In the second editorial in Helsingin Sanomat of 27/2 it is stated that a primeval forest with its plants, mushrooms and animals is no more valuable to nature than one chopped down either by coppicing, or simply to an open area, a forest floor later sowed or planted out, the so-called field of trees with its own plants, mushrooms and animals. It is also stated that "lumberjacks do not destroy nature, even though they chop trees down".

All this is surely true. To show that it's definitely so, I'll tell three little stories about three Finnish primeval forests.

The first forest was chopped down like the one in Talaskangas, and then it was cleared of stumps and wheat was sown in its place. There wasn't any significant change; wheat is green nature just as much as three hundred years old pines and roughly shaped, two meter thick aspens are.

Another forest was chopped down as well, and an industrial plant was built on it, and around that, thirty hectares of paved space for warehousing and parking. True, this new natural forest wasn't green, but living humans teemed in it, who are as valuable as the rest of living nature.

The third primeval forest was cut down too, and a piece of rock moved by a tractor drew attention. Soon there was a one hundred meter deep quarry at the spot. Nature didn't change remarkably, the new level a hundred meters below the previous one was of course equally natural. In the course of time, a mountain as much as five thousand meters high had stood there.

For the sake of comparison I'll tell one more story, which comes from the human world, the initial settings included. There was a city named, let us say, Turku, for instance. A large and old so-called cathedral stood there, and services and other religious events were held there. The shack was discovered to be old, insanely high and uneconomic. It was demolished, and a hall of reinforced plastic with a roof of sheet metal was built on its place, which had low expenses for heating and use. Service went just as well there, but expenses were still seen as too high. The hall was torn down and the site was smoothed down to a field on which services were held on Sunday mornings, and during other times markets could be held, football and icehockey played and so on. On cold winter Sundays the service had to be shortened, but it was pointed out that the gain from the worship wasn't proportionate to the length of it, as a devout and receptive mind is the most important aspect.

1989

It is a peculiar sociopsychological phenomenon that stupidity and intelligence are distributed not nearly in accordance with the statistical probabilities. There are some fields of study and some professions to which stupidity specifically accumulates, makes a nest, as it's said.

Beginning from the tail end, sociologists, meteorologists, economists and so on come to mind. Well, I put them into this context as comfort and consolation for forestry men, for humanitarian reasons. The professionals in the field of forestry after all are not sharply separate from the skillful people, but progressively. Forest rangers do form a most monumental island of foolishness.

The history of silviculture in Finland truly is a road filled with agony, an endless chain of mistakes and mishaps. When one course of error has been bitterly and slowly left behind, the next one is well under way. And everything always happens over the whole breadth of the country, as is customary in a centralized, systematic economy.

The most well-known example is the mobilization of all the enormous machinery to wipe birch out - just before it arose as the most expensive of valued trees in industry. Equally astounding losses were produced by "kalelointi", or clearing loggings which were used to fell groups of quite young trees there where "the nursery wasn't even." That's how we lost thirty year old trees, and grew - if successful - a nursery covering maybe one fourth or fifth the space from the age of 0.

Anyway, the calculus of the primary school hasn't left a mark on a forest ranger. The whole trade measures, busy with excitement, the thickness of yearly growth rings and thins out a young forest to a good state for growth so that a tree grows at double speed compared to the previous overly dense, stunted and degenerate forest. Although the number of the growing trunks was fivefold there, in time the trees, wet by the forest ranger's tears of joy, became lousy as lumber, which makes a builder rage and despair. I too know this second-rate lumber of nursed forests all too well: when it's stepped on, a deep footprint is left in the wood.

Through time, the forest has been taxed so that the large logs were chopped down first and the smaller trees grew to be felled in time. There was no other flaw in this other than that, because it was a method of deforestation dictated solely by common sense - the intelligence of every farmer - no help was needed from experts or professional assistance. Because of that foresters named the method "selective felling," and declared it extremely disastrous to the forest. As always, before long they themselves believed in their lie, thinking that smaller trees beneath the stock had languished to worthlessness and lost their ability to grow. That's why a whole forest has to be cut down at once and an evenly aged planted forest grown in its place. This was the birth of clearfelling, the greatest curse upon Finnish landscapes since the Ice Age.

