“At the countryside… The communists had completely destroyed it; doing so in two ways. First of all, by driving out the elites. They had never returned and never will, so this is a done deal. At present, it is impossible to return the countryside to a reasonable state because the people are missing and will never come back. On the other hand, terrible things started happening there. Plowing up groves, soil amelioration, straightening of rivers, digging of canals. Up until today in Moravia, you can find irrigation canals or their remainders, which are long out of use. All in all, there was widespread destruction. At the same time, heavy industry was either in the making or already in operation, without any filtering. Power plants, steel mills, chemical plants… Bílina was a river that turned all kinds of colors at that time, becoming more or less toxic. It had escalated over time. In the 1960s and early 1970s all of this had become visible and effective.”
“I have a traumatic memory of the mob pushing ahead an elderly man. They were beating him in various ways. Not too much but they still did; using an umbrella for instance. They shoved him, beat him, and later I learned they really killed him. It was lynching. Eventually, it turned out he was no Nazi or a quisling but just a guy from Kladno who went to see his son. They had just mistaken him for someone else, or something of that sort. That such cases took place had left a mark on me.”
“I managed one thing; that was even before the establishment of the Environmental Section. In March, the Limits to Growth was published. A truly essential book, which offered a completely new perspective of the economic system. It was really a breakthrough. Back then, I worked in the Geological Institute and as such was travelling a lot – that’s due to the nature of the science of geology. I had a friend there who was just about to travel to England. Having my contacts and information, I told him: ‘Dear Joel, since you’re going to London, get me one of those books.’ And he really did. It was published in March and in April, I got hold of it, which was a really good thing. In the course of the summer at my cottage I managed to translate all of it into Czech. In October, we had 400 prints, which we spread around the country. So, it had quite and impact. Jiřina Šiklová was recalling the other day Miloš Zeman bringing it somewhere and claiming he was the one who translated it.”
Bedřich Moldan was born on 15 August 1935 in Prague into a family of a police officer. He spent his childhood in the Košíře quarter. After the war, he moved with his family to Děčín, where in 1954 he finished a grammar school and also got to know the Woodcraft movement. He then enrolled to the Charles University Faculty of Mathematics and Physics, specializing in analytic chemistry. For a short time after graduation, he worked as a high school teacher in Prague 6. Ever since early 1960s, he worked in the Central Geological Institute of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences. In 1978, he co-founded the renowned Environmental Section within the Academy of Sciences, which became the most important environmental organization in the country, criticizing environmental protection in communist Czechoslovakia from an expert standpoint. After the Velvet Revolution, he first became a member of František Pitra’s government, and then the first minister of environment in the government of Petr Pithart. He joined the Civic Democratic Party (ODS) in 1991. In 2004, he was elected Senator, representing the Kutná Hora district. Due to its anti-environmental and Eurosceptic policies, he left ODS in 2010 and instead joined TOP 09. Besides his political career, in 1992 he founded the Charles University Center for Environmental Matters over which he later presided.
