Prague, Feb 21 (CTK) – The Senate changes to the national parks’ draft rules are like massacring Sumava with a power saw, Czech Environment Minister Richard Brabec (ANO) said, adding that he is in ideological dispute with President Milos Zeman who supported the Senate version in the Chamber of Deputies yesterday.
The Sumava National Park spreads along the Bavarian border in south-west Bohemia.
The Chamber of Deputies did not make a decision on the amendment yesterday.
Brabec repeated that the passing of the Senate version of the bill could mean an end to national parks in the Czech Republic.
He said Zeman would prefer landscape protected areas or even a sort of nature city parks to national parks.
“The problem lies in us, we want to direct everything, we want to have brooks and rivers well straightened up, animals counted and chipped and trees straight like soldiers,” Brabec said.
He said nature-protected zones only create a small minority of the territory.
Brabec sad it is a mistake that a bigger number of municipalities have been included in the Sumava National Park, and the promises that were given to them have not been fulfilled.
He said if the Senate proposed changes to the draft amendment on nature protection “were applied, they could generate an endless chaos and legal confusion and disputes, including lawsuits.”
Brabec wondered that the Senate version aims at ensuring the sustainable development of municipalities, that it places nature protection on the same level as other purposes of the national park and that it deletes the long-term goal, which is nature protection.
He also supported 15-year moratorium on the division of national parks into zones. This would bring in stability, no national park director could change the rules.
The Czech Republic has four national parks. The three others are the Krkonose (Giant Mountains), east Bohemia, Ceske Svycarsko (Czech Switzerland), north-west Bohemia, and Podyji (Thaya River Valley), south Moravia, which borders Thayatal in Austria.
