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.
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
(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.)
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?
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.
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
(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.
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.
Burning wood only becomes unsustainable when it is done on a commercially viable scale.
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.
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.
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
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.
Yet we are disgusted when forests are cut down and then replanted.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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...
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.
