To Breathe with Birds: A Book of Landscapes

PREFACE

Gathering Strength and Drinking Dawn in the Landscape of Home

I will sit on a stump

by a forest spring

to gather strength

and drink dawn

—Vítězslav Nezval*

We are returning from a vacation in Thailand or maybe the Canary Islands. It was beautiful, but had we stayed there a bit longer, we would soon have become bored. The painter Václav Rabas** used to say that it is important to find one’s own square kilometer of landscape and try to understand it. Argentinean writer Jorge Luis Borges insisted that it is not as important to read books as it is to return to those books that one has already read. We contemplate landscapes and distinguish between them: That one is beautiful, but this one is mine. Home is where we return to, and we leave it only so that we may return. And then it makes no difference whether we live below the monumental Pravčice Gate* or next to a barely mature spruce forest.

We spend only brief amounts of time in foreign countries, but in the landscapes of our home we grow old with the earth and the trees. Years later we return to the same places, pile up memories, and become rooted in the landscape. Hardly anyone can feel at home in more than two or three landscapes. A trip means rapture, excitement, and experience. The landscape of our home is a flux in which our spiritual and natural sides mingle and the resulting blend is poised—like music or poetry—somewhere between humans and the elements.

Certain nations and civilizations like to travel because they believe beauty and truth must be somewhere else, since they cannot find them at home. Other nations or groups feel it is quite sufficient to understand their own piece of the earth. This is the difference between people from northern and southern Italy, between Germans and Austrians, and between the French on the Atlantic coast and their compatriots on the Mediterranean. What can the world possibly offer a vintner from Pálava or Hodonín,** when he has all the strength of the earth and sun right in his wine cellar?

We Bohemians and Moravians are both. Influenced by the restless Germans and especially the Saxons with their proclivity for hiking, we set off for foreign lands, but we are truly comfortable only where we can drop into a familiar pub or go mushroom picking. Simply at home—where we are not afraid of the forest, where we can’t get lost for very long, and where we can find our way to the station even from the deepest wilderness. We are very lucky to be living in this country, where everything is small yet immensely diverse. I have written this many times, but I must repeat it: to get to know this country is a lifelong endeavor. Bohemia and Moravia* form a landscape for connoisseurs and wayfarers, which, rather than tantalizing us with grandiose exaltation, propagates refined strength and a faintly melancholic calm. The cliffs are small here, the colors muted, the rivers are not turbid waterways, and the waterfalls resemble children’s toys rather than places where roaring waters careen into deep chasms.

This landscape is so mild and yet so rich that we do not even realize how lucky we are to be walking through it. It doesn’t dazzle; it replenishes. We don’t even think about it anymore; we just put on our shoes and pack a bottle of water, a map, a notepad, and maybe a camera or a few pages copied from this book, and we set off for places where the earth is still strong and strengthens us as well.

* Vítězslav Nezval (1900–1958) was an important, prolific, and politically controversial poet whose early poems had a rare, playful beauty.

** Václav Rabas (1885–1954) was a landscape painter whose artistic focus for several decades was a small agricultural area near Krušovice, a village to the west of Prague.

* The Pravčice Gate is a large sandstone arch in the so called Saxon-Bohemian Switzerland region which was visited frequently by the first Continental Romantics.

** Pálava and Hodonín are sunny and dry regions in southern Moravia well known for wine production.

* Bohemia is the central region of the Czech Republic, and Moravia forms the country’s eastern part. The name Bohemia is mentioned by Strabo and other writers of antiquity as the land of the Boii, a Celtic tribe, hence Boiohaemum, later Bohemia. The adjective bohemian originated much later, when French and Spanish armies returning from medieval Bohemia attracted Roma, or Gypsies, whom they mistakenly called Bohemians. Still later, people who lived freely, unconventionally and outside the social establishment—in particular avant-garde artists—called themselves bohemians.

Geodiversity comprises a whole range of landscape features, including geological, geomorphological, paleontological, soil, hydrological and atmospheric features, systems and processes.

