RNDr. Naděžda Gutzerová

"I feel that the ice began to break significantly in the eighty-seventh year. The eighty-sixth was connected with Gorbachev and perestroika, but our communists were terribly rigid, so when Gorbachev came to us, I expected something to start happening, something to change, but they were more trying to consolidate their positions. But by '87 something had started to happen, and I feel that those last two years before the revolution we had quite a free hand, that they didn't forbid us anything."

"What destroyed the forests in Krušné hory, then in the Jizera Mountains and Krkonoše, were the so-called acid rains. These were the emissions from thermal power plants, when sulphur dioxide was released into the air, then reacted with water vapour to form weak sulphuric acid, which then rained down on us from the air and stuck to the needles of spruces and other conifers. Deciduous trees have the advantage that as they shed their leaves in the autumn, they produce new ones in the spring. But the needles on a spruce or any other conifer remain for several years, so that after two or three years of exposure to weak sulphuric acid, the surface wax layers which protect the needles have been damaged, the trees weakened, and such a weakened tree is terribly susceptible to attack by any pest. So the trees were dying and being attacked by bark beetles, wrappers and other pests."