Defend Your Community Forests

All Plants Bulletin is not stating that you should go out and defend your natural resources yourself, when they need it, forming militias and expressing general civic unrest if necessary, we only share this report about a mexican town where they did so, enhancing and strengthening the ties of the social structure of the settlement, practicing direct decisionmaking, growing trees in greenhouses, patrolling the woods, guarding it from illegal cutting.

Treeslaughter at Csobánka

Hundreds of trees have been chopped down, in and around the cemetery of Csobánka ("Chobanka"), surrounded by controversy.

Casualties include seedlings, as well as trees with  trunks greater than 40 cm diameter. The area has not been cleaned properly, and the stipes have not been removed from the ground, which suggests that the perpetrators were in a hurry and only took the logs without doing the hard job.

The plant life was probably exectued by the local militia commander, but his motifs, and the legal background of this operation are blurry at best. Here is a quick rundown of the controversy:

1. The mayor of the village says, the trees have been cut out to make room for a drainage ditch.

2. The commander made the same claims, and reported that the cuttings was done by "the poor of Csobánka", who got firewood this way.

 3. The manager responsible for the drainage development, answering the questions of national weekly newspaper  Magyar Narancs, stated that four trees are facing death for the sake of the ditch, but on the other side of the road, and he claimed absolutely no involvement with the cuttings around the cemetery.

4. Under increasing pressure from local enviromentalists, the notary of Csobánka admitted that no one asked for his clearance for the treecutting. This makes the operation illegal, as the clearance is necessary by law to start the cutting.

5. Later the commander stated at the village council meeting, that only seedlings have been chopped down, which seedlings have grown "wild" and representing "no value". He also said that this was necessary to clean up the cemetery, to make room for a parking lot, and establishing running water connection. So the trees had to go.

6. None of the above-mentioned developments were known to the city council members, no plans have been made, no cost estimated. Running water connection is out of the question anyway, since it would require special pressure-enhancing machinery the village has no money for. The statement that only seedlings have been cut is an obvious lie, anyone can see the stipes the perpetrators did not bother to remove yet.

So, no clearance from the notary, no council planning, and the road development office does not know anything about this plantlife-butchery. It's also sad to hear that someone thinks that trees growing "wild" can be cut down without any sort of paperwork or warrant - this is obviously not the case in Hungary, the country has laws controlling usage of natural resources.

After following the story on local blogs, All Plants Bulletin can only come down to the probable conclusion, without any tangible proof of course, that someone in the circles of the mayor gave direct orders to the militia commander to cut the trees and use the logs for their own gains, either sell it illegally or distribute it as firewood to their partners, ensuring their support. 

The police has not been alarmed, there is no investigation, counterterrorism units are not bustling in the peaceful village near the Budapets suburbs. So the perpetrators seem likely to get away with their crimes, and can repeat doing it anytime in the future.

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.