Dr. Kubassek János szerk.: A Kárpát-medence természeti értékei (Érd, 2004)

Dr. Gyula Gábris: Jenő Cholnoky, a professor of geography and protector of nature

PROTECTOR OF THE ENVIRONMENT holnoky always reacted promptly and vigorously to the geographical aspects of I4V daily events in politics or economics, should they be issues of borderlines, war, military geography, earthquakes, floods, river regulation, education or his favourite topic, Lake Balaton, or applied arts. It is not accidental that on the publication of the first act on the administration issues of environmental protection, Act XVIII/1923, he outlined a large-scale programme, which first of all considered the geographical interests of landscape protection.

1 He published his paper in No. 8-10 of the Hungarian Geographical Review. It is worth quoting passages from this paper. ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION IN HUNGARY AND CHOLNOKY'S CONTRIBUTION s~^(~yy ct XVIII/1923 was the first law on the administrative issues of environmenv^^sZ-tal protection, stating that in the beginning its local executive organs were the forest authorities, and later on forest supervisors, forest regulators or forestries as public organisations. After this act there was no public measure worth mentioning until 1935. A fundamental work, however, was published in 1931, which was the book by Károly Kaan on environmental protection. As a result of long and laborious preparations, the act on environmental protection was passed in 1935, distinguishing three forms of environmental protection: the protection of areas (nature conservancy areas, protected districts), the protection of natural values (individual natural forms and objects) and the protection of useful species or of those threatened with extinction. The Act defined the activities (destruction, damage), which were prohibited in protected areas or in connection with protected species, or the range of activities requiring an obligator)' permit (constructing a workshop, a building). The Act also dealt with the legal status of natural values in privately owned protected areas and contained the rules of compensation and expropriation. The Act defined the most important elements of the procedures for declaring something protected and the administrative system of environmental protection. Later, in 1939, the National Environmental Protection Council was founded. In the same year, by declaring a part of the Nagyerdő Forest in Debrecen protected, environmental protection started to operate in practice.