Dispatches - Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment

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Greening the Iron Curtain
Ken Ferguson
What Winston Churchill branded “the
Iron Curtain” – the virtually impenetrable
barrier of concrete walls, barbed
wire, guard towers, and land mines that
long separated Eastern Europe from the
West – is gradually being converted
into a ribbon of green snaking its way
through Central Europe. The
European Green Belt initiative, as it is
called, is backed by the International
Union for Conservation of Nature
(IUCN) in partnership with an array of
local, regional, national, and international
organizations and government
agencies throughout Europe.
The long-term goal of the initiative
is to transform the remaining strips of
the largely depopulated border zones
between the nations of the former
Eastern and Western European realms
into natural corridors, linking together
the “core areas” of existing national
parks, biosphere reserves, and wildlife
A section of the European Green Belt
winds its way through Germany.
preserves. Representative slices of
almost all of Europe’s biophysical
regions will be included within the
Belt, conferring at least some measure
of protection for, and connectivity
between, remnants of the continent’s
natural heritage. “The Green Belt harbors
many endangered species and
ecosystems”, explains Uwe Riecken, a
researcher with the German Federal
Agency for Nature Conservation
(Bonn, Germany). “It connects many
large natural landscapes and forms an
important backbone for an ecological
network across Europe.”
© K Leidorf
Initiated in 2004, in a transboundary
park located in the former border
zone between Hungary and Austria,
the Green Belt currently stretches
from the Barents Sea in the north to
the Black Sea in the south, spanning
nearly 8500 km over 23 countries.
Because of its length, the Belt is separated
into three distinct regional sections
– Scandinavia and the Baltic,
Central Europe, and Southeastern
Europe – with each section overseen
by a regional coordinator, while the
project as a whole is managed by the
IUCN. The time frame for completion
of the Green Belt is “difficult to
say”, according to Riecken. “In
Germany, we are close to full implementation.
In other countries, the situation
is not that well developed.”
“An increasing number of people
visit this area for recreation and to
experience nature”, adds Riecken.
“The Green Belt is a living historic
monument that reminds people of
the former division of Europe.” n
205
Efforts underway to
restore the Gulf ecosystem
Johanna Polsenberg
In response to the unprecedented oil
disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, in
2010, President Obama issued an
Executive Order to establish the Gulf
Coast Ecosystem Restoration Task
Force (www.epa.gov/gulfcoasttask
force). In late February, in Louisiana,
the Executive Director of the Task
Force, John Hankinson (EPA,
Washington, DC), held the second of
five public meetings scheduled for
each Gulf state. The Task Force has
until October 2011 to engage with
stakeholders, including local governments,
business and industry, and scientists
– along with 11 federal agencies
– to prepare an Ecosystem
Restoration Strategy for the Gulf.
Hankinson’s experience in the
1990s with the Everglades restoration
project informs his work in the Gulf,
he explains. As with that massive
ecosystem restoration project, determining
the end goal is a major part of
the debate. “Fortunately, ecosystem
restoration for this project is clearly
defined in the Executive Order, but it
is broader than an ecological definition”,
continues Hankinson. “It also
discusses strengthening the ability of
the ecosystem to support the diverse
economies, communities, and cultures
of the Gulf Coast. One thing it
does not spell out, however, is a target
‘recover to’ date.”
“The Gulf ecosystem is highly
dynamic”, explains Scott Eustis,
Coastal Wetlands Specialist with
the Gulf Restoration Network
(www.healthygulf.org; New Orleans,
LA). “The goals for restoration need
to be helping the system become
what it might have evolved to in the
future, if it hadn’t been so disturbed.”
Determining restoration targets in
this complex ecosystem is further
complicated by the fact that industrial-scale
extraction of both seafood
and oil and gas in the Gulf began
decades before anyone started monitoring
impacts to the natural state of
the system, so baseline data are limited.
Funding such a major undertaking
presents another hurdle.
Although BP faces legal fines for
the Gulf spill, the amount of those
fines and whether they could be spent
on Gulf restoration remain unclear.
The Department of Justice filed suit,
claiming BP could owe from $4 billion
to $20 billion, based on fines
mandated by the Clean Water and
the Oil Pollution Acts. BP, in recent
court filings, claimed it was not willfully
negligent and suggested fines
from $2.8 million to $4.9 million.
Current law dictates that any
fines collected go into the Oil Spill
Liability Trust Fund, which is used
for initial clean-up of oil spills and
to cover uncompensated damages,
and then, once the $2.7 billion
funding cap is reached, directly
into the general US Treasury. A
Commission created by the
President to examine federal law
following the disaster recommended
redirecting 80% of fines to
Gulf restoration, which would
require legislative changes. n
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