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East or West, Home is Best---for the Birds

When the Berlin Wall fell, it marked the real end at last of World War II and signalled a dramatic winding down of the Cold War. Germans wept for joy; people who'd never been to Germany and never wanted to go wept along with them. The falling wall was a powerfully positive symbol worldwide.

Yet, as a recent issue of the British journal Nature explains, the best of events can have unhappy repercussions. When Gerrnany was divided, the line was marked by a harsh no-man's land, a swathe accurately called "the death strip." From north to south, a guarded zone lay just within the East German border. Six hundred kilometers long and five kilometers wide, it was forbidding territory, inhabited only by armed and wary patrols prepared to shoot first, ask questions later.

Land forbidden to people becomes a haven for wildlife. In densely populated Europe, the death strip became a refuge. East Germany also held other areas closed to the public---the private hunting preserves enjoyed by privileged high officials. These lands too provided refuge, at least for creatures not considered fair game.

Black storks, cranes, and other species endangered in Europe, from whitefish to wild flowers, also received some benefit from the awkward economic system dominating East Germany. Enormous and poorly managed collective farms often had patches of uncultivated and marshy ground that no one got around to draining and improving for agricultural purposes. The marshes especially suited the big birds, and hundreds of young storks and cranes started life there. Only through intensive efforts had West German ecologists been able to save about 50 breeding pairs of both cranes and storks; on the eastern side of the old border, hundreds of pairs of each species still exist.

Thus, in a country notorious for its poor environmental record, an unplanned environmental effect has been the protection of wildlife now rare to vanishing elsewhere. But an unplanned effect of German reunification may be the end of these unintentional refuges.

West Germany has an Environment Minister, and he called for turning the old death strip into a green belt---a protected park girdling the midsection of the united country. The suggestion was not met with general enthusiasm. Residents on either side of the proposed linear park complained that it would keep them isolated. As one village mayor put it, "Why should we have to drive 90 kilometers to the next town when it is only 12 kilometers away?" They want roads through the strip, and lots of them.

The Germans also want access to the lands themselves. The Environment Ministry reports that since the border opened, thousands of tourists from both halves of the nation have gone for picnics and hikes all over the more popular and scenic parts of the old strip. The ministry worries that the tourists are loving the terrain to death, trampling everything into the ground.

So, although it hasn't made as many international headlines as have other difficulties attending reunification, the problem of wildlife protection plagues German politicians. Alaskans are in a position to appreciate some of the problems. Although the Environment Ministry can provide coordination, it will be up to the individual states to set aside preserves and to strike a balance between use and preservation. Just as Alaskans sometimes feel as if development here is squelched by pressures from people who've ruined the environment where they live, so---it is possible to imagine---must Prussians feel as if they're being forced to give up possible economic development because Bavarians didn't protect their forests and marshes.

It will be interesting to see what balance the Germans manage to strike between preservation and progress. Probably the storks and cranes will be watching keenly; perhaps it's a pity that they can't vote.