Culture in the Globalized Society (Selection and compilation by Maria Śliwińska with cooperation and acceptance of Alicja Kapuścińska)

Today our planet, inhabited for ages by a small group of the free and by throngs of the enslaved, is getting filled up with a growing number of nations and communities characterised by an increased sense of importance of their own, separate value. This process often takes place among great difficulties, conflicts and dramas. We may well be heading in the direction of a world so completely new and different that our experience of its history so far will prove insufficient for us to grasp it and be able to cope in it. At any rate, the world we enter is the Planet of Great Opportunity, not an unconditional opportunity but an opportunity open only to those who treat their responsibilities seriously, thereby manifesting that they treat themselves seriously. It is the world that potentially gives a lot but at the same time requires a lot, and in which an attempt to take easy shortcuts is often a way to nowhere. We will keep encountering in it a new Other, who is going to begin to emerge slowly from the chaos and confusion of contemporariness. It is possible that the Other will arise from an encounter of two contradictory trends shaping the culture of the modern world – a trend toward globalisation of our reality and the other, preserving our divergences, our differences, our uniqueness. They will be their offspring and inheritors, and that is why we should seek a dialogue and agreement with them

Evaluation of national parks on the basis of Nature 2000 areas

The goal of this work is to present the valorisation of national park based on the criteria resulting from standard data forms (SDF). The analysis covered a number of areas protected under the Birds Directive and Habitats Directive with the A, B or C category. Habitats and species marked as D in the SDF are not protected in the Nature 2000 areas, which is why they were not taken into account in the analysis. The presented characteristics made it possible to determine the hierarchy of national parks amongst the most valuable natural objects that deserve protection in the first place and also to verify the views on most valuable areas