This theory, which still prevails and instructs how to treat the soil of the fatherland is, of course, totally without foundation. In fact, a tree that is left shaded and in a nutritional offside can linger on even for decades, and as soon as it has light and room for living, it springs up in joyful growth. I have closely followed some persistent farmers who have been capable of defying the pressure from silvicultural organisations and selling a new batch of top-quality trees from a marked cutting zone every five or ten years. The remnants of the worthy lumber that have been available in South- and Central Finland depend on these few old men. The productivity of continuously grown forests is greater in the long run than what is achieved by alternating clearcuttings and clumsy plantings.

So, clearfellings were then followed by the entire turmoil of "forest renewal". Terrible crashing and banging; armies of machines, splotching or plowing rocks throughout the land; millions of hectares with billions of scars. And the rebounding variation between the methods of renewal - the result of experimental activity is not seen until years later and these results are not at hand until applications have been in operation on areas the size of Denmark.

What does "natural reform" look like? A few pines are left around the opening as seed trees. I have seen that oddity as well where a spruce wood is cut down except for the seed trees - even during this very year, and it wasn't far away either, because I have collected two years worth of firewood from the leftovers of fellings and chippings of harvesters from that spruce wood. All in all, long before the next seeding year, pines and spruces alike have crashed down in an autumnal storm leaving only the black plates of roots standing upwards. However, a part of the spruces have a three-meter stub left. The opening has simultaneously widened deep into the neighboring section of the woods until the front of the forest has successfully endured the storm.

Renewal by sowing has become so rare an event that I can move straight on to the subject of planting. Its popularity is for most part explainable by the gigantic turnover in the growing and selling of tree seedlings. Let's have a quick glance from one tree species to another.

From clearcuttings the enthusiasm spread even further. The last parts of pastures, arable land, and fields of the realm will now have pretty rows of deep green spruce plants. On the second or the third year a late spring frost will strike when the new annual growth is well under way. Deep green will turn into brown, and those rows of plants shall shrivel up into the grass, to the gentle embrace of the damp masses of weeds, and into merciful oblivion.

But the European birch does not mind frost, it flourishes full of vigor. It really thrives having been transported to its own plantation by the elk everywhere through Finland. The elk's method of cultivation reminds one of the old tale about a king and a chessboard: one grain on the first square, two on the second one, then four, eight, sixteen... Two branches on a birch seedling in the second spring, then four, eight, sixteen...

There was too a trend of planting genetically engineered trees for the needs of match industry, though it never developed to a mass movement of thousands of hectares. Guess what? It happened to come about during the same years when the remnants of this fading branch of industry quietly began to move abroad.

Nevertheless, the trade of pine seedlings is the most enormous nation-wide operation. The consequences are appalling to the terrain. I don't only mean Lapland, where nurseries struggle for some years before withering into tundra. Since I was a little child I have watched logging openings in Southern Finland as well, of which the most lush are left dominated by weeds -- during all my lifetime. Or, I'll count how many deformed crooks of a plant still have green needles: last year still every fifth had them, now no more than every eighth do. I once walked to a large open nursery at Hauho, where preventive spraying to snuff out either the grass or coppice had also killed every single 5-year-old pine seedling. Nonetheless, especially at farmlands, I come across some finely prospering nurseries too and do some calculations again: every sixteenth, every eighteenth young pine is at somewhat of a straight line, the others are a most odd collection of curve, loop, multi-branch and angle. The greatest marvel however is witnessed if one pushes and bends these lousy ones: they wobble and bend like a rubber hose, even when thick as an arm.

Everything shows that a forester doesn't comprehend anything about the essence of tree nor the wholeness of forest: how they feel, their demands, or what they tolerate. It isn't ridiculously delicate; it can withstand mole, rabbit, elk - and even storm. So it allows humans to take their share too, through cautiously culling a tree from here and there. Density and shelter are the basic qualities of a forest, and a forest having only one type of tree is usually insane to even try think about.

