Why would you flood a forest?
The Europeans | European news, politics and culture
Katy Lee and Dominic Kraemer
4.8 • 162 Ratings
🗓️ 23 March 2023
⏱️ 41 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Last year, conservationists deliberately flooded a Slovakian forest. Why would you do such a thing? This week we ring up the co-founder of one of the organisations behind the project, Duarte de Zoeten of Mossy Earth, to find out. We're also talking about Italy's rainbow families, a kind-of-sort-of deal between Kosovo and Serbia, and Europe's first wild river national park.
You can find Mossy Earth's YouTube channel here and their latest video about the Danube project here. Find out more about their Slovakian partners, Broz, here.
This week's Isolation Inspiration: Vrij Spel (NPO) - Arnout, Dominic, Felix & Timo vs. Purcell; Stanley Tucci - Searching for Italy.
Thanks for listening! If you enjoy our podcast and would like to help us keep making it, we'd love it if you'd consider chipping in a few bucks a month at patreon.com/europeanspodcast (many currencies are available). You can also help new listeners find the show by leaving us a review or giving us five stars on Spotify.
00:22 Rats and Covid
03:12 Bad week: Milan's rainbow families
09:39 Good week (ish): Serbia and Kosovo
19:03 Interview: Duarte de Zoeten on flooding a Slovakian forest
32:05 Isolation Inspiration: Arnout, Dominic, Felix & Timo vs. Purcell, and 'Searching for Italy'
37:45 Happy Ending: Europe's first wild river national park
Producer: Katy Lee
Mixing and mastering: Wojciech Oleksiak
Music: Jim Barne and Mariska Martina
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello from Paris. |
| 0:07.0 | Hello from Paris, city of romance, strikes, garbage piling up on the streets, and very angry mass protests. |
| 0:30.3 | If you're visiting our city at the moment, I can only apologise for the filth and the occasional torched car. |
| 0:38.3 | But I also think it's quite a good time to visit and see, you know, a different side of life here. |
| 0:43.8 | This is also France, Dominic. It's not just croissons and beautiful people. |
| 0:47.7 | How long has the garbage strike been going on? |
| 0:49.7 | More than two weeks now. |
| 0:51.4 | Oh, goodness. |
| 0:52.9 | Yeah. It's kind of neighbourhood to neighbourhoods. And here, anyway, |
| 0:56.7 | in this bit of town in the north-east, the rubbish on the streets does seem to be subsiding a little bit, |
| 1:02.7 | but it's been pretty bad. Apparently a few days ago there was estimated to be 10,000 tonnes of |
| 1:08.3 | uncollected trash on the streets. Wow. |
| 1:12.6 | The rats have been having a field day. |
| 1:15.1 | I saw this nice meme yesterday that made me laugh. |
| 1:17.9 | It was a rat being interviewed by a TV reporter. |
| 1:22.0 | And it was saying, yeah, we were just thinking of spending a couple of days in Paris. |
| 1:26.1 | But with this all-you-can-eat buffet deal, we've decided to extend our holiday. |
| 1:29.9 | But yeah, it's not just been garbage, has it? |
| 1:35.1 | There's also been some quite heavy protests, right? Yeah, it's been pretty hairy at points. |
| 1:38.9 | Some of the protests have been more in the kind of festive tradition of French protests, |
| 1:46.3 | but some of them have been really, really angry. So it's a febrile time over here. But I hear you've also been having a febrile time over there in Italy. Yeah, I arrived in Italy and immediately discovered I had |
| 1:51.0 | COVID. So was stuck in an admittedly very nice Airbnb in Bolzano. Fortunately, with a balcony |
... |
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