Former Budějovice mayor wins Green Pearl award for stupidest environmental statement of year

The former mayor of České Budějovice, Jiří Svoboda, is this year’s winner of the Green Pearl award, which is awarded annually by the NGO Children of the Earth. His statement made last year that rivers are a traffic obstacle earned him the dubious honour.

Last August, Mr Svoboda said in an interview with the weekly Czech newspaper Respekt that České Budějovice’s two rivers are a costly traffic obstacle and that the land would be better used as a parking lot. This won him this year’s Green Pearl award for the stupidest anti-environmental statement of the year.

Second place was awarded to Senator Daniela Kovářová, who said that it is necessary to fight with nature rather than protect it.

Third place went to senator and mayor of Hluboká nad Vltavou, Tomáš Jirsa, a long-time opponent of no-intervention zones in national parks, who said that non-intervention was yet another modern left-wing ideology and like “genderism”, multiculturalism, Black Lives Matter or Me Too, was the result of a rich and decadent society – and social media.