its influence to other environmental issues.

Over the past few years, the area of the Jizerské Mountains in Northern Bohemia has suffered severe environmental degradation. Logging is quickly destroying the old-growth forests, which are then replaced by planted glades and young forests, predominantly fir monocultures. Due to poor forest management, many trees that once were a common feature in the local habitat have become rare and their occurrence in nature has been reduced to a minimum. The disappearing native species include the silver fir (abies alba), red yew (taxus baccata), mountain elm (ulmus glabra), wych elm (ulmus minor), and linden tree (tilia platyphylla).

Unfortunately, the forestry regulations in the Czech Republic are heavily influenced by the logging lobby. Since the monocultures (i.e. fir forests) are more economical, the industry favors this solution to deforestation. And yet the full-grown fir monocultures which have summarily replaced the original natural forests are often attacked and sometimes obliterated by pests (wood engraver), against which they have no defense due to their unnatural homogeneity.

Moreover, in the process of growing seedlings (overwhelmingly firs), the forest industry tends to apply energy-wasting methods combined with destructive use of fertilizers, pesticides, and heavy machinery. Such processes do not respect the natural requirements of the given species and only replicate methods wrongly applied to agricultural food production (causing greenhouse acceleration, etc.). There is therefore a real danger that in several years' time, the Jizerské Mountains will be faced with an ecological calamity.

Meanwhile, the public at large has little understanding of the problem. The philosophy of sustainable life remains a purely abstract ideal for a substantial segment of the general population. And yet statistical research has shown that almost 100 percent of Czechs value their forests and want to (or would be willing to) help it in some way. Honza has made it his mission to tap into this latent enthusiasm for the environment and transform in into concrete action.

In 1994, Honza (then a university student) and some of his friends fonded an association called The Old Protectors of the Jizerské Mountains. He began to trace the remaining trees belonging to the endangered species and initiated the first fir cone pickings. He started organizing volunteer opportunities for his fellow students; within the first two years of the existence of his association, its members collected the basic materials for future bionurseries; they gathered sixty-five thousand beech seedlings, dwarf-pine cones, and rowan seeds from the highest altitudes of the Jizerské Mountains. Honza also organized the first collection of the endangered mountain elm.

From the start, he cooperated with the Jizerské Mountains Natural Preserve (Chránìná krajinná oblast Jizerských hor - CHKOJH). He renewed a forest nursery where he introduced the natural growth of seedlings of endangered tree species. At the same time, he launched an educational program in ecology for elementary, high-school, and university students. He also hired the first alternative-service conscript to work in the nurseries and started negotiations with Manpower regarding job-creation in the area of tree planting.

Honza also founded an acclimatization nursery to obtain resistant seedlings of ash tree, birch tree, beech, sycamore maple, and willow tree for planting in higher altitudes. In order to save the silver fir, he mapped the positions of the individual trees and placed protective devices around approximately five hundred seedlings; he further created an experimental seedling nursery in the sylvan environment. To preserve the widest possible geofunds, his seed-collection strategy involves the following rule: it is preferable to obtain smaller amounts of seeds from a larger number of individual trees.

In 1996, he obtained the first subsidies from the Czech Ministry of the Environment, the Endowment for the Development of Civic Society, and the first donations from local sponsors. A year later, his Association purchased a cabin near the Mariánské Hory Chalets in the Jizerské Mountains. The cabin has already been put to use for educational and recreational purposes, educational and working summer camps, courses, weekend stays for job-seekers, in-service for other non-profit organizations, accommodations for participants in specialized excursions, bonus stays for cooperating schools, etc.; it also generates rental income. The cabin is quickly becoming one of the means to stimulate the general public's systematic involvement.

During the 1998 season, the Association registered 450 excursion participants and volunteer workers who had come from the region as well as other locations in the Czech Republic. By the end of 1998, the Association had ten permanent employees. It cared for 250,000 seedlings in nurseries and started working with other counties in the Czech Republic to develop similar forest preservation programs.

The coordination center for all the Association's activities (such activities are interconnected and form a complex system) is the Association's headquarters in Liberec called 'The Ekocentrum'. The Ekocentrum houses Association offices and is currently developing a library with a reading room. The Ekocentrum also contains a club room, a hall for holding lectures, seminars, and discussions, as well as stores selling environment-friendly products and biological farm products. The Ekocentrum further serves as a recruiting point for new collaborators and houses the production of the organization's periodic bulletin.

The Ekocentrum organizes field work (e.g. seed collection, surveys and inventory of endangered tree species, planting of seedlings–the first planting of elm seedlings took place already in 1997 in cooperation with the forestry enterprise Lesy ÈR–individual protection of firs, nursery work, etc.) with volunteers in the form of regular excursions, weekend stays, and camps. Members of the non-profit community throughout the Czech Republic, students of elementary schools, secondary schools, training colleges for forestry, as well as university students participate actively in the volunteer network. In cooperation with three Manpower offices, seven people (socially disadvantaged individuals who were unable to find regular jobs) also found paid employment with the Association and perform manual tasks in tree nurseries.

Honza also organizes excursions for employees of the central and local governments and for its sponsors, and has begun to use its networks to seek solutions to problems not immediately connected with forestry; this is achieved in cooperation with other ecological organizations from the entire Czech Republic: Children of the Earth, The Rainbow Movement, ÈSOP, Beskydèan, Kosenka, Chaloupky, Horní MarSov, Friends of Nature, and others.

The Association has managed to promote an alternative method of growing forest-tree seedlings which created a larger demand for these seedlings even from various forest administrations. The seedlings of the trees native to the area will be primarily supplied to natural reserves, bio-centres and biocorridors. Honza's association has also become a body with a real chance to push through the principles of sustainable life within the framework of the municipal development in Liberec. It organizes guest lectures about forestry and home ecology at various schools inside and outside the region. It owns and runs nine bionurseries on an area totalling twenty-three square kilometres; the nurseries are located in altitudes varying from 380 to 760 m above sea level.

Honza has gained public attention thanks to a wide spectrum of its funding drives: besides using state subsidies, it manages to obtain funds from sponsors, endowment grants, advertising, rentals, and various money-making ventures like sales of seedlings, growing and sales of Christmas trees, sales of environmentally friendly products etc. Honza is making ouvertures to Austrian officials (just across the border) to try to extend his practice beyond the borders of the Czech republic.

Honza is just completing his studies at the Faculty of Natural Sciences of the Palacký University in Olomouc. He is a graduate of the Business College in Liberec and has also completed a year's course in management of non-profit organizations offered by the Charles University in Prague.

Honza considers nature his primary concern. He grew up in the Jizerské Mountains area and recalls the time when, as an elementary-school student, he read a large number of books about the world's nature, threats to its survival–about killing rhinos, the destruction of rain forests and other environmental issues. He still remembers how angry and powerless he felt vis-a-vis the incomprehension and arrogance of the people who managed to push through the construction of the Gabèíkovo project on the Danube River in Slovakia.

From such emotions, after much struggle, he came to the conclusion that the harmony and beauty of the countryside where he grew up does not have to be the source of nostalgia and sadness; there are still human and natural resources which can be brought to life, nurtured, and mobilized. His determination stems from his refusal to accept the present inconsiderate and unsustainable levels of consumption, his refusal to believe that people will not change their attitudes.