President: Everyone responsible for preserving natural world

Healthy human life depends on the health and completeness of nature, President of the Republic János Áder said in his New Year’s greeting broadcast on public television.

“Preservation of the natural world is the responsibility of us all,” Áder said, calling for a national consensus on the matter.

He said that humanity suffers if nature suffers. “So it is not nature that must be overcome, but our own nature,” he added.

Áder 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.

Passport-free travel across the world carries with it harmful effects, the president said. “We share our atmosphere and our waters flow together.”

Áder 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?” Áder also questioned whether crops would have the same nutritious value and familiar flavour, and whether the current generation would waste its heritage of millions of years in the space of a single generation.

Source: MTI