Google told to halt work on datacentres in Finland over environmental concerns

Ah yes the Amazon model. Cover your ass with subcontractor to take the fall, and make them so dependent on you that they unquestionably follow orders.

That way you can evade all sorts of labour and environmental laws and if it blows up you just pop the contractor and find a new one.

be real, they will just pay off the local officials to pass zoning laws to make it all legal. As they have done across the states.

Its a pretty egregious procedural oversight if you want to chalk it up to that.

For sure this is being politicized, for example claiming that the area was reduced to sand due to an overheated data center market. But to clear the land before doing legally required environmental impact studies is a pretty obvious mistake, and frankly I'm not sure how you'd even have landed on a plan for land clearing before doing said study if its required. How would you know what areas to clear, for example?

> This is an amusing little scandal, but it seems to be only a procedural issue.

If you go out and illegally cut down a tree, that's not "only a procedural issue". They illegally logged 815 acres of forest.

There is no MOST or WORST or BEST anything. Its practically impossible to possibly know or judge who is the happiest or where is the best ice cream.

Finland is 75% covered with forrest out of which 97% is grown for the purpose of logging. This AI slop research, but it’s in the ballpark.

Monoculture plantation does not imply "planted for the purpose of logging". It implies originally planted for some reason.

In parts of Australia there are designated "reference areas" which have a higher level of environmental protection than national parks. They are typically remote areas that humans do not visit and have not historically and directly disturbed. These areas are also typically less disturbed by other external factors such as seeding of non-endemic species by birds. Scientists use such areas as a reference to what other less protected areas of the environment would have looked like before human impact. In scientific journals you'll find surveys of such reference areas including the prevalence of different taxon, as well as surveys of national parks or other areas being compared.

I've tried to find similar for Finland. The closest I've found is [1] which maps "old forests" which are defined to be over 100 years old (not actually very old). The three examples [2], [3] and [4] are Google street view imagery of nearby "old forests" and all indicate a much higher biodiversity and natural planting than the site Google has cleared. The site Google has cleared and nearby forests are visible in overhead imagery as having a pattern of tree plantings (distinct rows/grid) and show visible disturbance for forestry trails (ground compaction), whereas the "old forest" sites don't have these patterns. The "old forest" sites also show variance in trunk diameters, greater separation between trunks, more forest floor diversity and more tree variety (both taxon and structure). Plantation forests have trees deliberately planted too close to each other to encourage upright growth habit, lower limbs are deliberately removed and trees thinned after some years, all to maximise the number of sawmill-ready trunks. Revegetation planting would look completely different to what occurred at the Google site.

Revegetation planting and ongoing management is also much more expensive to do correctly. It's a struggle to find success stories. Best examples likely involve aerial seeding and complex seed collection and preparation, as well as ongoing manual weed management and introduced species control for 20+ years. There is often a fair bit of complexity to simulating nature to make seeds viable--for example, refer to Przewalski's Horse case study where hoofed animals were reintroduced and found to be essential for embedding seeds at required depth and reshaping the terrain to support seed germination. More examples are water courses upstream having to be cleared of weeds first, introduced animals need to be excluded/culled, etc, etc.

[1] https://luontovahti.fi/vanhojametsia -- select Pohjois-Pohjanmaa as the area then zoom in near Muhos.

[2] https://maps.app.goo.gl/wncKi2JMxuPXC7Bc7

[3] https://maps.app.goo.gl/BX2ta5dQmihSgVAM6

[4] https://maps.app.goo.gl/4W3WvR5tH9wroVna7

If the translation is correct, Finland converted about 14,000 hectares of forest in the 2010s per year (without replacement), and cut about 173,000 hectares per year in general (with replacement).

I suspect how much people think this was an honest mistake with their 330 hectares (apparently following the forestry rules but missing EIA) will depend on people's priors.

1. https://ilmastopaneeli.fi/hallinta/wp-content/uploads/2025/1...

This is the correct way to frame it.

Swede here too.

It's extremely depressing driving around in Swedens countryside now. There are little to no forests, it's all just tree plantations.

This one was probably planted up to 60 years ago after the previous felling. The biodiversity requirements surely were not any better back then.

