The War on Estonian Forests (2022)
daveon.design
daveon.design
And at least when I was a kid and out in the foothills camping with parents, huge users of herbicides, too.
They'd attempt be PR-clever about it, too. Along the major roads, it looked all nice. Get about 200ft in on a gravel logging road and you'd see mass clearcuts. Fly over in a small plane, you get a really "nice" vista.
I wonder if the difference you're seeing is softwood vs hardwood?
When that point was reached is very different by region.
The reason for this was pest infestation caused by the warming climate, which severely impacts large coniferous monoculture forests (also in some regions of Germany, it seems so [1]). Estonia, with its predominantly coniferous forests, is particularly affected. These forests, once considered a future investment, are now being devastated by beetles. My great-grandfather would likely be turning in his grave right now.
Luckily we knew a local harvester pilot, who agreed to leave some birch and maple trees for seeding in the "wild" part of the forest, so we should have a more diverse set of trees going forward. Hopefully for my children to harvest/manage. But leaving them standing as one of the few "ripe" trees cut into our profits, and with the average salary as it is, it is no wonder that many are forced to leave no trees behind.
You'd think that destroying nature just to make ends meet is something you'd hear about the Amazon rainforest, but no, this is happening here in Europe.
(And the recent bark beetle infestation is largely a reaction to the earlier monocrop planting. DW had a good piece on that recently. Most places are planning to regrow their forests with more diversity in species.)
In the Middle Ages, all (accessible) German forests were harvested until not much was left. Most still existing forests have been re-planted and managed to produce wood since then.
There are exceptions in the form of nature preserves like Naturpark Pfälzerwald.
By the way, there are some fun docmentaries about the hard work in forestry a couple of decades or even more than a hundred years ago. This is one, the rest should show up in suggestions. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aeU5u4VGkrI
I'm grateful to them for publishing my piece [2] and also allowing it to be republished on my own site.
[1] https://estonianworld.com/
[2] https://estonianworld.com/life/the-war-on-estonian-forests/
I find it quite an important aspect of the issue of land use the article covers but little detail is given.
Sure it looks ugly when a forest is cut down, but some types of plants are waiting for just that chance to sprout (adapted for forest fires), and in western countries forests normally grow up again after being cut down.
[1] https://www.eramets.ee/forests-in-estonia/
[2] https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/7750867ad5cf467998492fc...
It struck me that there must be some very weird economic situation for it to be profitable to ship poor quality firewood 8000 miles or so for sale.
(UK here). In the UK, there is almost nowhere that doesn't have people living there. The closest national park to where I live is the New Forest [0]. The area was originally established as a royal hunting park in 1079. One of the main modern villages, Brockenhurst, goes back to 1253, so there has 'always' been a resident population. The National Park status was formally established only in 2005, although the area has had unique land management for centuries, which has prevented uncontrolled development. The park has a large population of free-roaming ponies although all of these are owned and their breeding is controlled. Most of the other UK National Parks are set in similarly ancient landscapes, although their relative remoteness and topography mean that they only have small settlements.
To a casual observer, they usually appear wild (e.g. high windswept moorland) but as with the rest of the UK, the landscapes have been shaped by human activities for millenia.
I really really wish we had similar expanses of untouched nature here in Europe but unfortunately it was all gone by the time people started seeing untouched nature as something to preserve
This was pretty common everywhere in 2020. I remember hiking in the cascade mountains of Washington State on a sunny, breezy summer day and the few other hikers I came across on the trail avoided me by 20+ft.
If the wood were burned locally (and without the additional expenditure of pellet-making), I could see a sustainability argument in there and support it. The place I live in is heated by firewood. If it makes it any better, it's delivered from less than 10km away, by a farmer that manages his forest with respect. It's not the best, but considering it's worked for generations that way, it seems renewable enough. And it's a mountainous region, not really usable for anything else agriculturally.
But considering the majority of Estonian exports is just for heating two extremely wealthy european countries with a industrially processed wood product, I just see affirmation of my prejudice that the Eurozone and EU mostly exist as a tool for the richer global west to exploit poorer eastern countries that get added to the union when the existing ones are squeezed dry of their resources.
And despite all of this, we import processed pellets and the only wood we cut is sent to China for making furniture, that's absolute insanity.
The problem is that it's incredibly labour intensive vs clear cutting. It's hard enough to make paths to haul logs or equipment let alone all the work to prep and store the wood. It's doable, I've done it, but at the end of the day it's more efficient to import from someone else's lot. And pellets, even locally made, are even cheaper.
