"The first time I met people who were active in the Brontosaurus movement was in the summer of 1983, after I graduated from high school. Before I went to college. At that time I attended a camp, it was called a study camp at the Zvířetice Castle near Bakov nad Jizerou. It was invented by Václav Petříček, a botanist among others. He worked at the then Centre for State Nature Conservation and Monument Protection. The name has changed a lot, but it is the organisation that is now represented by the Agency for Nature and Landscape Protection of the Czech Republic. Within their organisation, SSM, he invented the idea of doing study camps for young, promising people who could be trained to be active in nature conservation. At that time I had already decided what I wanted to do. I knew that I would start university in September and go to study biology, but that camp was very important because I met people with whom I stayed in contact not only through my studies, but most of them I am still in contact with today. With them I then started to organize different brontosaurus events."
"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."
Naděžda Gutzerová was born on 22 November 1964 and grew up in a Czech-German family in Podbořanský Rohozec. After high school in Podbořany she studied systematic biology at the Faculty of Science of Charles University in 1983-1988. Since 1983 she was involved in the activities of the Brontosaurus movement. They organized debates on ecological topics on Novotný lávka in Prague. As part of the organization of Holidays with Brontosaurus, she participated in the restoration of Krušné hory after the immission disaster. In the second half of the 1980s, she went to Gustav Ginzel’s manure house in Jizerka. In 1986 she spent three weeks at the biological station of Moscow Lomonosov University on the White Sea. After her studies she worked at the District Museum in Louny. Since 1992 she worked in the non-profit organization Green House Litvínov. She completed professional internships in Sweden and the USA. Since 2001 she was working in the Natura 2000 project. She has three children with her partner Lubomír Kříž. In 2024 she lived in Chrudim.
From the back left, grandfather František Podzimek with aunt Milada, twin brother of his mother and grandmother Kristina Podzimkova née Vankova, from the front left, dad Rudolf Gutzer with Nadězda Gutzerová, mother Jitka Gutzerová with brother Martin Gutzer in the late 1960s (ca. 1969)
From the back left, grandfather František Podzimek with aunt Milada, twin brother of his mother and grandmother Kristina Podzimkova née Vankova, from the front left, dad Rudolf Gutzer with Nadězda Gutzerová, mother Jitka Gutzerová with brother Martin Gutzer in the late 1960s (ca. 1969)
