President János Áder has highlighted how healthy human life depends on the health and completeness of nature.
During his New Year’s greeting broadcast on public television, the president said preservation of the natural world is the responsibility of us all and called for a national consensus on the matter.
President Áder said that humanity suffers if nature suffers. “So it is not nature that must be overcome, but our own nature,” he added.
The president said that Hungary’s streams were drying up and native plant life was disappearing. Changes that affect our lives and future bear consequences for the Pannonian landscape, too, he said.
President Áder also quoted the Hungarian writers Sándor Petőfi, Miklós Radnóti, Magda Szabó and Sándor Kányádi to highlight the country’s beauty. “Will this landscape be the homeland in the future? Are we able to preserve it and pass it on as we found it?”
The president also questioned whether crops would have the same nutritious value and familiar flavor, and whether the current generation would waste its heritage of millions of years in the space of a single generation.