Finn here. Not really. You're allowed to log if you resow.

So this seems to be a calculated move: When permits pass, prep is done. Worth paying minor fines for jumping the gun. Permits don't pass, just resow. That's a well informed expected value calculation.

That's a bad calculation, if the risk model failed to account for a political scandal in a small country that's very proud of their tree plantations and deeply suspicious of megacaps. But even with that tail risk realizing the likely outcome is that permits pass and prep is done. People make some noise, you get some bad PR and pay more than anticipated. Might seem like not worth the costs in retrospect, but hardly a disaster.

There is, but the amount of primary forests (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old-growth_forest ) is much lower than the amount of plantations

Pretty much yes, say Germany and Britain cut down almost all of the forests that were not too steep to farm on centuries ago, which make their cries to other parts of the world to stop deforestation pretty hypocritical.

Because they want to move in and can afford it. Same reason that apartment complexes have to add greenspace or subsidized apartments as a condition of getting a zoning variance.

Because in a democratic society the people can decide who is responsible for what, that's the price of admission you pay to live in such a society.

Executives were the world's first slop slingers even before LLMs. No wonder they got infatuated so easily.

Neoliberalism and right-wing austerity.

Also, earlier Nokia got sniped by Microsoft and profitable wood industries were decimated by transition from paper magazines (high quality, high value add paper) to digital (no paper) --> industry now makes pulp, which is low-value-add.

Their economy has been struggling for a while, having the highest unemployment rate in the EU and a large deficit.

Among other things, this has been caused by the downfall of Nokia and the paper industry as well as the collapse of trade and tourism with Russia.

High tech industry couldn't compete against the Chinese, the Ukraine War killed a huge chunk of export industries, aging population, successive governments shifting money from one welfare pocket to another, escalating unemployment eroding tax base and now when the money has ran out, aggressive austerity measures.

But construction workers are still people and they would like employment

True, again,

I'm of course against illegal logging, but in this case there was very little loss of the environment. These planted pine forests in the Nordics are not biodiversity hubs in any stretch of imagination. They do support life, but not much. You will generally not meet any animal there, except some birds perhaps if you're lucky. It would be another matter altogether if this was an old growth forest. This one is more like just a procedural blunder.

    > incalculable loss

This is silly. This land was an industrial monoculture wood crop, not a forest.

Does it really? I've been to mono forests that basically had one type of visible bug, maybe 2 kind of spiders and maybe a squirrel but definitely no birds (because of the lack of bugs)

Meanwhile the average urban area in Switzerland comes with many different types of plants and areas.

Better for who?

It's certainly not better for you and me that Google is able to do whatever they want at the cost of a fine and nothing more

Most of the lost Amazon forest was coverted into agricultural land to raise cattle and grow soybeans (to later feed pigs). It had nothing to do with data centers.

We’re in the middle of the next technological revolution and not building is our best bet? You could’ve said that about the green revolution we should have left the fertilizer in the ground cause now we have 10 billion people and all the problems that come with it.

As an executive of a company, I can think of no reason to remove that as a value unless of course (checks notes) you are condoning and encouraging evil.

"We're not evil" - Larry Pagerank and Tim Apple

I agree, and, want to point out this wasn't old growth forest. At least, none of the standing trees in the photos look like old growth. If it was, that would be a huge story, but it would have been very odd for Google to put a data center in old growth forest. Almost all of Finland is covered by managed/logged forests like this, so it's kind of inevitable if building a datacenter there that it is going to replace forest.

The same is true in much of the world actually, over half of the earth's surface was forested before humans started clearing it.

Is it really a shortage of chips and not datacenters? Nobody seems to accurately know this fact, just semiconductor companies saying were at future capacity for years.

It's a shortage of everything. Power, datacenters, chips, etc. If you don't see it now, just look at where estimates are projecting the demand in even a couple years.

That's not the most evil thing that Google has been doing. Setting up a global surveillance network comes to mind. And algorithm based engagement on things like YouTube. They've also led the industry monetisation of personal data.

I think the world would be a much better place if Google and it's peers had never existed.