We've settled on partially supplying from felled trees (which is somewhat of a convenient byproduct of clearing trails) but the bulk of supply being purchased and delivered in the fall, to get us through the season. Pellets would be the obvious winner if we were willing to convert over, but I have too much attachment to the old stove.
The other thing is that felled trees provide a lot of resources back to the forest, and so at least for property I maintain, I prefer to let nature take course for the most part.
Btw 1 foreign worker rarely equals to 1 local. Even just the quality of their work isn’t equal usually and averagely, and language, culture, distance, etc differences are on top of that. Interestingly, who moved to Western countries usually works better than those who stayed, even with the same background. Source: my Eastern European ass, who still waits a project which has outsourced workforce and they really worth it not just on paper.
Full agreement here. 1 exploited foreign worker will have much more output than 1 local unionized, low working hours worker.
For example I have a friend who worked next to the production line the exact same job for Mercedes both in Hungary and Germany. In Hungary, the quantity was way more important than quality. In Germany, the opposite. So where that same exact person produced more value?
The Poland that joined the EU is so different from the Poland of today etc. It is subtle and not instant so perhaps younger people don’t see it so easily?
You know why people travel for bigger salaries? Because they want bigger salaries.
That's right! Then everyone will have to buy this expensive heat pump sold by few corporations around the world! It is only green when it fills correct pockets.
It was “sustainable” only due to small population.
Burning wood only becomes unsustainable when it is done on a commercially viable scale.
(I live rural and have a wood burning insert and a fireplace. I don't use them much anymore.)
It is green in the sense that logging a forest net sequesters carbon from the atmosphere. Yes, even if you burn the wood. There's still carbon left in the ash and from discarded branches, and forests are most productive when regrowing.
You are right they are not healthy. The air pollution generated is nasty and even with a good catalyst stove cannot be reduced very much.
Burying biochar (carbon and minerals left over after gasification of woody biomass) is one of the only means of reversing mining of carbon (coal and petrochemicals). The carbon that you introduce into the soil as biochar has a carbon lattice that is fairly inert and can remain in the soil for thousands of years. It also improves the soils friability, moisture retention and ability to harbor micro-organisms.
Lastly the plant matter that you're burning has absorbed it's carbon from the air, and is one of the only ways to "draw down" CO2 from the atmosphere. You're working within the carbon cycle, removing fuel that will either compost or result in wild fires and be released into the atmosphere anyways...instead of using petrochemicals to produce heat and power.
Many of these gasification systems run fine on dead standing wood (fallen branches), corn stover, biogasse and nut shells. So you aren't even utilizing woody biomass that would be used for lumber construction, just the agricultural waste products.
The latter has always been opposed to nuclear and the former converged into it because until relatively recently they were the only ones listening
I'm not saying it was smart (it wasn't) but it's how we got here
Nuclear was, in the 70s, looking like potentially a complete replacement for gas, as it almost became in France. Slowing down or stopping nuclear in Europe was a big priority for KGB active measures.
Citation needed, especially for the "pretty strongly" part.
Are you the kind of person who also needs citations that the KGB (and modern FSB) try to influence western elections too?
Or who thinks: "Okay, so we've been hearing a lot about the FSB and attempted election meddling. So if someone on the internet makes a spurious claim about an amazingly successful operation the KGB supposedly pulled off back in the 80s -- heck, why not just believe that also? Even though apparently nothing has been ever been written about it; and in fact what they're saying runs counter to direct observation of events at the time."
You certainly sound like that kind of person.
And regarding gas and nuclear, Plenty of EU high level politicians from Germany and Austria were close to the Kremlin and after their mandates were over took well paid positions in Russian oil and gas companies being proof.
What part of this logic makes you think that Russia couldn't have anything to do with pushing the anti nuclear agenda on Europe in order to maintain EU dependent on their gas that you need to be spoonfed precise proof? It's not like the FSB publishes their dark ops online or that western counter intelligente Tracking FSB ops publish their immediate findings. But various journalist do make educated guesses on this without the "we did it" explicit proof.
So please be so kind as to use Google and your brain before demanding "source pls or it never happened" for every little thing.
I'd continue further with you here, but you seem to be very, very confused about some very basic things. We were talking about (empty) claims of KGB influence back in the 1980s. Not modern troll farms or German scandals in the past decade. The latter have absolutely no bearing of any kind on the former.
But various journalist do make educated guesses on this without the "we did it" explicit proof.
