Nature Conservation (PDF)

Many things happen in nature reserves that seem contradictory at first glance. For example, flower meadows are mown down during maintenance work, even though all the plants growing there are protected. In a fen, protected reed beds are burnt down and in a dune conservation area the top layer of soil is removed with bulldozers. Other areas, on the other hand, are to remain completely untouched by human intervention.

Klaus-Dieter Hupke shows the different strategies of nature conservation. He also shows that nature conservation is mostly not exactly what the term says in essence: "protection of nature". On the contrary, in Central Europe nature conservation areas are predominantly the relics of old agricultural and thus cultural landscapes. Often, aesthetic aspects of a landscape section are also in the foreground when designating it as a natural monument or nature reserve. Moreover, nature conservation runs the risk of becoming a substitute action and an alibi for a still growing destruction of traditional and near-natural landscape systems in Central Europe as well as globally.

The updated second edition now explicitly includes the consequences of climate change for nature conservation and has also incorporated a stronger reference to Austria as well as to the central alpine region in some places for the relevant readers.

The author

Prof. Dr. habil. Klaus-Dieter Hupke has a seat in Geography at the Heidelberg University of Education.

This book is a translation of an original German edition. The translation was done with the help of artificial intelligence (machine translation by the service DeepL.com). A subsequent human revision was done primarily in terms of content, so that the book will be read stylistically differently from a conventional translation.