DunaVision

What do you want to do in you life? How mobile are we?

All Plants Bulletin is a news media dedicated for enhancing the human settlement - natural water - plant life dialogue through our embassy correspondance, which is open to the public in it's totality, so nothing has to get leaked.

We are watching the Római Part storyline closely, and are interested in the groups who want to better the quality of life of citydwellers bringing more of Nature's power within the walls.

As an important Danube-country (which is amongst the greatest rivers of Europe), Hungary is naturally involved in plenty of international projects where countries and cities on the coast of this mighty river can share their thoughts and create action.

DunaVision is just like that, focusing on sustainable solutions. One of their interesting initiatives is Caravan of Change. This trip runs all along the Danube countries, but you can take part in it using two distinct methods:

Stream G:

One is a bike + train tour, from Vienna to Maribor, Croatia, and back North again to Budapest. A pretty cool summer trip complete with workshops and interesting individuals, application deadline is today.

Stream H:

The other method is even more intimately connected to the river: a canoe ride from Vienna to Budapest! An experienced shipman will maneuver every canoe, and luggage is transported separately.


Row, pedal, exchange ideas, generate projects, and have fun with it.

Also, DunaVision is now preparing a summer camp in rural Hungary, which aims to be a follow-up of the highly regarded FöldKelte camp set in a medieval farm in Zirc, three years ago. This camp is rumored to be an important starting point and networking event for many of us involved in the Hungarian ecovillage- and sustainable living  scene. APB will provide more info when it becomes available.

Blue Green Dream

According to the eleventh principle of permaculture edges and borders are the most important parts of any ecosystem, since at the edge, you can find three distinct living spaces: the one inside the edge, the one over the edge, and the mixture of both in the vicinity of the edge, often hosting a plethora of lifeforms evolved specially for the unique conditions of the overlapping areas. 

This is why riverside forests, estuaries, or borders of meadows and woods are such important living spaces.

Natural waters flowing through cities are often times no more than giant waste sewages nowadays, with citydwellers completely torn apart from the river which a few centuries, or even decades ago was the main source of life, mean of travel, key of commerce for them.

Budapest is the prime example of what industrialized and centralized city "development" is doing to a once majestic river, and in the current century we see the activization of civil groups to mitigate the damage done and bring the people closer to their rivers (one of the best known NGO's are Valyo, affiliated to  the Mindspace project)

Blue Green Dream is an international project for exactly that purpose. Many woes of modern cities (like summertime overheating, extreme energy consumption for temperature control, noise) could be eliminated or mitigated by "blue-green" projects, smart solutions using plant coverage, rainwater capturing, green roofs and other ideas involving plant life and natural waters. If interested, you can check out the article about Blue Green Dream, here.

Riverside Under Siege

Significant uproar followed as the news went wide about the plans of the Budapest City Council, involving a popular landmark of the capital, called Római Part (Roman Coast).





Even marketleading online news portal Index published heavy criticism of the project through one of their most popular publicist, László Szily, who, unfortunately from the viewpoint of the backers of the reconstruction project, happens to be a hardcore angler, who knows and loves all the ins and outs of all the fishing spots around the capital

I rode up North to this unique place, which is one of the very few spots left where people of the city can actually walk on the coast of their river, rest under robust trees, encounter ducks and other birds nesting near the water, eat (imported) fish and (prepacked) chips , in a very chilled out, nostalgic environment. I went there to check out the demonstration organized by the well-established sustainability think-tank, Védegylet, and Valyo, a group dedicated to fix the broken relationship of the city and the river.

The City Council plans to "enhance" the area, first and foremost, with building a dam to protect the real estate investments already came to being somewhat illegally, since that area is naturally quite defenseless from floods. The dam would bring opportunity for the ones who started business there to prosper more, and the stage would be set for new hotels, pathways, all that sterile and fake environment that some urban developers think it resembles nature, and what already can be seen at the southern end of the city at an area called Kopaszi-gát (Kopaszi Dam). All this, in exchange for cutting down a riverside groves of trees and destroying the habitat of all lifeforms living nearby, up from the unicellular level.

The mayor of Budapest, István Tarlós is backing this project heavily, which gives it a rather ironic spin, as he is a proud "Óbudan", born and raised right here, the northern part of the Buda-side of the city, thus probably spent many careless hours as a kid along these very shores.

At the demo, I got there quite late, so I missed the boring part (speeches, which were quite unheardable anyway as I heard, asking some familiar faces in the crowd), and was able to listen to music instead.

Everyone wore these cool stickers, which features a dozer which symbolically pushes the Római away:

And there were badges up for grabs featuring endangered local faunae, which I humbly represent on my cool recycled belt I got from the Noha Shop.

 

The demo and the working group has a Facebook page of course, with a lot more photos.

So, what is our statement regarding the issue? All Plants Bulletin was there, because we think that human-industrial civilization is beyond any comprehensible limits already, realizing a FUBAR situation in the whole ecosystem, which means that even the slowing down of the scary climate- and biodiversity changes cannot be done with any "refocusing" of efforts. Only the most radical solutions remain, e.g.: not a single tree should be cut down, not another wild animal killed, no fish caught from the waters, until we at least stabilize our world and assess the damage. Nature as a whole is cornered on this planet, and the backlash will be painful, so, let's just chill out on the riverside instead of more urban developments.




The Budapest Council gave the project green lights. Several hundred people registered on the "fast-response" mailing list of the demo organizers. The game is on.