Black Forest Nature Nonprofits

The Schwarzwald got its name from the density of its conifers, which grew so thick that the light beneath them failed. It is a plateau of rounded hills and deep valleys in the southwest corner of Germany, cut by the Rhine on one side, and it is the source of the Danube, which begins here as a small stream and ends two thousand eight hundred kilometres away in the Black Sea.

The forest was hit hard by acid rain in the 1980s, and the phenomenon of Waldsterben, forest death, became a national trauma and one of the founding causes of the German Green movement. It drove the emissions controls that followed and, in a fairly direct line, much of modern European environmental law. The forest recovered, though not to what it was.

The organizations here restore the spruce monocultures toward mixed, more resilient forest, protect the high moors and the mountain streams, and maintain the open pastures whose grazing has kept the landscape from closing over entirely.