Bureaucracy vs Trees in the European Union

The projects funded by the European Union are a major topic in countries like Bulgaria, Romania, Lithuania, Czech Republic, Poland and other newly accepted members in the European Union. All of them rely heavily on the funding for their development, and all of them compete with each other how much money they have acquired.

I have recently been involved in the development of several projects in Bulgaria for a medium sized enterprise. Fairly small projects. I will lead you into some details in the preparation process: the project itself was 45 pages long. There were about 25 additional pages in different kinds of declarations and about 70 pages in required documents with financials and translated company offers from suppliers. Total of more than 140 pages a single small project! And this project had to be accompanied by two identical copies. Total of 420 sheets of paper! The three fat folders were squeezed into a cartoon box, which weighted about 25 kilos! 25 kilos of white A4 paper and one cartoon – this is more than a tree! To my horror, when I delivered the project, in the waiting room there were thousands of even bigger projects than mine. Piles of wasted paper! Bigger projects (from towns and for the roads) weight from 250 kilos to 500 kilos! Just imagine the impact bureaucracy does on nature!

My project was rejected in the first stage for missing one stamp. So were 62% of the projects and more than 20% more will be rejected on the second stage. What will be done with the thousands of paper and energy spent in this nonsense? What will be done with all these papers which are rejected for stupid reasons?

I cannot believe that in the 21^st century, thousands of kilograms of paper is sent to the rubbish, instead of just investing in a software product that will accept projects electronically! I intend to write a letter of complaint to the European Commission, and whoever is in, please give me a shout!

"Let the nature remains in Bulgaria"

My first post will be about a community in my native country called "Let the nature remains in Bulgaria". These people are doing extraordinary things in order to save the beautiful and extremely rich nature in Bulgaria from ruthless money-makers and bribed politicians.

They make petitions, protests in front of the parliament, writing lett

ers to the ruling people and what not, with only one thought in mind - to save as much nature as possible. The main problems of Bulgarian green people are the illegal forest cuttings, building hotels and ski runs on protected areas and killing biodiversity.

Believe it or not, they have succeeded on several projects so far: almost closing the "Natura 2000" ecological network, which will protect 34% of the country's area, stopping of the building of the illegal ski run Panichishte, and the salvation of national parl Strandzha. If you want to become a memeber or sign their petitions, check out their website: http://en.forthenature.org.