Memory of water, or the battle for the Slepiotka River and Ochojec Nature Reserve

In the past, the Slepiotka was characterized by a snow and rain (snowmelt) regime, but today it responds mainly with short, rapid surges after heavy rain, after which only puddles remain. Water-related species are disappearing, vegetation is changing, and the microclimate of the valley no longer resembles the one that allowed plants and insects of mountain origin to survive here. The Ochojec Reserve, which was created after a media storm and logging for a gas pipeline, was supposed to protect the phenomenon of nature. Today it is becoming a place to record its slow agony. Dr. Parusel puts it bluntly: without water, there is no river, no forest, and no local security.

You can read the first part of the interview with Dr. Parusel in the February issue of Water Matters.

Magdalena Gościniak Podziewska: You connect the river and hydrological memory with the memory of events, people, the Lucien mine, the change of the riverbed, dikes, trenches, the reserve itself, which was created after the media storm. Tell us how human history is written in the riverbed today. How can it be read?

Jerzy Parusel: I read it and I know it. Only I have the impression that it’s getting worse, especially when it comes to the living world. Because the interference has always been there, but….

M.G.P.: Sprólet’s take it one step at a time. What do you remember? There was a mine.

J.P.: The mine has been in operation for hundreds of years. And I remember from my childhood the Slepiotka River, which was full of water all year round, despite coal mining. The mere presence of 17 mountain species proves that conditions were once stable and favorable enough that just such specialized organisms settled there. They may have been older than the mine, but they also existed as it appeared.

What happened later? I don’t know if the decisive factor was the scale of mining or the degradation of the entire system and water balance. But I have a sense that what happened from below during the last 200 years overlapped with what is fromabove: lack of snow, disruption of thermal and precipitation systems.

M.G.P.: MóYou talked about changing the trough – that at some point it stopped meandering.

J.P.: Yes, except that I only remember the riverbed transformed anymore. In the section I knew from my childhood, the river flowed for a few kilometers in technical ditches: part of the Lucien open pit mine was reclaimed, and the riverbed was fitted into the ditch. But maps from the 18th century show a beaded arrangement of three ponds in the valley. This is classic: rivers worked for man. It’s just that there was a certain consistency in that arrangement – man used the resources without destroying them. It produced something like a balance: water, fish, natural values – everything still existed, lived.

And then the ponds were destroyed. In my time there were only three dykes. Older people said that the lowest pond still existed in the 1930s. last century. I, however, have a problem with it – there are more than a century old alders growing at the site of the former basin. This dating does not agree. Perhaps there was less water back then, maybe it faded earlier – but the whole system is simply gone.

There were also meadow systems in the valley – you can see them on maps. This was evidenced, among other things, by the curly-leafed elder, also a mountain species. Today it is gone, as the area has been reclaimed and alders planted.

M.G.P.: A The trenches along the ŚLepiotka?

J.P.: They could have originated in the forest, they stretch from the wooded Wanda Hill in Murcki through the Murckowski Forest. Their spatial logic is a mystery to me: their location on the right bank would indicate defensive trenches against the Germans coming from the west, from the direction of Mikolow. On the other hand, I once met an elderly woman in the Ochojec reserve who told me that it was not Poles who dug them in 1939, but women forced to do so by the NKVD in 1945, as protection in case the Germans returned. This would have to be checked by historians, but it seems likely….

M.G.P.: Since you mentioned the reserve, please, can you recall its originsorigins?

J.P.: The thought of creating a nature reserve was related to my discovery of a mountain abacus in the area. It was a fantastic event. Although I didn’t know the plant well at the time, I knew that it was something very rare and unique. I later confronted it with Professor Mieczkowski. He confirmed that it was a mountain species. A phenomenon: in such a small valley, by such a small watercourse.

The problem was that at that time we did not protect the abacus. It had been on the conservation list for a few years (since 2001), but at the time, when I was fighting for the reserve, it was not an argument for the conservationist:a mountain species, a botanical rarity, but unprotected.

