Germany. Geographical and Environmental Features

Geographically, Germany consists of three zones: the north lowland plain, the central uplands, and the southern alpine foreland. The north lowland plain, which covers about one-third of German territory, is part of the broad plain that stretches from the Netherlands to Russia.

The central uplands is a hilly and forested area that includes the Harz and Thüringer Mountains in the north, the Erzgebirge Mountains and the Bohemian Forest in the east, the Swabian and Franconian Jura Mountains in the south, and the Eifel Mountain and Hardt and Black Forests in the west. The southern alpine foreland is situated in the southern tip of Germany just north of the Alps. It contains Germany's highest peak, the Zugspitze (2,964 meters), and largest lake, the Bodensee (Lake Constance).

Germany's principal rivers cut across these geographical zones. They include the Rhine in the west, the Danube in the south, the Weser in the center, and the Elbe and Oder in the east. All flow northwesterly from the Alps or central uplands to the North or Baltic Seas except the Danube, which flows easterly from the Alps to the Black Sea.

The German government reengineered most German rivers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to promote land reclamation, flood control, and navigation. Nearly all also became polluted with industrial effluents, urban sewage, and agrochemicals. Government-mandated cleanup efforts have greatly improved water quality over the past thirty years.

Germany was blanketed in old-growth forest two millennia ago, but the spread of agriculture, towns, wood-based industries, and roads over the centuries has expunged a!! but around one-quarter of its forest cover today. Since the eighteenth century Germans have been in the forefront of scientific forest management, establishing some of the world's first forestry schools and promoting the practice of sustainability (Nachhaltigkeit) long before it became a watchword of modern conservationism.

Although oak, birch, beech, chestnut, oak, and walnut trees are still found in Germany, the foresters' preference for fast-growing commercial timber has tipped the balance in favor of conifers (principally pine and fir), which now account for about two-thirds of remaining forest cover.

In the 1980s there was widespread concern that acid rain was causing Waldsterben (forest death), especially in the fabled Black Forest. Closer inspection, however, revealed that monocultural practices, exotic species introductions, underbrush removal, and soil exhaustion also explain why so many of Germany's forests are disease ridden.

Before the Industrial Revolution, natural resource utilization—land reclamation, forest management, and similar activities—was known as Naturpflege (the cultivation of nature). In the late nineteenth century, as Germany began experiencing unprecedented air, water, and soil pollution from coal-fired industries, the botanist HugoConwentz (1855-1922) popularized an alternate term, Naturschutz (nature protection), and lobbied in favor of state-sponsored conservation of the country's resources.

Derivative coinages include Tierschutz (animal protection), Landschaftschutz (landscape protection), Denkmalschutz (monument protection), and even Naturdenkmalschutz (natural monument protection), About the same time, the early Darwinist Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919) coined the term Ökologie (ecology) to highlight the relationship between an organism and its environment.

For the past two centuries most German conservationists have championed the establishment of nature reserves, monument landmarks, and national parks (an idea borrowed from the United States), with the goal of protecting certain important bioregions and historical sites from the impact of industrial and urban growth.

It is largely through their efforts that Germany now has an extensive network of protected areas throughout the country. Some conservationists, however, took a more antitechnological and pronationalist stance, notably the musician Ernst Rudorff (18401916), founder of the Heimatschutz (homeland protection) movement; the ethnographer Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl (1823-1897), advocate of a folk-based (Wölkisch) nationalism that links nature with Germandom; and the geographer Friedrich Ratzel (1844-1904), popularizer of the term Lebensratim (living space).

From there it was a short step to the race-based "blood and soil" (Blut und Boden) brand of conservationism that Walter Darre (1895-1953) and other prominent Nazi leaders used to justify' the extermination of Jews and the appropriation of agricultural land in eastern Europe.

The Nazi government did pass one significant piece of nature-protection legislation—the Reich Conservation Law of 1935, which standardized conservation practices among the states and established bureaucratic oversight by a reich forest chief (one of Hermann Göring's many positions). In reality, however, the Nazis were committed to breakneck economic recovery and military expansion, not nature protection, and their twelve-year reign of terror left a legacy of air and water pollution of breathtaking proportions.