The drainage of swamps touches on the matter at hand even if in it we go from forests to another aspect of national landscape, which has given the name for this country[1]. The drainage of Finland's marshlands has been identified as the greatest act of ruin against nature in the 20th century. What's interesting in this observation is that not a single seedling has risen, nor will any rise, on a fifth of the drained area, and the profit of the rest of the work is probably about the same as with a savings bank. Billions of dollars were frittered away as imported machines were driven and worn out and imported oil burnt on marshes and open bogs. That money could now be in the state coffers.

What is gained from all this? Massive loss is accumulated at every turn, loss, that cancels out the meager merits and victories elsewhere. In this survey, I haven't said a word about the basic philosophy of forest economy, protection of the circle of life, carbon balance of the globe and other such grand matters. This time I'm interested in limiting perspective to the economy of small Finland. And even from that standpoint the final result of the forestry trade's fumbling over it's whole course of life has been clearly negative. Without a single forest ranger, or any school of the profession, the same amount of lumber, finer lumber, could have been sold from Finland, and forest fur would have been incomparably bushier. The unforgettable definition of the forestry professional -- "the armored destroyer" -- by the great man of programs for national parks and marshland preservation, the late Urpo Häyrinen, can for a change be substituted with the nickname "the armored idiot".

1993

[1] 'Finland' translates to 'Suomi' in Finnish. The word 'suo' means 'swamp' in Finnish and forms the first syllable of the country's name in Finnish.

If I could read people's minds I would disguise myself as an interviewer from the center of statistics, take a sample of five hundred forestry professionals and ask: do you really believe in Finland's forests surplus through logging and increasing of lumber reserves during the last few decades? But the seal of that mystery will never open. People answer regular questionnaires like they want to answer. I know that the forestry professional is stupid, but I shall never know how stupid he is, how much of an opportunist's cunning is included.

Innumerable naturalists cruising the country, countless sharp-eyed laymen harassing me with visits, on the phone, on roads, streets and trains and keep asking the same chorus: Where are the savings by logging, where are the decaying forests, where are the dense woods anyway? They drive through the whole network of roads in the land from Hanko to Utsjoki and from Vaasa to Ilomantsi, roam cartrails in the woods till the very last curve and observe every coast and island in the country from their boats. They rove also the insides of forests by picking berries, mushrooms and hunting - or for no particular reason. But they do not find anything other than fields of stumps, in them nurseries thick as an arm at best, or middle-aged forests thinned out near to having only seedling trees, actually them being nurseries, too. They say that genuine, fully grown trees - the ones which have to be hugged with the whole length of one's arms - are encountered only in built-up areas and yards of mansions. What increases the amount of cubic metres of lumber in statistics?

My own position is truly unfortunate in this matter as in many others as well. Many people attempt to assure, either in conversation or polemic in papers, either to debate or to console, that I am either imagining or that I want to overstate for some reason or other. I'm "a lord from Helsinki" at one time and "a scraggly beard" at another or a "fussmaker", who has no clue about the reality of either "the people" and "a regular working person" or "countryside" and "economy". Appalled, I have to point out that I've lived precisely in all that reality and seen everything with my own eyes. I've gone through the whole post-war history of the ruin of countryside, the mother of Finland's landscapes and forests and the crumpling and smearing of the fatherland's motherly face. I have surely committed a mistake, but not of the kind that my opponents assume. I have kept my eyes too open and listened too alertly, sniffed around for too much, seen and travelled too much - and I remember too much. And so, my soul has received wounds. But I am persistent, I'll have my "difficult clinical depressions" treated, and again, I'll try to save what's left to save, hitting my head against the wall.

I just noticed that something small is already getting rusty, that I can't remember by heart every one of those regions in who's forests I have journeyed wearing either rubber boots or ski boots, a compass leashed under the waistband, and a map wearing out little by little. And so I browsed through my notes and I wasn't able to go through all of them, but well over 250 counties ended up on the list, roughly the half of Finland's counties - according to the division of regions from the 1950's. The sample is sufficient and I immediately know that there aren't many others who have first-hand knowledge about the condition of Finland's forests. I also have a field of assay of about ten central-Tavastian villages in which I have travelled through almost every small owner's forest segments, most of them far and wide.