At least in principle (when they are not being grossly irresponsible) they attempt to draw inferences from boring things like, you know, actual substantiated facts (from multiple sources), or at least interviews with people claiming direct knowledge of such. Not -- as we have with the assertions you are strenuously defending -- wild-hair speculation about "could have" happened, in the complete absence of any hard facts or direct evidence of any kind.
On my todo is to make footnotes collapsed by default on mobile, so you tap to display them. Right now they are always present and so interrupt the paragraphs. I don't like this, and it may be what you're seeing.
I am not a super expert on HTML and CSS and I can tell that it's going to take a few hours to fix (it's not even the first time I've tried to code it.) So, right now, my apologies to everyone on mobile. I hope I will have it fixed by the time I have another article on the front page :)
Yet we are disgusted when forests are cut down and then replanted.
And there are laws that replanting must be started within 2/5 years of cutting.
If you look aerial photos of the area in article then you can see that this process is started. Cannot find exact spot but looking around in the village.
I've visited many of the spots mentioned in this article. I haven't checked all of them, but all the ones I have checked have _no_ manual replanting to date, that I can see. (I'd expect a grid, with trees with those little fences protecting them, etc.)
What I do see is just natural growth of various plant species taking advantage of open ground, a mix of grasses, shrubs, birches, and others. There is no sign, that I have personally seen, of the ground being restored, or of systematic replanting. I write this noting I have not been to every site, so I can't definitely state there's been zero replanting. Some places were so lovely I just don't want to revisit :(
I picked a lot of wild strawberries on one of these plots of land just a couple of weeks ago. It used to be damp soil even in summer, lots of moss, mist commonly held between the trees (there's a photo.) Now it was baking hot with deep trenches from the machines. But hey. Hiding among the undergrowth there were strawberry plants.
_Something_ will grow back. Often in these things the replacement ecosystem is very different.
That says a lot. You have zero experience in forestry :)
As noted -- I see what appears to be natural regrowth. That expectation (lots of trees with little fences) comes from what I've seen in other places, where I have seen huge areas of clearfelled land with systematic gridded replanting. You are right I am not a forestry expert. I'm only writing what I observe as best as I can.
I guess one day of planting a forest is already a lot of help. Planting apple tree in garden is not forestry.
I wouldn't write an article about how doctors treat cancer wrong if my only experience is my dead grandmother.
Source: have manually planted maybe ~300 000 trees in Estonia over the years, and also done the brush cutting work afterwards. I don't think clear cutting could be avoided entirely (among other things, we're maybe too spoiled as timber consumers for that), but it does feel way too extensive over here (emphasis on the word "feel" here -- as, despite some hands-on experience, my analytical understanding of the forestry ecosystem is very superficial). In place of confier monocultures, a small society like Estonia could maybe place its focus on heavily developing mixed forests instead, for a start. Abrupt forestry policy changes would likely backfire socio-economically (e.g. unemployment rise in rural areas). But those spruce-only or pine-only forests everywhere do look kind of... sad.
Thinking aloud here, but I like this idea. It could also be signposted: one of the things that "feels" awful is just the constant gaps in forest: forest, clear, forest forest forest, clear, forest, clear. Or walking to areas you know and love and one day they're just gone. There seems no oversight and little protection.
Suppose you entered a region that was labeled: "In the next 10km, you will see managed forestry", at least you'd know it was deliberate, a large specific region designated for this work, rather than just a bunch of spots where someone who owned a plot of land decided to clearfell it and take the cash.
Because the corollary of that is areas that are _not_ managed (and not cut) and where, hopefully, forest would be allowed to grow into century-or-more old genuine wildforest. And you'd see that signposted too. Or you could plan to buy a house in the middle of that kind of land, if you valued it.
Really like this idea. In reality, though, the Estonian state forest management council seems to put more PR-efforts in showing how they also preserve wilderness, build camping trails etc. They don't seem very confident in showing "actual forestry" to the general public -- but, it is, obviously, also not an easy task these days, especially considering that e.g. clear cutting and usage of harvesters is ethically questionable to many people.
I think for these "In the next 10km, you will see managed forestry" signs, the whole society would need to become more mature at first. As in, foresters should have more acceptance for wilderness preservation, and the general public should have more acceptance for the forest industry.
That is not how forest replanting works. That is how you do a garden.
What you will see in Estonia - forest is cut down and then some kind of plow makes lines in the forest to prepare the ground for planting trees. The trees are planted and in the next few years there will be lots of new growth, bushes and small trees that have grown from seeds or didn't get any sun below the old trees. The newly planted trees are sometimes hidden betwen the bushes and grass etc, but they are there.