The reserve was only created when it was destroyed. The area from the project was cut through the middle: a clear-cut was made on a strip 700 meters long and about 12 meters wide to run a gas pipeline to the then under construction Manhattan estate, the Rebirth estate in Katowice. Only a media scandal forced the conservationist to react. Journalists from three regional newspapers pushed him to the wall. Today it is hard to imagine such media solidarity in defense of nature.

This is the only case I know of in the history of nature conservation in Poland when a reserve was created because something was destroyed – not because it was supposed to be protected. Paradox.

M.G.P.: And a little giggle of fate… The fact that we have a reserve at the moment gives a stable context for measuring theós you make.

J.P.: If the reserve didn’t exist, I wouldn’t have a measurement or research goal. On the other hand, I realize that I may – if life permits – survey the Slepiota to death.

M.G.P.: You witness the agony of the river. You are recording and documenting its ś mierć.

J.P.: It hurts me, it hurts me. I never imagined that a river that is only eight kilometers long and only within the borders of Katowice would end up like this. The local government should protect it – it’s the only wholly urban river for which we, the residents, are responsible….

M.G.P.: WeI’m also dreaming of those disappearing tributaries. They are no longer there, but the traces in the field are legible.

J.P.: They are a bit deformed, if only by forest drainage, but they are there.

M.G.P.: So we are losing not only water, but also landscape and self-regulatory mechanisms.

J.P.: And this is where the city’s investments come in. The first battle over the reserve was in 2000: the development plan for Katowice’s southern districts designed a four-lane road 50 meters wide through the reserve, right through the middle of the largest population of mountain abacus in Europe. Fortunately, in 2008 the city withdrew from the idea. Later, another project emerged: a road and streetcar system along the edge of the reserve, in the forest-meadow ecotone, the most valuable part of the landscape.

There was also an investment related to one of the tributaries of the Slepiotka River: a pointless road shortcut through the forest so that the residents of the estate could get to Greyfriars Street faster. This would have meant that the residue from any accident, chemicals, salt from snow removal – everything would have flowed straight into the reserve.

M.G.P.: Usually we don’t see the degradation process, and it turns out that this is the last moment to save nature. When investments come closer, there may be nothing to harvest.

J.P.: The city is developing, which means it is building up the last green enclaves, designing a streetcar line next to the reserve, in the forest-meadow ecotone, which is the most valuable. It is doing something that will devastate all this space: noise, light, traffic. If the streetcar line and road are built, it will become risky and inconvenient to enjoy the values and benefits of the reserve.

The worst thing is that the authorities responsible for protection, RDOŚ and GDOŚ, did not notice these threats. I am preparing a report on this project for the European Commission: I am compiling the results of the natural inventories on the basis of which decisions were issued. The inventory was done, of course, by the investor, that is, by someone commissioned by the investor. To me, this is a creation, not an inventory. We wrote complaints, asked for cassations, but the courts and the prosecutor’s office took the investor’s arguments as their basis. We are in a macabre situation….

M.G.P.: So, in fact, this is the last moment to see Slepiota.

J.P.: Yes. You can still even see the abacus, but the fate of mountain species in such a desiccated, insulated system is a foregone conclusion. And if asphalt, cars, streetcars appear – it will only get worse.

M.G.P.: What would have to happen systemically (planning and socially) for the Slepiatka to remain a river and not just an archive and a memory?

J.P.: I’m afraid I don’t have the answer. There is no turning back. Mr. Wojciech Czech, who was the first non-communist governor of the Katowice province, still keeps me hoping that when the Murcki mine together with Staszic stop mining, the underground water level will recover. I would like to believe that.

M.G.P.: It’s just that water can take a very long time to return, and changes on the surface happen quickly. And it’s impossible to put the responsibility solely on the mine: the mine fed and the water was there. The system unraveled later. On a macro level, it’s no longer a crisis, it’s agony, moving into a completely new system, where the state of the river is the absence of the river, and the landscape will have to cope without water.

J.P.: The memory of water will remain: in the relief, in the name. But we won’t see it in the vegetation.

