Oscar Tuazon's “Water School” stands for water as a vital resource worthy of protection that belongs to everyone and must not be subjected to commercial exploitation.

We take the activist potential of Tuazon's Water School project as an opportunity to talk to ecologist and conservationist Ulrich Eichelmann about the threatened river lifeline from a European perspective. For more than 10 years, the head of the Vienna-based nature conservation organization Riverwatch has been leading the “Save the Blue Heart of Europe” campaign, a transnational campaign to protect rivers in the Balkans. “Rivers are considered the lifelines of the earth, but hardly anyone in Europe has ever seen a living river,” says Eichelmann. In the last 50 years, rivers and their floodplains have been destroyed to an extent that goes far beyond the destruction of forests and seas - largely unnoticed. Above all, the construction of dams and hydroelectric power plants poses the greatest threat to rivers. In his presentation, he tells us what living rivers are, why we need them and how they can be saved.

Ulrich Eichelmann studied landscape conservation in Höxter (Germany). Until 2007, he worked for WWF Austria, where he led numerous projects and campaigns, particularly for the protection of rivers. He is internationally active against the construction of hydropower plants, in Europe as well as against the planned Ilisu dam in Turkey. In December 2012, he completed the film "Climate Crimes" - a film about the abuse of climate protection and the consequences of “green energies” for nature, biodiversity and people. In November 2014, he was awarded the Grand Binding Prize for Nature and Environmental Protection and in June 2015 he received the Wolfgang Staab Nature Conservation Prize.