I haven't sat in a satellite and in that respect I trust the satellite pictures of wintry Finland, Sweden and Russian-Karelia, introduced by Mikko Puntari. Or rather, I didn't need those pictures myself as I had seen the same picture from the ground: the same bushy steppe, the same snowy desert, and, instantly behind the border, the dark wall of forests in Sweden and Russia.

What all is included in "my life in the forest"? Can one bring up main points from it, form it on paper? "Condense, condense", asks the editor. "Let the memories flow", "tell to younger ones", "remind peers", demands my own veteran-self, the yearner for the golden youth. I try to travel the middle road.

I had time to spot many virginal forests untouched by ax, beginning from the large wooded islands of Åland Islands, in the heart of great trackless forests of southern Tavastia, in Ostrobothnia of Suomenselkä, Karelia, Kainuu and southern Lapland. There were such wilds too in which one would encounter a rare giant stump from times long past, maybe once every hectare. It was recalled in villages that a couple of selected straight giant trees were sometimes taken for the needs of shipbuilding at the coast, trunk in it's full length, dragged by five horses at the beginning of the journey. One could walk for miles and miles of Vienan wilderness in the wildlands of Mujejärvi and Jonkeri in Nurmes and Kuhmo, without any trace of humans: no chip, nor remains of a campfire. I know from there what it is like to fall into rapture, to an otherwordly mental state, to lose oneself from the map on purpose with only a rough course of the compass stored in the depths of the mind - and then walk straight onto an ancient pine inhabited by a golden eagle and its fledglings, without realizing what province I was in, Oulu or North Karelia.

Oh the former mighty wildlands of Ranua and Pudasjärvi, I wandered there too at the tracks of golden eagles, oh Palovaara and its wildly free pack of summer horses beyond all paths, a bell jingling about the neck of the leader, oh Vilmivaara and Soidinkangas, beyond the grace of all gods! It was there that I made my life's record in walking, 36 hours in a steady stream, when a companion of mine got lost in the wilderness without a compass and had to be searched for. And elsewhere, oh the enormous worksites of Pudasjärvi at which wide marshlands were cleared into populated areas - and oh the bitterness of state forest's landlords, technicians and foremen of the time, when their finest pine ridges on the necks of open bogs were shared between veteran farmers.

I also remember the innumerable forest cabins from the backwoods, into which lumberjacks or forest workers - the word 'chopper' didn't exist yet - carried food from miles away by paths and causeways. I remember their wintry fuss and nocturnal group-snoring and the summery silence and the two old cottage guards who lived there round the year. I recall log transports from wintry skiing trips: they appeared silently as ghosts, the lower branches of great spruces suddenly turned aside like a curtain and the creaking of sleigh's skids wasn't heard until then, nine steaming horses glided past with their enormous burdens from backwoods to the stockpiles at coastal lands. At spring there was no trace left of the road besides bundles of straw - laid out by the roadmaster of the logging on the steepest of hills to slow down the loads - which were carried away by ospreys as softening to their nests at the highest tops of pines. Back then, forests had quieted down into unbreakable peace for half of the year; men were at the shores and the piles at roadsides with their peeling irons, upper body bare on sunny banks, even since March, and they were working at fields after the first of May.

I vividly remember the first roads for bicycles and mopeds in the state parks of Perho, Halsua and Lesti. After these arrived rugged and trampled roads, frozen at winter - which didn't last any longer than the former did. Now a network of gravel roads of hundreds of thousands of kilometres has parceled out the coat of woods into small pieces, slaughtered the Finnish forest. And as a secondary consequence it has decimated the ponds of the woodlands, brought them an exhibition of fibreglass boats, booths and junk busses: all the glistening variations of the colours of the rainbow.

