"A lot of people knew that, I knew that, but they didn't dare to go against the trend that was national - to make the areas as productive as possible, to make agriculture as productive as possible, to make heavy machinery as mobile as possible, just everything as much as possible. Production, production, production. And nobody was looking at the fact that the bank vegetation was disappearing, the beautiful alder stands, that biodiversity was disappearing, that the movement of those insects, birds from one place to another that used to use those strips was disappearing. That it kept the winds out, that they were such natural windbreaks, they just didn't get it. That was the order from somewhere in that republic headquarters, and it was being done, even though they were aware that it wasn't exactly good. Well, unfortunately."
"We arrived in front of the crossing, it was like half a kilometre in front of it. We stopped and said, 'Let's not go any further, it's guarded.'So we put on our backpacks and we were walking and it was like, 'Should we try it, should we risk it?' We had visas for China, but stil...There's still an area very much eliminated by the Chinese. And so we came to this crossing, and there was a barrier, of course, and a little booth, and nobody was there. A little bit away from that, some fifty meters, maybe more, a hundred meters, there was a kind of a long hostel. So we said, "There's nobody here. So what now? Shall we go? Let's go, let's take our chances.' We went and we walked about a hundred and two hundred meters, and suddenly we hear a GAZ vehicle behind us. And now it's - you know what they say among men? Now they're gonna arrest here and we're out of Tibet."
"That's the basis of why I'm still here and why I was a forester too and why I loved nature. Because I've said from the beginning that it was because of my dad and my grandfather, who were excellent foresters, growers - and they led me to grow the forest. My grandfather always told me, 'Grow a forest. When you're big, wherever you are, grow it in a way that you'll be proud of it and not be ashamed of it.' I think I proved that in the tropics, too. There were never any complaints about it. I've grown forest, you might say, almost all over the world. That's a great asset, because I've seen a lot of landscapes. Then we moved. My daddy used to take me to the forest in Konopiště, no matter what. I could hardly walk, so they would drag me into the forest with my grandfather and show me how to grow things, what to do, what kind of trees to grow, and they taught me about flowers, which was very good, because I practically learned from them the flowers that grow here, not only in Czech but also in Latin. They basically took very good care of it, so I learned a lot of things there in the forest. We watched animals, there was a lot of game at Konopiště, we always sat on these perches and watched it. So all that love was already from that."
Hubert Čížek was born in Prague in August 1941 to Vlasta and Hubert Čížek. From early childhood his father and grandfather, both foresters, led him to love nature. After completing eleven-year-school, he graduated from the Faculty of Forestry and Wood Technology in Brno in 1962-1967. After graduation, he completed a year of military service and joined a forestry company in Tachov. He worked mainly in the field and had the task of checking afforestation. After graduation he studied Spanish at Charles University and then started postgraduate studies in forestry. In the 1980s, he participated in trips to the Soviet Union in search of endemic juniper species - he was at Baikal, the Caucasus and Khabarovsk. In the late 1980s he visited Tibet for work. Since 1992 he has been working on issues related to forestry in South America, where he presented the Czech project Patrik - a new method of planting. He worked in Ecuador, Chile, Colombia, Bolivia, Cuba and Galapagos. He has lectured on his work at several foreign and domestic universities. His texts complement the photographic books “Flowers of the Earth” and “Trees of the Earth” by Tomáš Míček. In 2022 he was living in Prague and still lecturing about his experiences and achievements in tropical forestry.