—Australian Natural Heritage Charter, 1997

Introduction: Definition of the Term

The term geodiversity was probably first used by Vojen Ložek in conversations about the natural sciences without any later written elaboration on the concept. The discussion centered on the fact that there exist whole monographs on biodiversity, while the term geodiversity is hardly used. I found it only recently in the Australian Natural Heritage Charter, quoted above. Geodiversity is the basis of a substantial part of biodiversity, and functions as a superstructural phenomenon. There are an inexhaustible number of cases where geological and geomorphological characteristics determine vegetation type—from rocky steppes to riparian forests and valley phenomena. The two—the biological and the geological—are so closely connected that while we perceive them as a natural unit, only seldom do we view such a naturalistic whole solely from the point of view of earth sciences. The aim of this essay is to draw attention to the necessity of targeted protection of geodiversity, about which until recently the view prevailed, more or less automatically, that it—unlike plants and animals—is able to protect itself.

When making a list of protected and other significant geological localities for the Ministry of the Environment, I was thinking about geodiversity as one of the basic categories of protection for the non-living environment. Definitionally, I consider it to be the substrative and morphological diversity of a certain territory. The Australian definition is more detailed, encompassing a territory’s hydrological and microclimatic conditions as well, and taking into account the possible existence of valuable paleontological sites. In addition, it contains the presupposition that geodiversity is subject to natural processes of transformation. In existing works on environmental protection, the concept of geodiversity is more or less subsumed within a range of other, often difficult-to-define terms such as a habitat or landscape. In the past several years, geological aspects of environmental protection have received increasing attention—for example, in the creation of geological parks. It is my belief that geodiversity may, or rather must, become one of the basic concepts of environmental and landscape protection.

The Story of a Trench for a Telephone Cable

As a result of gas lines and underground telephone cables laid over the past several years, dozens of kilometers of trenches reaching down to the bedrock have been excavated, which enables us to examine what the original geodiversity of the landscape was like and when it was depleted. Evidence of this comes in the form of fragments of slag, brick, and prehistoric or modern glazed shards. In recent years I have systematically walked along a number of trenches dug in the Czech Karst.* Let us now set off along a Czech Telecom trench running from the Karlštejn railway station in the direction of Liteň and have a look at what has happened to the landscape.

The trench first runs from the railway station across a wide floodplain to the walls of the valley. The profile consists of brown flood clays located as high as five to six meters above the current level of the Berounka River. The brown-glazed shards of earthenware demonstrate that floodwaters reached this height during the past 150 to 200 years. There can be only one reason for the occasional stones that appear in the otherwise fine-grained clays—they were brought here by melting glaciers. And when we gaze across the valley and imagine a line six meters above the current level of the river’s surface, we see that in the event of another great flood at least several hundred—but probably several thousand—cabins and houses would lie within this flooded area.

The trench now leaves the floodplain and climbs up the hillside—we discover the remains of terraced fields and orchards here. There used to be many more small ravines on the slope; today they are clogged with earth and fragments of quite modern bricks (at most one hundred years old) that lie as deep as 1.5 meters. In other places it is evident that diabase rocks once penetrated the surface but were broken off—probably by the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—so as not to obstruct agriculture. Today the slope of the valley is smooth and relatively featureless, but until recently it was furrowed with small gorges and accentuated with low rocks.

The trench gradually climbs up to a plateau along a golf course. Here, by contrast, a sort of cockpit relief of small hills and depressions was created on the remains of the agricultural terraces. (The nature conservation body and those of us who have been advising it recently did not mind the golf course, but we did not know that such a course requires a specific type of lawn in which the local grass vegetation must be smothered somewhat.) The trench now continues on for a kilometer through flat agricultural land, where there is seemingly nothing that it could harm. But right behind the golf course we come across a buried moor with thick black soil that contains the reddish stalks of ancient reeds. A little bit farther on not only is there another wetland, but suddenly a rocky wall of contact metamorphic Liteň shale rises to the surface. Today there is a desert of corn here, but only recently this monolithic area—the pride of every agricultural cooperative—was a system of several fields separated by strips of uncultivated land that lay on the natural fractures of the topography. Between the fields there were two spring basins and at least one sludgy lake. We sense newts, globeflowers, and orchids here, and maybe even ducks nested here as they do in the wetland above Tetín* that still exists