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The War on Estonian Forests (2022)

daveon.design

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Re: The War on Estonian Forests (2022)

#71

Post by indoordin0saur »

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…

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

Re: The War on Estonian Forests (2022)

#74

Post by indoordin0saur »

jFriedensreich wrote: post #45

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 pract…

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.

Re: The War on Estonian Forests (2022)

#75

Post by KineticLensman »

indoordin0saur wrote: post #70

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.

>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

Re: The War on Estonian Forests (2022)

#76

Post by indoordin0saur »

nullorempty wrote: post #72

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

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.

Re: The War on Estonian Forests (2022)

#77

Post by treprinum »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #60
jFriedensreich wrote: post #45

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 pract…

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…

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.

Re: The War on Estonian Forests (2022)

#78

Post by arlort »

indoordin0saur wrote: post #71
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…

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

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

Re: The War on Estonian Forests (2022)

#79

Post by pyrale »

kristjank wrote: post #41
watwut wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wor…

The ridiculous part is making this comparison on a per-country basis. Whole regions and their populations have been ruined by industries closing overnight to move abroad. Yet, by simplistic accounting, they should be considered winners?

Re: The War on Estonian Forests (2022)

#80

Post by michpoch »

ruszki wrote: post #57
kristjank wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wor…

Why does it matter that somebody benefits more if everybody benefits? Btw 1 foreign worker rarely equals to 1 local. Even just the quality of their work isn’t equal usually and averagely, and language, culture, distance, etc differences are on top of that. Interestingly, who moved to Western countries usually works better than those who stayed, even with the same background. Source: my Eastern European ass, who still…

> Btw 1 foreign worker rarely equals to 1 local. Even just the quality of their work isn’t equal usually and averagely, and language, culture, distance, etc differences are on top of that.

Full agreement here. 1 exploited foreign worker will have much more output than 1 local unionized, low working hours worker.

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