Jiří Hušek

"Although a natural reserve was created and nature preservation worked, it was clearly playing second fiddle. For the then ruling class and the society that was shaping the course of history, turning the wheels of socialism and building a better tomorrow, the protected landscape area was inconvenient yet, on the other hand, it was also powerless. In fact, its role was only that of an advisory body or a body that says and suggests things but has no executive power. The economy had the upper hand, with Party authorities managing it. Conservationists were kind of a tolerated group that presented a formal social brief or public interest, but it didn't actually work. 'You cannot make an omelette without breaking eggs' - well, not surprisingly, when heavy machinery was deployed and ten hectares were being felled and the reserve somehow got in the way, they just went into the reserve and cut down a chunk of it, just like that."

"They say, 'a hundred times nothing killed a donkey.' Well, it wasn't exactly a hundred times nothing; it was a very strong influence in a complex synergistic action over several times that caused this. It was the pests you described - the false spruce webworm and the larch bud moth - with a frost episode, and then the bark beetle or spruce budworm was very much on the rise from 1981 onwards. When I joined the Frýdlant forestry plant, immission damage was manifesting, trees were directly drying out, many were damaged by insect pests, and a huge bark beetle calamity was unfolding, comparable to what happened in Šumava relatively recently or what we have seen throughout the country in recent years. It was taking off, and suddenly any systematic economic activity, growing and harvesting the forest, was meaningless. All of a sudden, we had huge areas of forest that we knew would dry out on its own in a few years, whether or not we do anything. Pests would proliferate and it would disappear. Then came the task: save this valuable timber for the national economy, whatever the cost."