It was started in the 1950s by the Korean trade cycle, the rumbling and rolling of clear cutting. I recall the first opening of a hundred hectares at the backlands of Luopioiset in forests of Yhtyneet Paperitehtaat; it laid there bare after a prescribed burning, black and vast. My traveling companion, the late Pekka Putkonen, afterwards a doctor, named it "Kullervo's Curse", and by that name it appears in my observation notes to this day. Also that opening was widened with the help of saws and two-man saws. Men and work force were available in infinite amounts, as they are still available nowadays, even to cut trees down and into pieces with a knife. But the machine was preying already and it soon struck into the hearts of the wildlands, and elsewhere too, to deprive man of everything of he is worthy; mighty labour, effort and struggle. The first chainsaw on a snowshoe journey in the backlands of Pälkäne's Ruokola signals a horrendous break in my life - and during the same year's August, the first grand logging of chainsaws in the virginal pine forest in Naarva of Ilomantsi... Then the logging site of this spring, in 1993 - well, nevermind.

But first and foremost I remember what has happened to trees. They vanished before my eyes, melted away like snow. Shield barked pine woods disappeared, dense and shadowy eternal spruce forests dispersed, and they were replaced by bushes of nurseries, if they were replaced with anything at all. Every birch thicker than a leg disappeared. Aspen groves were wiped into extinction most precisely, the old holey aspens, as by wriggling on them I could ring almost three hundred jackdew fledglings and owls and stock doves in addition to them, still during the most diligent summers of the 50s. Clear felling started from backlands and not until the 80s did they reach the woods beside yards and coastal copses. All told, the quantity of trees decreased at an inconceivable rate. I estimated in Tavastian villages that at the beginning of the 1980s there might have been one third left from the number of trees at the end of 1940s when measuring in cubic metres - a loss of about two thirds in thirty years. The dearth was even more severe elsewhere in the land, all the more profound in the north. Already at the end of the Fifties an old master from Pudasjärvi was angry because he couldn't find even a child's whip from the whole village.

Against reality, the efficiency of the propaganda by the forest industry is amazing. What I've said above was witnessed by eye and satellite photos all over the country. The testimony by the forest industry about savings in logging and growth of the state's timber reserves was after all swallowed by the majority - the one that does not wander woods or watch them even from their cars, the one that considers all green that is not field to be forest. That lie has been swallowed by the public word, throughout every paper. Recently to my bewilderment, I found the same statistics about the growth of trees' quantity even from a book made with care and acute in many senses, "The state of the environment in Finland." It's like Goebbels used to say: every claim is true when it's repeated often enough.

What is behind all these forestry statistics? How have they been collected? It just befell to me as I feared at the start - I lapsed into reminiscing, lost pages, and tired the reader. I'll give him a week for recuperation and hopefully re-attuning.

1993

How have this land's statistics that point out the growing of timber reserves and savings by loggings been collected and obtained? They were compiled by the Department of Forest Research, which main duty is to acquire research findings for the needs of the forest industry. That firm has nothing to do with unbiased, academic science, although the big crowd - and the main editors of some newspapers - often believe so. The department's name, having a scientific ring to it - and the nomination of the departments officials to professors - is as brilliant a bluff as the official title of the forest feller: "forester".

The Department of Forest Research is a tool for the forest industry - a branch which it is at one with. And the industry, and major corporation, this Kymmene, then Repola, then Enso and Serla, and the tradesman; it bargains, makes "Geschäft" and business, and basically it isn't interested at anything else at all. And it can't be either, especially about morality, as the bank and the market are its only gods, it will sell even its grandmother, it will enlarge its store and sell and sell as long as there's merchandise and in the end it sells out. For it does not comprehend most things in the world and future is one of them. A trader's calculations of profitability do not reach to the horizon.

To have an advantageous forest statistic made is the most profitable of businesses. It's worth investing in, budgeting great sums of money for, preparing with care and cleverly disguising. It is hard for me to believe that the forest survey groups, who to my knowledge do travel their routes marked on map, would not do honest work and leave their results misrepresented. But how many persons are before the summaries and totals? Through an intermediary, I have heard that the publisher of the satellite pictures would have sought to examine the original material of the surveys, but they weren't public files - the archives of Metla (abbrv. of "the Department of Forest Research") did not open. I do not know if this is true; however, things like this usually are.

