E’ stato un successo: Al Parlamento Europeo la battaglia per le grotte è stata accompagnata da una bella magnata di pastasciutta. Se i politici europei sono come i nostri (ma non sono come i nostri, per fortuna) magnare è la cosa che gli riesce meglio.
Ecco la cronaca di Christiane Grebe da Bruxelles (se qualche traduttore può aiutarci senza aspettare lo scongelamento del Grossglockner…)
Dear caving friends,
some news for you from Brussels and our stand at the European parliament!
From November 10th to 13th our campaign team stayed in Brussels in order to promote WD 66 for cave protection. We had a meeting with a responsible of DG Environment of EU commission on the 10th, a press conference on the 11th and at the our information stand in front of the plenar hall in EU parliament.
Our information stand in Brussels on the 11th and 12th November was a real success. We had lots of interested visitors from many different countries.
In 2 days we distributed 2000 postcards, 1000 packages of maccaroni with a cave picture on it saying “these are also breakable – maccaroni! save the hole world by signing WD 66” and 1000 flyer. In the end you saw everywhere in the parliament people with our maccaroni and flyers. If you want to get an impression how these days were, take a look on picasaweb
We found out that the maccaroni as present were a very good idea as it attracted attention of many people. In addition, we had a stalagmite at the stand lent by the German Cave Museum and Dechenhoehle Iserlohn
(www.dechenhoehle.de) as example for caves as archive for sciences and the new book of cave photographies by Max Wisshak “Inside Mother Earth” (http://www.editionreuss.de/pages/english.html) and a presentation of pictures from it. These were really two eyecatcher to sensitize the people and especially the deputies for the cave and karst protection.
BUT….. above all… I would like to thank the fantastic team of speleologists, who came to Brussels to pack 1000 packes of maccaroni,to help at the stand and convince the people in a multi-lingual way, to visit the deputies directly in their offices and ask them to sign, to render expert opinion during the meeting with the EU commission and the press conference etc.. Many thanks to Prof Paolo Forti, Herman de Swart, Wietske
van der Berge, Pierrot Clemens, Jean-Pierre Bartholeyns, Kasia Biernacka, Ferdinando Didonna, Rainer Fohlert, Bärbel Vogel, Ioana Meleg, Viorel Lascu, Alexey Zhalov, Dirk van Daerme. And I would like to thank all the speleologists and federations in Europe, who contacted their deputies. We still have some time till 4th December, so if you didn’t contact your national deputies so far, please do it now. Everything you need for this,
you find on our homepage www.cavedeclaration.eu.
So what will be our next steps? – specialists on GIS and hydrology are needed
During the meeting with EU commission we agreed on working together in the future and Mr Ladislav Miko askes us to prepare GIS map for all karst areas in Europe in order to compare it with the existing protected areas. We are planing to prepare a first map for the commission with less details and some regional examples. In a second step we will do it with more details, as this is connected with much more work and time. So what we need now is a group of interested GIS-speleos, who would like to work on this project for the EU commission and collect all data from the European federations. The first interested people mailed to us. It is also planed that next September/October this GIS group will also present their results in front of the EU commission in a workshop for the new EU commission.
Beside this we are now represented in the groundwater working group in Brussels and looking for a group of hydrology experts, who can assisst this working group for the new papers for the groundwater framework.
If you are interested in the GIS or groundwater project, please mail to protection@eurospeleo.org. More information in the next mail!
Best speleo wishes
Christiane Grebe