New Wilderness Advocates for Germany

When you think of Germany, Wilderness is probably not the first thing that you think of. It is highly industrialized and densely populated country. And the numbers prove that perception. Only 0.6% of the area of Germany is currently Wilderness. But there are many Wilderness Advocates that work hard to change this. The initiative “Wilderness in Germany” wants to increase this number to 2%. But they do not only work to increase the amount of Wilderness in Germany. They also want to improve protection and monitoring of existing Wilderness, interconnect it climate and civil protection and increase public awareness.

This for purpose, “Naturlandschaften Brandenburg” and “NaturRanger Verein” have trained 14 new Wilderness Advocates in 2021. They will educate visitors of Wilderness Areas and other interested people on the topic of Wilderness. This includes how to behave in Wilderness, what is special about Wilderness and which role predators and deadwood plays.

As the final step of their training, they visited the Wilderness area “Lieberose, a former military training area in Eastern Germany. Accompanied by experts, they got a first-hand experience of German Wilderness. Afterwards, they could show their newly acquired skills by guiding a group from the association of blind and visually impaired people from Berlin. On this tailored evening excursion, the participants learned plenty about Wilderness and bat. 

More Wilderness Advocates in 2022

After last year´s Wilderness advocates have graduated, the new class of Wilderness advocates 2022 have already started their training. They will attend 20 online training sessions until October 2022, when they will have their final excursion and get certified and Wilderness advocates.

Initiatives like this are crucial to raise awareness about the benefit and importance of Wilderness across Europe. Wilderness advocates promote local Wilderness Areas amongst local communities and provide a low-barrier access to Wilderness. 

If you are from Germany and you are also interested to become a Wilderness advocate, you can find mor information here: Wildnisbotschafter.de