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In case you are European and have never heard of it, I'm not blaming you, in fact the lack of newspapers covering it is what I would consider its first "red flag". The "LIFE programme" is a project by the European Union to mitigate both environmental damages and climate change that began in 1992 and is divided into several branches and project phases lasting for four to six years. Five phases have passed since then and each phase introduced new goals, yet its main goals – improve waste management and nature conservation efforts, develop better monitoring tools, provide environmental education and provide an administrative framework – remained the same.
Please read the following Wikipedia page of this program carefully because there is at least one catch hidden within this framework:
LIFE is a large funding project with a varying, yet still huge budget depending on the phase. LIFE+ demanded each applying project to be of interest to the EU, "provide value for money" and either demonstrate "best practices", "raise awareness" or improve "long-term monitoring of forests and environmental interactions". Anyone registered in the EU can become a benificiary.
In short: It's a subsidy program not all too different from that de-facto making small agriculture enterprises fully dependent on funds while large businesses largely violationg agricultural "best practices" continue to grow. It is fundamentally neo-liberal and thus actually encourages environmental exploitation and "low-effort measurements" such as a growing body of unmonitored monitoring projects, rather than environmental protection.
But it isn't just ineffective in the sense that it doesn't meet a single goal – especially "education" projects seem to either not have been funded at all the whole time or the EU picks literally anything that label itself "educational" because my public broadcaster unironically published a video claiming that bees pollinate wheat¹ – and is virtually unknown to one set of potential beneficiaries (private bodies), my state used "LIFE+", the third phase, to protect and expand man-made steppes at the expense of flora and fauna abundance, fully aware that my area already is prone to droughts and every single stream carrying highly-polluted water².
While not part of my main study area, "Bog Hill" and a much smaller area to the north, which is classified as being part of the hill, were managed from 2011 up until 2019 by a local agricultural enterprise (NOT the one I also study!) as part of a LIFE+ project by the state of Thuringia. I remember that I often passed this area as a kid when my parents briefly mowed a hay field right next to the northern area. While I was pretty young back then, I still remember that I saw a white once buth nothing else; even the amount of bees was quite low at this particular area. Other than that, we barely kept track of this territory, which was officially included in the FFH network in 2004 (around the same time my parents mowed said hay field). As far as wel cann tell, nothing really changed until the early 2010's when it became a LIFE+ project and the orchard on the western brink of the hill suddenly lost nearly half of its rather old, albeit largely dead fruit trees. We saw our local shepherd crossing the hill every year up until 2019; the last time we discovered sheep wool near our village was on the legally-unprotected "Cherry Hill" in 2022. The same year we went to Bog Hill and were shocked at the amount of only a handful of grasses dominating the vast majority of the hill, barely offering any other plants. Ironically enough, the southeastern brink, which was used as an illegal dumpster and later as an illegal motocross track by one of my former classmates and his brother, is NOT part of the FFH area, despite being the main spot of the rare summer adonis and the rare eastern burnet.
Due to the large amount of grasses that grew nearly as tall as me (I'm a mere 162cm), I STILL am unable to reach the only sign indicating that the hill is (at least partially) protected by law. I managed to take a photo of it, yet due to the distance only made the title of said sign readable:
"ISLAND WITH GUARANTEED SUN"
Not only was it ironic that I took this photo on a day with visible overcast, it reads like a cheap flyer for tourists. It's even more hilarious that this sign is inaccessible due to the lack of paths leading to it and tall-growing grasses covering the area surrounding it. During the first two years of conducting layman field studies, the hill was the most negatively affected area I studied during the drought in 2022, with its effects lasting until the season of 2023. During 2023, it offered only half of the amount of butterfly species compared to that of the largely-abandoned Cherry Hill (Zone I). Just this year, it managed to become on par with "Odrich's Pond" (Zone III) with 19 individual butterfly species.
I had to search for what felt like hours until I finally came across a document published by the Thurinigian government in 2012, revealing that it was managed as a "LIFE+" project for a few years. Research was conducted in 2011 and compared to data from 1995 but the quality of the 2011 data, as well as the reason for rejecting a small wet area from becoming part of the FFH territory – the document legit stated that it is "too dirty" – made me question the true intentions of this short-lived project. Right off the bat, it is claimed that this area used to be a forest before humans started to exploit it, DESPITE it's very name indicting that it was a wetland before it underwent drainage around the 1920's³. The species lists, covering flora and fauna each, were limited and few field trips were noted (for butterflies less than ten, for example). Particulary bad is the fact that they largely excluded plants and intead focued entirely on mosses and lichens, which unironically are being classified as "plants" by my state. I sent thi document to my Austrian friend, who still was in the midst of his bachelor in zoology, and he scratched his head when he came across a Latin name for a butterfly species he never heard of. His "Google-fu" did not yield any results, so we both concluded that this entire document likely is pure political bullshittery (that eventually led him to share my frustrations with the state of the hill).
