"Relations between foresters and conservationists here were not good at all after 1990. Conservationists, or rather natural scientists, accused foresters of destroying nature, and foresters accused conservationists of being responsible for it, that they couldn't cut down trees any more, which was paradoxical. I have to say that nature conservation in the Jizera Mountains Protected Landscape Area had no competence at all until 1992, it only had a kind of expert recommendation. So it was very unfair because the machinery of the foresters was somewhere else. The truth was not somewhere in the middle, of course, but it was not completely on anyone's side. Of course, the synergy of the effects of long-term inappropriate forest management, which was losing its ecological essence, and then, of course, the huge emissions burden, were inextricably responsible. That was very sad, and I came to the conclusion that we had to come up with something new. The primitive concept of planting trees could not apply here for various reasons because of the distribution of the emission burden and the restoration of the natural forest. The atmosphere of non-cooperation and the escalation of bad relations between foresters and conservationists made this intractable. I said we had to change both. I decided to try to change it, and I must say that we managed to formulate some kind of forest restoration strategy based on saving the original gene pool of trees, the original trees of the Jizera Mountains that only existed here in fragments."
"The original root cause, to say the least, was the fact that we were in the black triangle - East Germany, Poland and North Bohemia, which was destroying the surrounding mountains with its smokestack industries, whether the Krušné hory, Krkonoše, Jizerské hory or to a lesser extent other mountain ranges. In the 1980s, technologies began to be devised to deal with this, which were not successful. One of the solutions from the 1970s and 1980s, for example, was to build higher chimneys to spread the pollutants over a wider area, which undoubtedly had some significance, for example, for the agglomeration but not for the total volume of exhalations. It was particularly tragic when the fallout paths of local loads met, and they seemed to meet, especially over the mountains where they stopped. Hence the enormous damage to forests and the land, staying in our region on an infinitely large scale. It was so, I would say, already on the verge of an ecological catastrophe."
"We have, in fact, made a variation that did not exist. As students, we found stamps somewhere and made them out of a potato. With that, we took the train across what was then Ukraine. Then we flew to Mineralnye Vody and went to the Caucasus from there. The nature there was breathtaking at that time, we saw vultures and huge mountains, we were thrilled. But then we did a stupid thing - we walked down from those mountains somewhere on the other side of Georgia to bathe in the sea just outside Sukhumi, which is now, unfortunately, a territory occupied by Russia. There were about eight of us students, and we were stopped by a militiaman who was studying our documents and suspected that they were not quite right. But he didn't want to shoot students from a friendly country right away, so he put us in a pioneer camp and told us that he had to check everything, so we spent about three days there. Then we managed to explain it somehow, so they let us go again. But we only swam in the sea once, and then we had to leave."
František Pelc was born on 4 October 1962 in Turnov. After graduating from the first part of the primary school in Výšince, he entered the Turnov grammar school, which he graduated from in 1980. As he was already interested in nature during his high school years, he decided to study Environment Protection at the University of Olomouc. In 1981, he continued his studies at the Faculty of Science of Charles University in Prague, where his master’s thesis focused on bird communities in the Jizera Mountain forests, which were heavily damaged by emissions and forest management. After receiving his PhD in natural sciences in 1986, he worked briefly in the Bohemian Paradise Protected Landscape Area as a specialist, and from 1987 to 1989, he held the post of district ecologist in Semily. Between 1990-1995 he worked as the head of the Jizera Mountains Protected Landscape Area Administration in Liberec, and he was instrumental in restoring the forests of the Jizera Mountains. From 1995, he served as the Director of the Administration of Protected Landscape Areas of the Czech Republic until he was elected a member of the Chamber of Deputies of the Parliament of the Czech Republic in 2002 on behalf of the Freedom Union-DEU. During his mandate, he contributed in particular to the creation of legislation bringing the Republic closer to the European Union. In addition, he was Vice-Chairman of the Chamber’s Committee on Public Administration, Regional Development and Environment and a member of the Mandate and Immunity Committee. In 2006, he became the Director of the Agency for the Protection of Nature and Landscape of the Czech Republic. However, in 2007, he interrupted his work when he took up the Deputy Minister of the Environment post. He has been the Director of the Agency for Nature and Landscape Conservation of the Czech Republic since 2010. At the time of filming (2024), he lived in Turnov.
In 2019, František Pelc received the Rector's Award for his contribution to teaching at the Faculty of Environment of the ČZU. On the photo with the Rector Prof. J. Balík.
In 2019, František Pelc received the Rector's Award for his contribution to teaching at the Faculty of Environment of the ČZU. On the photo with the Rector Prof. J. Balík.
František Pelc with Prof. Bedřich Moldan at the presentation of the Award of the Director of the Agency for Nature and Landscape Conservation of the Czech Technical University for the contribution to nature conservation in 2021
František Pelc with Prof. Bedřich Moldan at the presentation of the Award of the Director of the Agency for Nature and Landscape Conservation of the Czech Technical University for the contribution to nature conservation in 2021
