10 ms·

The War on Estonian Forests (2022)

112 points by votiv 2y ago

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
sociorealist 2y ago
[flagged]
- sgoose_ 2y ago
  [flagged]
vintagedave 2y ago
Hello everyone -- what a lovely surprise to see this posted! This is my article. Happy to answer questions :)
- vintagedave 2y 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/ https://estonianworld.com/ [2] https://estonianworld.com/life/the-war-on-estonian-forests/ https://estonianworld.com/life/the-war-on-estonian-forests/
- Quarrelsome 2y 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 2y 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/ https://www.eramets.ee/forests-in-estonia/ [2] https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/7750867ad5cf467998492fcf034e2ba5 https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/7750867ad5cf467998492fc...
sccxy 2y 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.
- dubcanada 2y ago
  What part of this article suggested the forest cut down was being replanted?
  - sccxy 2y 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.
    - vintagedave 2y ago
      Author here. I'm actually sitting in a cafe in a town close to the village this is about right now. 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.
      - 2y ago
ddon 2y ago
Love CSS and simple layout... check out comments in the CSS file, very interesting.
- teractiveodular 2y 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.
  - vintagedave 2y 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.
    - teractiveodular 2y ago
      1080x2340, Chrome on Android. Screenshot here: https://imgur.com/a/E3Q3nrc https://imgur.com/a/E3Q3nrc
      - vintagedave 2y ago
        Thankyou. That's the todo I want to fix. I really should have before it hit the front page of HN... 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 :)
    - Towaway69 2y ago
      My iPhone SE using Firefox is showing the same problems…
kristjank 2y 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.
- immibis 2y ago
  Most political institutions exist to funnel wealth from poorer people to richer people.
  - goatlover 2y ago
    Sounds rather simplistic.
    - immibis 2y ago
      The purpose of a system is what it does.
      - shawndumas 2y ago
        POSIWID: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_what_it_does https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...
- realusername 2y ago
jFriedensreich 2y 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 2y ago
  80% (or more!?) of Swedish "forests" are really just monoculture tree plantations, too.
  - stefanfisk 2y ago
    And it's practically illegal to grow your forest any other way even as a private land owner
    - eru 2y ago
      Could you link to an explanation?
- cmrdporcupine 2y 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?
indoordin0saur 2y 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.
treprinum 2y 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 2y ago
  Pseudo justification? The bark beetle is wreaking havoc in our forests here in Germany.
indoordin0saur 2y 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 2y 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Forest
- arlort 2y 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 2y ago
    This isn't true. Some, yes, but parks like Acadia, Grand Teton, and Smoky Mountain all had people living in them.
nullorempty 2y ago
Well, according to Bill Gates trees don't matter.
- indoordin0saur 2y 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 2y 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.
cameldrv 2y 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.

112 points by votiv 2y ago

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

sociorealist 2y ago

[flagged]

sgoose_ 2y ago
[flagged]

vintagedave 2y ago

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

vintagedave 2y 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/ https://estonianworld.com/ [2] https://estonianworld.com/life/the-war-on-estonian-forests/ https://estonianworld.com/life/the-war-on-estonian-forests/
Quarrelsome 2y 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 2y 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/ https://www.eramets.ee/forests-in-estonia/ [2] https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/7750867ad5cf467998492fcf034e2ba5 https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/7750867ad5cf467998492fc...

sccxy 2y 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.

dubcanada 2y ago
What part of this article suggested the forest cut down was being replanted?
- sccxy 2y 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.
  - vintagedave 2y ago
    Author here. I'm actually sitting in a cafe in a town close to the village this is about right now. 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.
    - 2y ago

ddon 2y ago

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

teractiveodular 2y 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.
- vintagedave 2y 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.
  - teractiveodular 2y ago
    1080x2340, Chrome on Android. Screenshot here: https://imgur.com/a/E3Q3nrc https://imgur.com/a/E3Q3nrc
    - vintagedave 2y ago
      Thankyou. That's the todo I want to fix. I really should have before it hit the front page of HN... 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 :)
  - Towaway69 2y ago
    My iPhone SE using Firefox is showing the same problems…

kristjank 2y 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.

immibis 2y ago
Most political institutions exist to funnel wealth from poorer people to richer people.
- goatlover 2y ago
  Sounds rather simplistic.
  - immibis 2y ago
    The purpose of a system is what it does.
    - shawndumas 2y ago
      POSIWID: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_what_it_does https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...
realusername 2y ago

jFriedensreich 2y 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 2y ago
80% (or more!?) of Swedish "forests" are really just monoculture tree plantations, too.
- stefanfisk 2y ago
  And it's practically illegal to grow your forest any other way even as a private land owner
  - eru 2y ago
    Could you link to an explanation?
cmrdporcupine 2y 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?

indoordin0saur 2y 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.

treprinum 2y 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 2y ago
Pseudo justification? The bark beetle is wreaking havoc in our forests here in Germany.

indoordin0saur 2y 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 2y 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Forest
arlort 2y 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 2y ago
  This isn't true. Some, yes, but parks like Acadia, Grand Teton, and Smoky Mountain all had people living in them.

nullorempty 2y ago

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

indoordin0saur 2y 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 2y 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.

cameldrv 2y 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.