• 23/01/2023
• By wizewebsite
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Milan Jeglík: To rescue rainforests can be rescued without grants and subsidies - National Geographic<

Author: Editor

How does a professional diver become a professional conservationist? For the answer, I have to go back in time. I graduated from secondary forestry school, where for four years they taught me nothing but how to monetize the forest and nature. However, I did not agree with this direction, so it was clear to me that the path did not lead here. When I flew to Indonesia to work as a diving instructor in 2002, I was twenty-nine and had ten years of life more under the water than above. . But at the same time, I saw the atrocities that people commit to animals and to nature itself, whether it was killing whales or burning forests. I often had my camera with me and repeatedly played shots that I couldn't take my eyes off of. It began to dawn on me that this is one way to show people that while we live a fairly peaceful life, something else is happening in the world. For me, it was also the first strong realization that I can go down the path of protecting wild nature and the animals in it.

Source: www.pralesdetem.cz Why did you finally choose Sumatra, instead of thousands of kilometers from your home? Everything started by a coincidence in 2004, when a friend and I went to Sumatra with the naive goal of conquering the highest mountain range of the National Park in the province of Aceh . But due to the ongoing civil war, we were arrested by the Indonesian army, and because we didn't have a permit to enter, they kicked us back to North Sumatra. We didn't know what to do with the week off, so we went to the popular tourist village of Bukit Lawang and hired a guide. Ali Ruslim took us to the forest and we saw orangutans and hornbills in the wild for the first time. He also showed us the tracks of a tiger and I was so enchanted by all that I experienced that I promised Ali when I said goodbye that I would return to him one day and give him a job in conservation. At that time, I still had no idea what I would get into. In 2007, I gave him the first impulse to find a territory that could be bought. And it worked - we had the first four hectares. Back then, my friends and I had a vision that we would buy a maximum of thirty hectares, on which we would create a small paradise on earth, where we would take people, dive with them and show them life in the forest. Sumatra was an obvious choice because there we experienced how walking in the original wilderness gave us enormous energy - energy that makes you want to exist. Gradually, however, those who initially went into it with me dropped out and handed over the project to me by the time it started relationship with my current (personal and work) partner Zuzka Koloušková. We had a big step ahead of us and we had no idea if it would work out. But we decided to take the risk. In 2012, I quit diving, sold my share in the boat, and Zuzka and I set about protecting the tropical rainforest as part of our private Czech-Indonesian Green Life reserve. Source: www.pralesdetem.cz

Today, you are not only saving the rainforest, but also helping endangered species of animals... For a while we lived our fairy tale - they bought up the rainforest and felt good about it. However, we did not see beyond the borders of our "port" at all. Naivety left us in 2013, when we got into the black market thanks to Ali. There we saw the huge hole in which hundreds of thousands of animals intended for traditional Chinese medicine or various rituals disappear every year. Locals brought here snakes, monitor lizards and other types of animals they found in the forest. At first, we tried to save the animals by buying them. But once 200 turtles appeared there, and we realized that this is not a random business, but a business made to order. We had to start taking action. Thanks to the cooperation with the Gunung Leuser National Park, with the help of several cameras, we literally began to monitor the surroundings of our reserve in a guerilla way. It became clear what was really happening around us - poaching of birds, traps, poachers' eyes... But we also met the critically endangered Sumatran tiger for the first time in the reserve. I was more and more inclined to decide that we need to start not only protecting animals, but literally defending them. Confirmation that we were going in the right direction was when we caught the first poaching group. Source: www.pralesdetem.cz Today we have a great team of volunteer Tiger Patrol, which guards the Green Life Reserve and helps uncover other poaching groups. Thanks to this patrol, we were also able to monitor the critically endangered Sumatran elephants for the first time in 2014. The enthusiasm was all the greater when six photo traps (an automated camera used to capture photos of wild animals) showed a family - two baby elephants with a female and a huge male. Such impulses come exactly at the moment when I am tired and the feeling that I cannot help nature begins to prevail.