M.G.P.: There is also the memory of lampreys.

J.P.: The stream lamprey – that’s what we need to think about. It used to occur here for sure, and in large quantities. Today it remains the name of the watercourse and nothing more.

M.G.P.: And what else remains in your memory of Slepiota?

J.P.: The marsh marsh marigold, a beautiful plant of transitional bogs, which I labeled on my own with the help of Rostafinski’s key while preparing for matriculation at the Second Dam. And the green-bellied woodpecker, which I can still hear in the Slepiotka Valley. We used its voice with Leszek Pawlak to communicate during our childhood and adolescent romps through the forest.

M.G.P.: I remember how in the team designating community forests around Katowice I used to sayóyou said that we were talking not only about not cutting down forestsów, but also about water. Why is it so important on?

J.P.: It’s about the S7 criterion, or water conservation, which I admit I initially fought within myself as a criterion for designating social forests. It was only thanks to Professor Mariusz Czop of AGH that I changed my mind. I accepted his argumentation when I realized that what the Katowice Forestry District superintendent or the Bielsko Forestry District superintendent does has an impact on the quality of the water in the Vistula, and therefore on the water that people drink hundreds of kilometers away. I realized that what really matters most is water.

The same goes for the water from my tap, which comes from the Goczałkowice Reservoir. Its quality depends on the district forestry officer of Wisla, the district forestry officer of Ustroń, the district forestry officer of Bielsko, that is, on how the forests in the upper part of the catchment area are managed.

M.G.P.: We need to clarify this: what impact do foresters have on water?

J.P.: First: infrastructure and equipment. Skid roads, machinery, oils, lubricants, chemicals – all of this flows into the water. Second: the structure of the forest itself. Clear-cutting management causes the forest to periodically disappear over larger areas. This is ruin for hydrogeological processes. If we don’t maintain a permanent forest cover with an appropriate structure (multi-story, multi-species, multi-age), then retention resources and water abundance decrease.

In the Carpathians, in the flysch, the soils and subsoil do not hold water like a sponge – the primary retention takes place in the vegetation cover. And this is exactly what the forester influences and periodically destroys.

We have protective forests, seemingly 90 percent of the area, but so what if there is no change in management. The Water Law speaks of protective zones for water intakes: direct and indirect. Direct ones are sometimes respected – fenced, like smallgardens in the forest. But what is most important, the indirect zone, is most often not protected at all. Local governments can designate it, but they don’t. And if water is a key resource, there is no mercy – you have to.

Rapid storm surges and floods are also a negative consequence for local communities. The climate is unpredictable, cycles are jittery, and hydrological models are about to stop describing reality.

M.G.P.: There is already a problem even with weather forecasting, the models are diverging.

J.P.: They don’t work. And the forestry model was based on the belief that nature is predictable. Hence, management based on clearcuts and cutting age, which are not appropriate for modern and projected ecological conditions of tree growth and development. Today, such concepts as potential vegetation or succession may prove inadequate. So all the more reason for the precautionary principle: if you don’t know – don’t move. Only that this is the hardest part.

Dr. Jerzy Parusel – ecologist, botanist, phytosociologist and forester, long-time activist for nature protection in Upper Silesia. For years he documented the most valuable natural areas of the Silesian province. Member of the State Council for Nature Protection, the most important consultative and advisory body on nature protection in Poland. Co-founded and for many years headed the Upper Silesian Nature Heritage Center, an institution dedicated to research, documentation and popularization of knowledge about the region’s nature. Author of nearly 600 scientific and popular science publications, initiator of the creation of the Ochojec reserve. For years he has been documenting the hydrological transformations of the Ślepiotka valley.

Magdalena Gościniak Podziewska – environmental project communications specialist, associated with the Polish Society for the Protection of Birds (OTOP). She deals with the topics of biodiversity, peatlands and water retention, combining her experience in nature conservation with many years of media and PR practice. She lives in Upper Silesia.

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pic. main: Jerzy Parusel