The War on Estonian Forests (2022)

https://daveon.design/the-war-on-estonian-forests.html

by votiv • 2 years ago

112 108 2 years ago

sccxy7• 2 years ago

We want to be environmentally friendly and avoid plastic straws and plastic bags and replace them with paper straws and paper bags.

Yet we are disgusted when forests are cut down and then replanted.

dubcanada2• 2 years ago

What part of this article suggested the forest cut down was being replanted?

sccxy7• 2 years ago

I have worked in forestry and and have planted 500 trees daily...

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.

snowpid• 2 years ago

who is we?

SiempreViernes• 2 years ago

In this particular case the "we" seems to be: people who want to sell cheap mass produced timber but pretend it is sustainably source wood.

vintagedave11• 2 years ago

I'm actually a fan of 'tree farms': responsible forestry, specific areas of land dedicated to monocultures of useful tree species that are grown, harvested, replanted, and harvested again.

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.

sccxy7• 2 years ago

Estonian forests are not that old as you would guess.

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.

rob74• 2 years ago

As the report on wood pellet production linked in your article mentions:

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...

MrVandemar• 2 years ago

I'm actually a fan of 'tree farms': responsible forestry, specific areas of land dedicated to monocultures of useful tree species that are grown, harvested, replanted, and harvested again.

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.

Sharlin• 2 years ago

I’m not. Or, rather, not a fan of turning >100,000 km^2 of forest into tree farms, with another 100,000 being spared the fate simply because exploiting it is not economically viable.

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.

vintagedave11• 2 years ago

Hello everyone -- what a lovely surprise to see this posted! This is my article. Happy to answer questions :)

vintagedave11• 2 years ago

Also, this article was first posted on Estonian World [1]. They're a great news site that acts as English-language news for the country of Estonia, run by a couple of journalists who used to work at some big news companies.

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/

Quarrelsome• 2 years ago

does the article cover what is happening to the land afterwards? Is it felled for more farming, will it be replanted, will there be building and development?

I find it quite an important aspect of the issue of land use the article covers but little detail is given.

ftrobro• 2 years ago

Indeed, not many facts in that article. For example it claims that "Estonia is unique in the amount of land still covered in trees" (50%), and yet that is only 5th highest in Europe [1]. Finland has a tree coverage of 73% [2]. A hundred years ago Estonia had a tree coverage of only 30%, so forests have expanded a lot in Estonia since then [1].

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...

ddon• 2 years ago

Love CSS and simple layout... check out comments in the CSS file, very interesting.

teractiveodular2• 2 years ago

Unfortunately it's quite broken on vertical mobile, none of the "Drag" animations work and the footnotes are oddly mashed into the left side, forcing text to flow around it on the right.

vintagedave11• 2 years ago

Oh no! I will look into this. Can you share a phone model / screensize please? It is "okay" in the ones I test with.

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.

kristjank3• 2 years ago

The paragraph about wood pellet exports really makes me mad. I have always harbored some disdain for "green" policies in well-developed countries, because they always seem to simply move the "filth" into another, poorer country and make it their problem.

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.

immibis2• 2 years ago

Most political institutions exist to funnel wealth from poorer people to richer people.

goatlover• 2 years ago

Sounds rather simplistic.

realusername• 2 years ago

I live in western EU and I confirm that. There's so much forest in my place that nobody cares about that you could heat the whole area without cutting a single tree, just by picking up what fell down. I'm totally serious about that, there's so much trees on the floor that cutting new ones for firewood is mostly useless.

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.

xyzzy_plugh• 2 years ago

I have first hand experience with this scenario: a large forest property that yields enough firewood for a season in the form of naturally felled trees.

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.

watwut4• 2 years ago

Eastern countries added to the union benefit from Union. They are the ones who are given quite a lot of money. They are not squeezed, they are directly financially benefiting.

kristjank3• 2 years ago

They do receive a lot money through the funds, cheaper loans and investments, but it has to be compared to the money their counterparts earn by exploiting the much cheaper workforce, resources and energy prices in the global east. The minimum wages discussed in the article are at a 1:3 ratio. It's trivial to funnel some money back if you've managed to gain 3 foreign workers for the price of 1 domestic. There is a word for such phenomena and it's social dumping.

tokai2• 2 years ago

Wood burning is never sustainable, 'green', nor healthy. It boggles the mind that it is not normal to outlaw it.

wolvesechoes3• 2 years ago

Wood burning is never sustainable, 'green', nor healthy. It boggles the mind that it is not normal to outlaw it.

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.

kristjank3• 2 years ago

I do not understand how it's not sustainable if it has sustained itself as a part of normal wildlife management for centuries without any destructive interventions besides cutting and replanting old trees in a fairly remote region.

sccxy7• 2 years ago

Can you point out something that is sustainable, green and healthy?

andriamanitra• 2 years ago

In many rural/remote locations – especially off the grid – heating with wood (or oil-based products) is the only way to survive the winter. It isn't necessary to cut down entire forests to produce wood either – if you own some forest it is largely a byproduct of cutting down dangerous/dead trees and clearing ones that fall down naturally.

Burning wood only becomes unsustainable when it is done on a commercially viable scale.

markbnine• 2 years ago

Wood burning can be made sustainable. Where I live, the forest service encourages people to take dead trees out of the forest. It reduces the fire load. And building codes and EPA certs have done a lot to clean up wood stoves. https://www.epa.gov/burnwise

margalabargala• 2 years ago

It is sustainable if the amount of biomass taken is less than the amount of biomass generated per area.

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.

