The "rounded-up" anniversaries of the declarations of strict protection for the Žofín Natural Forest (170 years) and Boubín Natural Forest (150 years) enable the year 2008 to be termed "The Year of the Czech Natural Forest". The expression "natural forest" in the context of the exhibition is employed in the broader sense of a spontaneously evolving part of nature, the dynamics of which are determined by trees regardless of whether the forest was in the past affected by man. The emphasis is thus on current spontaneity at the expense of continuous intactness. Rather than the term wilderness that evokes an area untouched by human activities, the exhibition organisers prefer the term wildness which is, in contrast, based in our personal experience. Any experience of the spontaneous process of nature not affected and controlled by man has become rare in modern times. In terms of the development of natural sciences in modern times, nature has been reduced to a set of external, mechanically or mathematically describable regularities. We have largely forgotten about one major aspect of nature, in which it gives birth and grows spontaneously, is fertile and change occurs within it without us touching it, and frequently without us being aware of it. It is important to regard the wild character of external nature because of our intrinsic need to discover our own nature. Unmanaged forests and other spontaneously generated places may serve as mirrors that reflect the shared natural base of the worlds of people and nature. Even human life processes, our birth, growth, diseases, old age and death, are natural phenomena that we cannot influence by our will, that happen outside our plans. Wildness belongs in our lives although we live in a civilised world.