Source: I go orienteering and have had to search for checkpoints on these former clearings or have made the mistake of trying to run through them.
And what level of automation do you think can take this x10 ?
https://www.globalforestwatch.org/dashboards/country/EST/ appears to suggest that within the past decade tree loss has doubled. While the population has been flat. So it does suggest that what you are saying is not happening.
That's very different from what's seen in Estonia, where there's logging in national parks, and random plots of land in the forest are clear-felled.
Ten years ago you'd drive through the countryside and enjoy the trees, uninterrupted stretches of old forest. These days you drive and count the number of empty spots where someone has owned a plot and cleared it. This article talks about that: a village where beautiful, specific tracts of land with wonderful nature just -- vanished.
The main land use changes in Estonia during the 20th century have been the decrease in agricultural land from 65% in 1918 to 30% in 1994 and the increase in forests from 21% to 43%, respectively.
> Estonia is a forest-rich country; 51 per cent of the territory is covered by trees. Most forests in the country are classified as semi-natural, i.e. are composed of native tree species that have regrown after previous logging and have characteristics of undisturbed natural forests. Old-growth forests are rare in Estonia. About half of the forests belong to the State and are managed by the State Forest Management Centre (Estonian abbreviation: RMK). A significant share of the other half of Estonia’s forest that is in private hands is owned by large companies both domestic and foreign. Only 14 per cent of all Estonian forests is strictly protected meaning that no economic activities may take place in them. Various degrees of protection (e.g. limits to clearcutting) also apply to an additional 11.3 per cent of forests.
So only 14% of forests in Estonia are "completely" protected, and an additional 11.3% are partially protected (e.g. from clearcutting). Which means that around 75% are completely unprotected, even if they are semi-natural and have "characteristics of undisturbed natural forests". So these are actually "tree farms", just ones that have been left alone for slightly longer than usual. Of course, it's still painful to see them being cut down, but the real old-growth forest being cut down (or burnt) somewhere else (e.g. the Amazon rainforest) is far worse...
I'm not. Here in Australia they're planted on farm land, and taking that land out of food production. The growing of trees depletes the soil. They grow Bluegums, which are thirsty trees and deplete the water-table. Then the land is abandoned. The food still needs to come from somewhere! Which probably means more forest cleared elsewhere.
I’m Finnish, and us Finns like to talk about our special relationship with nature, and how we haven’t turned all of our forests into ships, fuel, and farmland like the West Europeans have. And that’s true. 75% of the country is covered in trees. We industrialized too late to have done much of the former two, and the climate and soil types aren’t very conducive to the latter except in the south-western parts of the country.
But.
By and large, those trees exist because it’s considered economically important for them to exist. Over 95% of the forests in the southern half of the country are far from their untouched state – they haven’t seen a natural process of succession, or ecological diversity, in generations. They are tree plantations, not real forests.
The destructive practice of clear-cutting was literally the only legally allowed method of harvesting until very recently, and it’s still preferred by all but the most ecologically aware land owners because old habits die hard.
Finnish forestry practices are proudly being called sustainable – and indeed they are when it comes to raw yields and economic output. (That’s changing as well, though, as plantations are getting harvested younger and younger, for a quicker return on investment – as in, 50–60 years rather than the recommended 90–100!)
But for a long time, that very narrow economical viewpoint of sustainability is all that mattered, and indeed many forest owners (often including the state itself) cannot even fathom that their practices could be somehow unsustainable. The Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry has quite a bit of power, and there’s an obvious conflict of interests in having the double portfolio of both protecting natural land and exploiting it economically.
Many if not most Finns now think that managed forest is what forests are supposed to be like because they have never seen real, ecologically diverse woodland with ongoing natural succession. Sure, it still beats the alternative of having little forest cover, and broad freedom to roam rights mean anyone can use Finnish forests for recreation, whether privately owned or not, but as it becomes more and more clear that climate change simply cannot be tackled independently of the loss of biodiversity, but rather those two issues are deeply interweaved.
When writing the article, multiple people I spoke to said the same think about the RMK here in Estonia. I believe preservation and exploitation should be separated.
> they have never seen real, ecologically diverse woodland with ongoing natural succession.
Yes! And even I have only rarely. It only happens with time and care (often, to make it faster in terms of restoration of forests, specific caretaking/treekeeping actions) though. And the time is decades to centuries.