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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
>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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
jFriedensreich|1 year ago
allumik|1 year ago
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
indoordin0saur|1 year ago
treprinum|1 year ago
cmrdporcupine|1 year ago
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?
actionfromafar|1 year ago
vintagedave|1 year ago
vintagedave|1 year ago
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|1 year ago
I find it quite an important aspect of the issue of land use the article covers but little detail is given.
treprinum|1 year ago
BitPirate|1 year ago
cameldrv|1 year ago
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.
indoordin0saur|1 year ago
arlort|1 year ago
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
KineticLensman|1 year ago
(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
indoordin0saur|1 year ago
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.
kristjank|1 year ago
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.
immibis|1 year ago
realusername|1 year ago
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.
watwut|1 year ago
tokai|1 year ago
indoordin0saur|1 year ago
ddon|1 year ago
teractiveodular|1 year ago
TazeTSchnitzel|1 year ago
unknown|1 year ago
[deleted]
sociorealist|1 year ago
[deleted]
sgoose_|1 year ago
[deleted]
sccxy|1 year ago
Yet we are disgusted when forests are cut down and then replanted.
vintagedave|1 year ago
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.
dubcanada|1 year ago
snowpid|1 year ago
nullorempty|1 year ago
indoordin0saur|1 year ago