Environment

Iron Curtain becomes green belt

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Twenty years ago today the Iron Curtain began to unravel. It was on March 11, 1990 that Lithuania became the first Soviet republic to declare its independence. The Soviet grip on Eastern Europe had begun to loosen with the fall of the Berlin Wall a few months earlier. But it was Lithuania’s move that soon led to the collapse of the Soviet Union itself. Now, twenty years later, the fortified east-west border is also just a memory. But not all vestiges of the Iron Curtain have vanished from the landscape. Ashley Ahearn reports in some places the former no-man’s land is being preserved… as a green belt.

• Downriver Productions

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Near the town of Mitwitz in Bavaria, an unkempt strip of trees and shrubs slices through acres of golden wheat fields. This fifty-meter-wide swath is all that’s left of the once impenetrable Iron Curtain.

Frobel: This was the place where I started bird watching on the borderline, 1975.

Kai Frobel was just 16 when he took up birding along the militarized border between East Germany and his home in the west, armed only with binoculars and Wellington boots.

Ahearn: “So did your parents know you were out on the border watching birds?
Frobel: “Not only my parents. He he he!”

The East German Intelligence Office kept a file on Frobel. They thought he was a spy for the West. But Frobel was really just in it for the birds. He realized that without people in the buffer zone, bird populations were thriving.

Today, nearly 20 years after the border disappeared, they still are. Frobel switches back to his native German to identify the birds calling from the underbrush.

There’s a Yellow Hammer, Frobel says… a Marsh Warbler, … a European Whitethroat…

Frobel says endangered birds came to depend on the no man’s land as habitat elsewhere was lost to industrial agriculture. And he says he knew that if East and West Germany reunited, this place would need to be protected.

So just weeks after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Frobel called a meeting of like-minded Germans from both sides of the border. The European Greenbelt Initiative was born.

Twenty years later, groups from nearly two dozen countries are still patching together a network of over 14 hundred protected areas, stretching more than 5,000 miles across the heart of Europe- from Finland in the far North to Albania in the Balkans.

About 500 miles Southeast of Kai Frobel’s town, Alois Lang climbs an old guard tower near the once-militarized border between Austria and Hungary. A wide swath of swampy grassland and a shallow lake dotted with waterfowl stretches out below him.

Lang: “Its one of the key places for bird migration between northern Europe and Africa.”

Lang is director of ecotourism for Neusiedlersee-Seewinkel National Park, which shares management of roughly 350 square miles here with its Hungarian counterpart across the border.

Lang:  “We have approximately 150 species that are migrating that need the area here as a resting and feeding place, and another 150 approximately is breeding here. That was the reason why the greenbelt was identified as the only positive heritage of cold war times.”

Some of the protected areas along the European Greenbelt are public parks like this one. Others are managed by partnerships between private landowners and conservation groups. Some are designated as UN world heritage sites while others are just scraps of fallow urban land.

Perhaps nowhere were the divisions of Cold War Europe more strongly pronounced than in the city of Berlin.

Today trains pass along two sides of a stretch of abandoned green space in the southern part of the city. In the mid 1900′s, this area was a rail yard. But when the Berlin wall was built in 1961, the trains stopped coming. Jesse Shapins is an American urban historian who’s lived and worked extensively in Berlin.

Shapins: “What’s happened over the last 40-50 years is that an enormous park has grown up over all of these train tracks.”

What was once a bustling knot of tracks, with trains coming in from all corners of the continent, is now the Natur-Park Schöneberger Südgelände. But it wasn’t a sure thing that this spot would remain a refuge for nature. When the wall came down, Berliners had to fight to keep these 44 acres from being redeveloped. Shapins says it’s an urban wildlife oasis…

Shapins: “What we have here now is an incredibly diverse ecosystem… Over 350 types of plants… there’s over 50 different types of large mushrooms… there’s over 30 different types of birds… you can even find over 60 different types of spiders.”

The green jewels along the old east-west border are an ironic positive legacy of a very dark period in European history.

Still, not all conservationists believe that protecting big stretches of the buffer zone is a good use of scarce conservation resources. Some are also wary of preserving vestiges of the political boundaries that so many in the region fought-and died-to erase.

But for others, protecting natural areas along the old frontier is a critical part of the healing process.

Grichting: “It becomes a sort of ecological backbone. You try to use this as a way of implementing ecological building ecological planning, ecological architecture.”

Anna Grichting is a Swiss urbanist and architect who’s studied military buffer zones around the world, including Berlin. She’s standing outside a chapel that was built to commemorate the people who died trying to cross the Berlin Wall. Grichting believes the greenbelt project gives people the opportunity to use nature to heal political divisions.

Grichting: “The actual populations who are close to the borders are often collaborating especially on questions of ecology. I think ecology’s very interesting because it’s something that brings people together despite their nationalities.”

20 years after the Iron Curtain crumbled, conservation groups in countries up and down Europe continue to work together to produce habitat and biodiversity maps of the green strip they’re trying to protect. There are also plans to develop extensive network of bicycle paths… along what was once a strip of land mines, guard dogs and barbed wire.

For the World, I’m Ashley Ahearn, Berlin.

photos: Ashley Ahearn