What are your other projects? Two years ago, we started the Blue Life volunteer center, where we clean the Pulau Banyak archipelago with the help of volunteers, where turtles come every day to lay their eggs. There is an incredible amount of plastic. That's why this year we bought a high-pressure compressor, with which we also start cleaning under water, and we also bought a bigger boat. And not only for garbage collection, but it will also serve as a guard ship. Here, too, poachers who steal turtle eggs or kill them for meat are a big problem. There is always room to help... But our organization is such a phenomenon because all our projects work without grants and subsidies. People support us financially by subscribing to our magazine, buying t-shirts, saving a piece of primeval forest or supporting the Tiger Command patrol. Source: www.pralesdetem.cz

You mentioned the help of volunteers. How many of them come to you? Annually, it is approximately 150 people from the Czech and Slovak Republics. They are united by the desire to help and protect nature. They pay for the program themselves (the total amount, including flights, accommodation and food, reaches 30,000 CZK) and, in addition to getting to know the forest, they are fully involved in all the necessary work. It is interesting that among the volunteers there are mainly girls and women, and there are also mothers with children among them. Just for comparison, in six years only one father came with his child. And at the same time, I would greatly welcome men. Although I don't have children myself yet, I think this is a unique trip where the children will see their dad actively involved in nature conservation, fording the river with them, protecting them in places where tigers live and sleeping together in small cabins without windows and door in the middle of the wilderness. After all, all children long for adventure... Today, however, they often have no choice but to escape to science fiction or fantasy. Here, however, they only experience the adventure virtually.

Do you think today's children have any idea what is really happening in nature and with nature? Thanks to the educational project The Richest Ecosystems of Planet Earth, which we founded in 2012, Zuzka and I meet 12,000 children every year. We have established cooperation with 80 partner schools throughout the country and in Slovakia, which significantly helps us finance not only our projects in Sumatra, but also our existence in the Czech Republic. I am glad that I can pass on my experiences in this way, because I am faced with the fact that children often have no idea what animals they can meet in the Czech forest. I also always ask them: "Do you know who creates our oxygen when it's autumn here and the leaves are falling from the trees?" It's only when I introduce the functioning of ecosystems that they start to realize that here for about five months we're literally breathing in debt, because oxygen creates another ecosystem or another geographical zone, which is the world ocean, and precisely the equatorial zone of tropical rainforests. All of humanity depends on them, and their destruction, when the forest is burned for the cultivation of oil palm, teak or eucalyptus, affects us all, affects us all. But at the same time, it is necessary to remind that if people really want to protect the planet and animals, they should start with themselves. Just ask yourself a simple question: "What do we use to wipe our bums with - recycled or non-recycled paper?" Because for non-recycled paper, around 270,000 trees worldwide are cut down every day for Europe alone. Source: www.pralesdetem.cz

Apart from pets, children only encounter animals that are kept in zoos or seen on television, where they are often shown as predators. How to change this view, which rather separates us from nature than unites us? It is necessary to explain to children that documentaries about nature, which happily show teeth, claws, blood and flesh in the main role, do not depict reality. A simple example is enough. Everywhere we are afraid that a shark will attack us in the sea. At the same time, only 30 people are bitten by sharks worldwide every year, even though millions of them swim in the oceans every day. These are often myths that need to be tamed. Otherwise, the idea that it would be better to lock animals up or even kill them will start to prevail in children. And at the same time, nature can give us so much... It is enough to learn to behave in it - to leave the role of an intruder, naturally merge with it, and then nothing can happen to anyone. Nor is it about letting children touch or learn to handle animals. It is enough if they observe them and respect their space. And that can be learned even in the Czech forest. The proof will be the project that we plan to start in 2019 in Slovakia in the Kremnické vrchy, where we want to bring people, including families with children, closer to wild nature and show how it is possible to live in it without fear.

Prepared by: Petr Hadač (Muzskykruh.cz) and Iveta Vařečková