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 hen Juraj Lukac (Your-eye Lou-kach) sits quietly beneath the slender branches of tall, graceful beech trees, he listens for the call of the wild. In the forests of Slovakia, Lukac hears a cry for help.
In 1993 he answered this cry with the Wolf Forest Protection Movement, known as Wolf, for short. Based in Tulcik, a small village in eastern Slovakia, Wolf is an environmental group working to preserve forests and wildlife in this region of Central Europe. Slovakia contains most of Europe's natural beech-fir forests, which once covered much of the continent. The forests are beautiful, but Lukac hopes we never visit them. "Wilderness needs to be left alone," he says.
Beech trees soar to great heights in the Wolf Reserve.
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Where The Wild Things Are
The Slovak forests are threatened. So are the creatures that live there: wolves, bears, wildcats, lynx, golden eagles, deer, wild boar and owls. Their biggest threat is humans. To protect the forests from harmful human activities, such as logging, planting nonnative tree species and hunting, Wolf is creating Central and Eastern Europe's first private reserve, which is land set aside for a special use.
The Wolf Reserve is 52 acres of natural beech-fir forest in eastern Slovakia's Cergov Mountains. People around the world pay $30 a tree to help Wolf buy land for this reserve and others.
Owners will not be allowed to visit the trees they buy. The reserve will become an evolution forest, a woodland in which there is no human interference and where any changes to the plant and animal populations happen naturally. "A forest is a complicated system," says Wolf's project manager, Maria Hudakova. "We must let nature run its course."
Wolf members believe that restoring Europe's natural forests will help prevent flooding and other problems that occur when humans alter the landscape. Wolf plans to create more evolution forests.
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Gray wolves roam free in the protected forests of the reserve.
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To Lukac, an evolution forest is the perfect wilderness. "I don't need stampeding elephants or a herd of caribou to imagine wilderness," he explains. "Wilderness is an ordinary forest, untouched by foresters, with wolves and wet moss." Sometimes the best way to answer nature's cry for help is for humans to keep their distance.
By Elizabeth Siris
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