Changes in the life of locally protected areas

"For the sake of the economic life of the countryside it should be advisable to think not only about the present, but also about the future, because the next generation is not going to appreciate that we were selling the heritage of tomorrow for a mess of pottage."
I was thinking of these lines which were published in the Gazette of Natural Sciences only seventy years ago, when I was informed that the leaders of a county municipality had made a decision which had not been given enough consideration: the protection of the so-called locally or regionally significant protected areas was suspended with retrospective effect as for forty years.
The fate of these territories was placed in the hands of the new local governments: they were to decide whether they needed them or not, and if so, whether they wanted to confirm their decision by redeclaring protection or they had other plans for the future. Many of us who are progressing on the uniquely beautiful and sometimes exception-ally thankless path of nature conservation protection thought that maybe these people misunderstood some sections of the Act on local governments, which came into force in 1990. It is true that laws are written by people and they are also executed by people, which means that there have been, there are and there will be mistakes. Maybe these sad cases were exceptional.
However, pieces of bad news kept on coming: protection had been suspended here and there. In one village a golf course was designed to replace the oak forest (Quercetum pubesceae - cerris) near the shore of Lake Balaton, where we can hardly find nature nowadays. A few days later we were informed ('we' meaning the official protectors of nature, who at the moment 'de jure, have nothing to do with the protected areas under the supervision of local governments) that the protection of the hill with the wonderfully reconstructed medieval castle had vanished into thin air.
Many of us gave a start: what could have happened? Has the hill worn off? Or did the cause of protection cease due to another natural disaster (maybe an 'anthropogenic' catastrophe)? According to the laws in force "protection has to be lifted if its reason cease to exist".
Everybody wanted to remedy the injustice when it turned out that the hill and its ornament are safe and sound. The only problem was that some people could not bear if their future was guided by laws made to favour the majority... We received alarming news from the plains too: for the election campaign it had seemed to be a good idea to eliminate the local-ly protected wetlands, backwaters, boggy meadows and swamps.
We were shown an infinite number of slogans: "the mosquitoes (and the loose obligations entailed by protection) disturb the repose of workers intending to relax and scare off wealthy foreign tourists".
I wonder whether it has been considered at all that those wanting to relax and spend money are not attracted by the sight of the machine center of the village, but rather by the surrounding territory which is rich in fish, game, romantics, and historical buildings. Or there is another well-known fear: "why does anybody hinder the unlimited and often unreasonable parceling out of the shore of mortlakes which have been created during the river control? Who could be disturbed by this?"
Maybe the answer is 'nobody' or 'hardly anybody' today. But in some years those will be disturbed who today invest their savings into the elim-ination of the 'uncivilized wild romantic areas'. For patches of reed (Phragmites), which are the home of birds and fish, will be broken up or wiped out, and consequently, the handling charges will rise considerably, the eutrophication of water without fresh water supply will accelerate, and the mortlake soon becomes a swamp. The happiness of the purchase soon changes into despair, the village loses a great opportunity - namely rural tourism, oecoturism and the attractive force of natural environment - for forming its future, which means the loss of a secure source of income.
I admit that we were worried because news of this kind often reached us and we rarely heard of refreshing local news, completed projects or conservations. Nobody has had a reliable account of the locally protected areas in the counties and in the whole of the coun-try for several years. We were aware of the fact that the fate of the natural environment is important for some counties and settlements even if they lacked jurisdiction and obligations. I want to thank our conscientious and persistent outside contributors for their never fail-ing devotion and work. While others - making the records even more chaotic - pulped their irreplaceable documents.
Under such circumstances did we start to compile this book. We are convinced that our country and the inhabitants of smaller settle-ments often suffered or suffer from the consequences of severe and sometimes irreversible damages and inestimable losses because it is not rare that even local authorities are unaware of what we, Hungarians, really have in the long inhabited land of our ancestors. Though in most cases a little more attention, some hours of well-orga-nized work at the weekends or a bit of foresight in the reshaping of our present would be enough. Because the solitary old trees along the road disappearing in some counties with lightning speed and the groups of trees and avenues which are all in need of preservation, the watery navvpits at the end of villages which are often filled up or used as a refuse dump following the doctrine of 'cultivates and hides', the shame-fully thinned but still incredibly valuable gallery forests, the refreshing little ponds, springs, bogs and swamps, the arboreous pastures, the colonies of bee-eaters (Merops apiaster), the canyons and gorges, the rocks, the alkali meadows, the meadows with orchids (Orchis), the patches of abopristine grassland and scattered reeds (Phragmites), the parks of country-houses, the arboretums, the protected cemetery gar-dens and groves, the recreation forests and the well-kept plant collections are the last resorts of man escaping from the modern asphalt jungles.
The first warning of the never too long list of calls came from Károly Kaán in 1932: "... our - we could say - numerated natural values are not protected or cared for, moreover, without proper jurisdiction they are destined to be destroyed. The remarkably tall old trees, rocks, the rare species of animals and plants, etc...."
Among the previously preserved so-called locally protected areas there are rarities of national or international importance. For example an atan-doned andesite quarry near the village of Bér reveals geological values that only have three counterparts in the world... And the list could be continued. Often national a piece of the wealth or an outstanding value is rescued by conservation by the county or the settlement.
But we should not always look for extraordinary phenomena: let us conserve what is beautiful, what we like, what makes us happy, what we are proud of, what radiates tranquillity, harmony and silence, what gives us colors and varied forms. Let us seek those things that have preserved some naturality and that has not been made annoyingly artificial, dirty, stinking, loud and monotonous by us, people: that is to say that has not become unbearable for ourselves. We should conserve values fol-lowing the pure local intentions, simply and without the delay of bureau-cracy, much faster than what the central public administration could accomplish after the obligatory interdepartmental coordination.
The task of our authors is far more than what can be witnessed in this volume. Their duty was not solely to extract the already published pro-fessional writings. They had to visit each place to check whether the value still exists... As a 'by-product' of this project we finally got real, comprehensive data about local values.
We will share our findings with the local governments in order to help them conserve these precious values. We were happy to hear that grandiose work had been going - n in the background in some regions: today the number of natural values in the hands of local governments is altogether 1067, which is 220 more than the number of locally protected areas registered in 1990. Concerning the above mentioned facts, i. e. that several irrecoverable values have been destroyed completely due to carelessness, indifference, ignorance and deliberate destruction, and that in some places protection has been terminated, the overall picture (regarding figures at least) is positive and encouraging. However, we should remember that our data are still incomplete and need continuous revision.
Let us have a look at the situation in 1990 and 1995 broken down into figures of the counties: how the number of locally protected areas changed in the past five years?