Just recently, I came across another, very similar document covering a different area which also is part of a larger Natura 2000 area. The "Finn Hill" is notable for its abandoned quarry on its northwestern brink and old orchards. However, it pretty much is a copy of the document covering Bog Hill, as rsearch was conducted in the same year and the registered species composition, alongside the entire structure and conclusion/recommendation sections being uncanningly similar to identical, despite the Finn Hill being located right next to a forest (unlike the Bog Hill which is surrounded entirely by agricultural fields). Nevertheless, there were multiple unique flaws I spotted when I read this document and the most bizarre ones involved, unsurprisingly, the butterfly list.
Only six field trips were conducted to register butterflies, with no date given on when exactly this data was recored. All registered species are classified as being "potentially native", despite the same list being compared to records from 1995. As this very same dataset also is available on "Tagfalter Thüringen", I compared the data and noticed the records for three species contradicting each other.
While this may have helped at estimating when those state-sponsored field trips took part (from June up until August, pretty much excluding the spring season entirely as A. cardamines is listed as a "very rare" species), the gross difference between the official documentation and the official database of a single member of the sub-family "Melitaeinae", alongside two vastly different classificaton of the largest orchard throughout the entire document was beyond shocking. Even worse, the literature section includes a single butterfly guide from 1952 and three "red lists", two of which were written by G. Kuna and one that covered the whole country. The list also includes a relatively large amount of documents and opinion pieces advocating for the improvement of the alleged "unpopular image of shepherding as a job" and more subsidies for still-practicing shepherds.
I really didn't know how to react to this document until I noticed that lichens again were classified as plants. That's when I became both annoyed and angry because both this hill and "Bog Hill", as advised in their respective documents, were intentionally overgrazed as a result. While I am not really familar with "Finn Hill", the local newspaper "Thüringer Allgemeine" covered a guided field trip focusing on orchids last year in which the discovery of the praying mantis was highlighted. Now that Germany is experiencing what I would call a "wet season", it is highly unlikely to become native to that area as, at least from a distance, appears to be a similar semi-abandoned state like "Bog Hill" with nearly all available fruit trees being dead⁴. So far I only managed to discover a "follow-up" document covering "Bog Hill" once again in 2019, assuming it's some sort of "conclusion" to subtly announce the end of the LIFE+ phase and its ending funding; I'm still searching for a similar document covering "Finn Hill", yet both projects officially appear to have ended and both areas's futures are left up to their respective owners with no further development monitoring.
Judging by the state of the hill close to my main study area, LIFE is nothing but another subsidy program that encourages environmental exploitation and destruction, alongside useless and midleading monitoring schemes. Its primary focus is the maintenance of economic growth and provide job security for bureaucrats and mid-sized to large businesses. Business as usual.
But hey, my drinking water now comes from a reservoir roughly 100 kilometers (!) away from my village. Yay, we protected our environment!
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¹ I kid you not, the ZDF really claimed that bees pollinate wheat and initially refused to acknowledge the backflash from farmers and biologists online. I'm forced to pay for this garbage.
² During the last field trip organized by my biology class in year 9 (mid-2013), we studied the Finne forest. As we found a spring and were fascinated by how clear the water was, we were told to not drink it. It turns out that the entire area's water resources carry a huge amount of lime and are highly contaminated with nitrates due to the agricultural practices nearby.
³ Just a year ago, my village celebrated "100 Years Melioration Cooperative [village name]". Yeah.
⁴ I actually planned on visiting this hill last year but checked the district's homepage and saw that said district prohibited the usage of the only path leading to it due to the large amount of dead trees. The "Hohe Schrecke" organization, in full violation of this, continued to sell guided field trips for €10 per person and with small print stating that participation happens "at one's own risk", meaning anyone getting hit by a dead breach or whatever cannot demand any kind of compensation from said organization. While I did get to see the mentioned orchard from afar, I decided to skip this one.