RGamma• 2 years ago

It can be sustainable... at 5% of the population.

nanomonkey• 2 years ago

Sorry, but this statement is just wrong. Look into gasification and biochar and you'll realize that controlled combustion can produce power (motive force or electricity), heat, and be carbon negative. Also while producing less greenhouse gases then letting the wood decompose naturally (compost produces methane and CO2).

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.

weweweoo2• 2 years ago

It is all of that, if done rurally and in small enough scale. I wouldn't mind outlawing wood as a source of heating in urban areas, but banning someone who literally lives in middle of a huge forest from utilizing wood would make zero sense.

indoordin0saur6• 2 years ago

It really was an own-goal how the green movement in Europe has been shutting down nuclear power plants.

arlort2• 2 years ago

The green movement has two roots, one is the worry about global warming the other (and much older) is about pollution/ecology and in some circles new age/hippy pseudo religion

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

jFriedensreich2• 2 years ago

The foresting practices were among the first things i noticed flying to Tallinn. Instead of carefully picking trees to harvest selectively from a wider forest area as i am used to in most of Germany, there seems to be whole football fields of forest just cut down completely and then regrown as a whole in a plantation like fashion similar to how crops are grown. I am not an expert by any means but i thought this practice was being phased out since the late 70s for environmental, resilience and biodiversiuty reasons. I feel as described by the article as being an expat living here and benefitting hugely from the life enabled by estonia and feeling nothing but welcome it is not my place to criticise, but i would support any initiative helping transformation into modern tree/forest planning.

actionfromafar• 2 years ago

80% (or more!?) of Swedish "forests" are really just monoculture tree plantations, too.

stefanfisk• 2 years ago

And it's practically illegal to grow your forest any other way even as a private land owner

cmrdporcupine2• 2 years ago

Sounds like softwood lumber forestry in general in western Canada, too. Mass monocrop plantations, then basically clearcut and replanted.

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?

treprinum4• 2 years ago

Vancouver island is famous for that. In comparison to Eastern Europe the monocultures in Canada get mostly replanted, in the Eastern Europe they most often don't.

allumik• 2 years ago

I agree that there's a lot room for improvement when it comes to forest management practices in Estonia. However, just to add to the OP's article, there is another reason for the recent forest clearings. Last year, I faced this issue with my own small patch of forest in Estonia, where had to do almost total clearing. There was no other option to extract /some/ value from the situation and save surrounding forests. It was heartbreaking to witness.

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.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c9UprJXSVSg

treprinum4• 2 years ago

You should revisit your knowledge of how things are done in Germany and see the clear cuts popping up everywhere, even in Taunus mountains next to some of the richest parts of the country.

jFriedensreich2• 2 years ago

you should just fly (aka google maps sattelite view) over germany and fly over estonia to see what i mean. i am not saying this practice does not exist in germany but the difference in extend is just immediately visible. Its probably the most obvious difference from a brids eye.

indoordin0saur6• 2 years ago

When visiting Germany I went through the Black Forest area. I was expecting something like you'd see in British Colombia or Northwestern USA. Instead what I saw was forestry plantations of monocrop non-native trees and clearcut patches of forest covering entire mountainsides. I tried looking up where an example of old growth forest can be seen in the area and apparently they simply do not exist.

eru2• 2 years ago

The clearcut patches are probably a reaction to the bark beetle.

(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.)

ahartmetz2• 2 years ago

Keep in mind how different the population densities are.

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

indoordin0saur6• 2 years ago

When coronavirus hit, so many Estonians went hiking to get away from people that the forestry commission recorded overcrowded trails, RMK calls on people to avoid crowded hiking trails.so crowded that that one article warned hikers to keep a safe distance to reduce risk of virus transmission – outdoors!

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.

treprinum4• 2 years ago

The whole Eastern Europe is getting raped by wood-hungry companies - look at Romania, Slovakia, Poland, Estonia etc. and compare satellite photos from 2015 with those from 2024 - truly Brazil-level deforestation but in the EU, often with the pseudo-justification of saving forests from certain insects... Even Germany is going through that.

BitPirate• 2 years ago

Pseudo justification? The bark beetle is wreaking havoc in our forests here in Germany.

indoordin0saur6• 2 years ago

It's wild to me that in Europe "National Parks" will have people living in them, forestry plantations and even clearcutting. In North America National Parks are entirely kept as wilderness with no use or development of the land allowed except for tourist infrastructure built and managed by the park administrations themselves.

KineticLensman• 2 years ago

It's wild to me that in Europe "National Parks" will have people living in them

(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.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Forest

arlort2• 2 years ago

As far as I'm aware national parks in the US were created on land that didn't really have anyone living in it (maybe Indians in some of them), you'd have to go back to the early middle ages to find similar areas in Europe (I'm guessing but at least in places like Italy I'm fairly sure of that)

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

COGlory• 2 years ago

This isn't true. Some, yes, but parks like Acadia, Grand Teton, and Smoky Mountain all had people living in them.

nullorempty• 2 years ago

Well, according to Bill Gates trees don't matter.

indoordin0saur6• 2 years ago

Planting trees hoping that they will mitigate climate change by their carbon draw-down is not effective, which is what Gates was referring to I'm guessing. It's really a scheme for corporations or nations to claim carbon credits for some trees that would have grown even if the land were left alone. Forests and wilderness should be preserved for their aesthetic beauty and biodiversity quality.

TazeTSchnitzel• 2 years ago

Reading about this, I can't help but notice the similarities to Sweden: unusually large amounts of ancient forest cover, being cut down en masse. Estonia was ruled by Sweden once, I wonder if that's some lingering influence somehow.

cameldrv2• 2 years ago

A few years ago I bought a package of firewood at the grocery store in California which ended up being Estonian Birch. As firewood it was terrible, it was almost impossible to light.

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.

The War on Estonian Forests (2022)

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