                      The number of                County areas    Ranking of counties
Megye               locally protected  Difference    in km2 for    according to the
                           areas                  each protected   number of locally
                       1990    1995                    area         protected areas

Baranya			75	 79	   + 4		 58		 5.
Bács-Kiskun    25   32        + 7    261   12.
Békés     75  121    +46     47    1.
Borsod-Abaúj-Zemplén  39   50    +11    147    8.
Csongrád   10   17    + 7    244   20.
Fejér      19   22    + 3    200   18.
Gy6c-Moson-Sopron	24	 47	   +23		 85		 9.
Hajdú-Bihar    40   40      0    144   10
Heves			32	 37	   - 1		117		13-15.
Jász-Nagykun-Szolnok 25   28    + 3    199   16.
Komárom-Esztergom  43  115    +72     20    2.
Nógrád      65   67    + 2     38    6.
Pest			81	 87	   + 6		 73		3-4.
Somogy			69	 65	   - 4		 94		 7
Szabolcs-Szatmár-Bereg 26   26      0    228   17.
Tolna			19	 19	     0		189		19.
Vas			34	 31	   - 3		108		13-15.
Veszprém   32   31    - 1    167   13-15.
Zala			58	 87	   +29		 38		3-4.
Budapest		24	 36	   +12		 15		11.
Összesen:         847     1067    220     87

County               The extension of nationally significant protected areas
                per hectare (1994)  percentage/ranking    number of areas/ranking

Baranya			 1628		 3,7(18.)		79(5.)
Bács-Kiskun    53796    6,4(10.)   32(12)
Békés     24754    4,4(13-15.)         121(1.)
Borsod-Abaúj-Zemplén   108137   15,4(1)     50(9.)
Csongrád   32560    7,8(8.)    17(20)
Fejér      17058    3,9(17.)   22(18.)
Győr-Moson-Sopron 40798           10,2(5.)                47(10.)
Hajdú-Bihar    64310   10,3(4.)    76(6.)
Heves			38267		10,5(3.)		31(13-15.)
Jász-Nagykun-Szolnok 18155    3,3(20.)   28(16)
Komárom-Esztergom  19571    8,7(7.)    115(2.)
Nógrád      18530    7,3(9.)    67(7.)
Pest			63395		 9,9(6.)		87(3-4.)
Somogy			27015		 4,4(13-15.)		65(8.)
Szabolcs-Szatmár-Bereg 25469    4,3(16.)   26(17.)
Tolna			12013		 3,4(19.)		19(19.)
Vas			43059		12,9(2.)		31(13-15.)
Veszprém   30091    5,8(11.)   31(13-15)
Zala			14406		 4,4(13-15.)		87(3-4.}
Budapest		 2588		 4,9(12)		36(11)

We would like to achieve that the situation in 1995 should become the 'starting line' for the local governments in a noble contest for the benefit of local communities as well as that of the whole country. In 1905 Károly Sajó foresaw like a clairvoyant what the relationship of man at the end of the twentieth century would be to nature:
"Sometime in the future our offsprings will stop to cultivate more and more territories because they will realize that it is only worth living in a beautiful, fresh and varied environment, and that it is our own interest to make the mutual homeland as beautiful as possible and in contrast, the cultural desert should be as small as possible."
This book - as the title implies - wishes to deal with a special part of Hungarian nature protection: it concentrates on the areas protected by settlements. We also want to provide the Readers with a sketchy picture of the intentions and policy of the official nature conservation (The of National Nature Conservation Policy ). We present lists and tables of figures about the nationally and internationally significant protected areas, about protected and strictly protected species of plants and animals, their intangible values and about strictly protected caves and caves with artificial footpaths that can be visited by everybody.
A lot of people have contributed to this volume. Most of the authors work at local governments or in the institutions of official nature con-servation. We received remarkable help from wise local patriots and from anonymous altruistic supporters of nature conservation. We thought it is more important to have descriptions written by people most familiar with the places than to publish a stylistically homogenous book of one author. Rectificatory remarks and additional pieces of information are welcome, since we wish to continue this project. We want to thank the European Community, the Budapest Embassy of the European Community, the PHARE office for making the publication of this book possible. We would like to recommend this book, which is intended to become a handbook to new "discoveries", fruitful day trips, physical and psychological refreshment and which has been compiled in the Year of Nature Protection, to teachers and students, to the nature-lovers of Hungary, to those who are proud of or are interested in our natural or historical sights, both to professionals and amateurs.
Guided by these thoughts does the editor in chief recommend this volume to everybody.

Dr. János Tardy

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