"According to official documents, the construction of the Nové Mlýny reservoirs was supposed to bring these benefits: recreation of the population, fishing, water retention against floods and irrigation. These were the four basic benefits that the construction was supposed to bring. The Geographic Survey found that most of those positives did not occur, and indeed, except perhaps for the recreation, which anyway only happens on that upper reservoir, the flow of that water does not allow for much response. Fishing there is questionable because the flesh of the fish is contaminated with various heavy metals and other chemicals that are brought in by the river Thaya from Austria. As for irrigation, that is quite literally a slap in the water. Because these irrigation systems were never implemented and are still not working today. So it was all wasted. And as for the negative effects that the study by the Geographical Institute revealed, which still exist today, I would say that it is primarily the destruction of one of the most valuable floodplain forest complexes in Central Europe. This was not just a matter for South Moravia, it was a matter for the whole of Central Europe, where the continuous, intact floodplain forests that started at the border with Austria and stretched all the way to the town of Břeclav were absolutely unique forests, of which only ruins remain today, and in addition, thanks to the Nové Mlýny reservoirs, the water regime has changed, so that these forests have remained prtactically on dry land, and the floods, which actually made the floodplain forests floodplain forests, have ceased to function. So those were probably the most significant negative impacts, namely the destruction of the original habitats."
"Well, it meant that in Větřní, for example, where there was a huge paper mill, all the waste water was discharged directly into the river. So the river was rotting, the river was rotting so badly that when you came to Český Krumlov, for example, today it is a pearl of a monument that tourists from all over the world come to see. And then you really felt sick. And I have to say that I saw with my own eyes how tourists threw up there. Because it really was like stepping into a cesspool. And there was just no cleaning, because that would sort of hinder the development of socialism and the building of communism. So the sewage was going straight into the river. The chimneys had no filters. The only thing that was done was to build chimneys higher and higher so that the fumes would get into the upper atmosphere and disperse more, or fly off to the neighbours. That was the strategy of the communist regime at that time. So there were sort of formal instructions on how to reduce pollution, but nobody paid attention to them because the main objective was to fulfil the plan. And whoever fulfilled the plan could do whatever they wanted."
"The construction itself had enormously negative consequences, especially in Šumava, which have not been fully resolved to date. In what way? Two things in particular. If the Iron Curtain ran through a peat bog, the peat bog was artificially drained, or at least huge amounts of material were brought in to build the barriers and to build the road. That was the first thing. And the second thing: the wires were actually doubled. There was one wall of wires and a second wall of wires to that first wall of wires. That was the signal wall where there were thin wires that if they were touched or broken, a flare would go off. Then they knew when a flare went off, which sometimes was caused by wild boar or game or a tree falling, but when a flare went off, the border troopers would go to that spot. Between that signal wall and the actual wires, which was a four-metre wall of barbed wire, there was a strip that was ploughed and raked so that you could see that there were footprints. And that was constantly groomed in the summer, in the winter, and pretty harsh pesticides were used to make sure that there was no grass growing there, just to see the footprints of any so-called trespassers. So these effects of the Iron Curtain were clearly negative. But the positive was not the Iron Curtain itself, but the fact that it was not entered without permission. That nobody went there, except those people who had the permits."
Zoologist, ecologist, activist, long-time representative of the South Moravian Region and the City of Brno. Mojmír Vlašín was born on 17 November 1954 in Brno to his parents Vlasta and Štěpán. From 1976 to 1980 he studied vertebrate ecology at the Faculty of Science of Jan Evangelista Purkyně University (now Masaryk University). In 1980 he joined the Brno Regional Centre for State Monument Protection and Nature Conservation. Here he participated, among other things, in the preparation of documents for the declaration of Podyjí as a protected landscape area. At the same time, he witnessed the destruction of the Podkomorské Forest during the construction of the Brno Autodrom in the 1980s. After 1990, he was at the forefront of the initiative to drain the third Novomlýn reservoir. As an activist, he also fought against the construction of a television transmitter on top of Děvín. From 1992 to 1996 he served as deputy director of the Czech Institute of Nature Conservation. He cooperated with the ecological institute Veronica. He is a laureate of the Josef Vavroušek Award. Today (2024) he lives in the Brno-Ořešín district and remains active in nature conservation.
