From Borders to Green Belts

This is an excellent post from Subtopia that I just felt needed to be blogged - and in a way it does deal with 'mobility' as the topic is of the 'border'. Here is discussed the transition from border to green belt.

[Image: Former 'Inner German Border' Provides Haven for Wildlife, Spiegel, May 13, 2008.]

While the "inner German border” that once divided East and West Germany decades ago, stretching 879 miles from the Baltic Sea to the Czech Republic, was a tangled jungle of barbed wire, landmines, booby traps and soldier patrols, it was also, much like the Korean DMZ, a kind of sanctuary for considerable wildlife.

When the Berlin Wall fell German environmentalists fought to protect the long line of no-man’s-land as a Green Belt, connecting it with Europe’s larger green belt that has followed the path of the Iron Curtain from the north of Finland south to the Adriatic Sea.


[Image: Former 'Inner German Border' Provides Haven for Wildlife, Spiegel, May 13, 2008.]

Up until now the German Green Belt has had very little legal protection, and while it still has a long ways to go, Spiegel reports that the groundwork for a new agreement between the federal Government and the local German states which directly assume responsibility for the Green Belt have reached some form of legal outlines for its protection. Currently, only a third of the natural corridor is designated a nature conservation area, but that could soon be increased. The Green Belt itself though is of great interest.

Read original post here
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