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The War on Estonian Forests (2022)

daveon.design

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Re: The War on Estonian Forests (2022)

#41

Post by kristjank »

watwut wrote: post #33
kristjank wrote: post #23

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…

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.

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.

Re: The War on Estonian Forests (2022)

#42

Post by kristjank »

tokai wrote: post #36
kristjank wrote: post #23

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…

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

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.

Re: The War on Estonian Forests (2022)

#43

Post by sccxy »

tokai wrote: post #36
kristjank wrote: post #23

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…

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

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

Re: The War on Estonian Forests (2022)

#44

Post by vintagedave »

marttt wrote: post #28
sccxy wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> (I'd expect a grid, with trees with those little fences protecting them, etc.) That says a lot. You have zero experience in forestry :)

Yep, no grids or fences in Estonia, at least not in typical state-managed forests. These just get replanted in furrows or on "turfs" (not sure about the correct English term). Newly planted seedlings can appear really tiny at first, though -- so tiny that even seasoned forestry workers who are later mowing grass around them occasionally fail to spot all the plants in the grass. Source: have manually planted maybe ~30…

> a small society like Estonia could maybe place its focus on heavily developing mixed forests instead, for a start

Thinking aloud here, but I like this idea. It could also be signposted: one of the things that "feels" awful is just the constant gaps in forest: forest, clear, forest forest forest, clear, forest, clear. Or walking to areas you know and love and one day they're just gone. There seems no oversight and little protection.

Suppose you entered a region that was labeled: "In the next 10km, you will see managed forestry", at least you'd know it was deliberate, a large specific region designated for this work, rather than just a bunch of spots where someone who owned a plot of land decided to clearfell it and take the cash.

Because the corollary of that is areas that are _not_ managed (and not cut) and where, hopefully, forest would be allowed to grow into century-or-more old genuine wildforest. And you'd see that signposted too. Or you could plan to buy a house in the middle of that kind of land, if you valued it.

Re: The War on Estonian Forests (2022)

#45

Post by jFriedensreich »

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.

Re: The War on Estonian Forests (2022)

#46

Post by vintagedave »

Sharlin wrote: post #35
vintagedave wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, uninterrupt…

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 i…

> 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.

When writing the article, multiple people I spoke to said the same think about the RMK here in Estonia. I believe preservation and exploitation should be separated.

> they have never seen real, ecologically diverse woodland with ongoing natural succession.

Yes! And even I have only rarely. It only happens with time and care (often, to make it faster in terms of restoration of forests, specific caretaking/treekeeping actions) though. And the time is decades to centuries.

Re: The War on Estonian Forests (2022)

#47

Post by tokai »

kristjank wrote: post #42
tokai wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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.

Deforestation has gone wrong many times in human history, from early to current. Tree logging has the same issues all other types of farming has, soil erosion, chancing of biotopes, disrupting runoff etc. The bigger the scale the worse consequences of tree farming are. The mono-culture of tree farming is closer to a parking lot than it is to nature.

Re: The War on Estonian Forests (2022)

#48

Post by unsigner »

kristjank wrote: post #42
tokai wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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.

Something that was sustainable when heating few hundred million people won't necessarily be sustainable when heating a few billion.

Re: The War on Estonian Forests (2022)

#49

Post by sccxy »

fxtentacle wrote: post #29
sccxy wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be good to have forestry experience before writing articles. I guess one day of planting a forest is already a lot of help. Planting apple tree in garden is not forestry. I wouldn't write an article about how doctors treat cancer wrong if my only experience is my dead grandmother.

You had a chance to educate a genuinely curious fellow human. And you blew it by being overly negative.

He has no forestry experience and many of the things he considers bad are actually additional costs to the landowner to make the forest grow back faster.

Re: The War on Estonian Forests (2022)

#50

Post by tpm »

wolvesechoes wrote: post #40
tokai wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> 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.

It's not that few really, the technology is not very complicated.
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