Can anyone imagine that the forest industry could publish a statistic which indicated decreasing of timber reserves, not to mention revealing that the decline has been catastrophical. Besides selling forestry products it also buys raw wood. What position would it then hold in a price negotiation with a forest owner? It knows how to trade, and the decisive matter in question is to have the buyer believe that there's a surplus of the product so that the buyer's market prevails. Furthermore, one must attempt to convince that the surplus is still increasing; that the amount of timber is great and growing as well, because then the forest owner will not only sell cheaply but he will also sell more of his trees, as opposed to withholding them in hopes of a better offer. My own guess is that according to the Department of Forest Research, timber reserves will be increasing even when the last currant bushes are being torn from peoples' yards for the pulp mills.

Another fly can be hit with the same slap, much less significant, much smaller but nevertheless bothersome and useless. When the people are assured that timber reserves are increasing, the sharpest edge is dulled from the nature conservation's criticism. When the forest industry churns out slogans verging on insanity just to be sure, such as: "The forests are just rotting there", "change into impassable thickets", "axe is the best remedy for forest"; when it speaks of "sparse usage", of "dilapidation" and "bogging down" or "suicidal spruce forests", it treads the dangerous grounds of reckless management. Nevertheless, it is "taking safe chances" as all their claims are true, provided they are repeated often enough. It knows too that it can repeat statements and slogans frequently enough, as it has much money, and, likewise to their colleagues in Naples and Sicily, a great army; the trade of forestry which does what is told from above.

Of course biologists have the endurance to straighten these absurdities a few times. They remind that Finland's forests have been growing since the last Ice Age without the help of the man and that the trees of old forests naturally renew like all vegetation does as the old age class dies off. The Man is instead always in the forest like an elephant in a porcelain store. But researchers and friends of nature grow weary; they don't have the resources for a constant battle of information. They are the most small-numbered minorities in this country and their cheeping is easy to quell. This writing too drowns under the massive beating of drums.

Critics who have slipped into our ranks, Trojan horses, are a trickier problem for the forest industry and a fouler of their own nest such as Lähde, Vaara or Norokorpi, is then grilled with such intensity that the snarls directed at bystanding protectors of environment feel like a pat to the head in comparison. The forest opposition can't be envied!

I once asked a forestry professional how the obedient consensus of the male-dominated trade of forestry, which only the few stubborn strugglers dare to defy, can be explained; how this mafia is really constructed. How is it that there is forest education in many institutes and a faculty of forestry sciences in most universities, and why will none of them begin to straighten out even the most awful of the twisted policies; why is almost all the criticism coming from outside the profession by the basic research by scientists and nature conservationists? Why don't we group up and start backing Lauri Vaara, for example, who doesn't question the justification for forest economy, doesn't speak with the mouth of a protector of environment, doesn't even criticize the methods of silviculture, but just points out the heavy machinized harvest's horrendous unprofitability to forests, national economy and countryside's commercial structure and employment alike in a mathematically unshakeable way, compiling evidence point after point?

The forestry professional's answer was thorough: All posts in the trade are either directly in forest companies or connected to them. If some educational institute of the forestry profession began to teach in a way which diverged from the one marked out by the forest industry, the first graduating class would be left unemployed. Furthermore, the grapevine reaches everyone in a small country: the next autumn the institute or the faculty is left without students. It's that simple.

For decades I have on occasion observed the struggle of the prey in the spiderweb spun by forestry officials and companies. He who journeys much also sees much, and he who sits at many tables hears a lot. How many stories have I heard about the unscrupulous businesses of forestry professionals. The silvicultural association, which has the position and rights of an authority, prohibits further loggings from a small-holding's forest after a few thinnings. After a while a forest ranger arrives to the house and he is concerned, as is the master, or his widow: earnings are finished and the area tax keeps on counting. They ponder and ponder. Perhaps the ranger could redeem the forest by renovating it so that it would produce timber again after twenty years, barely coping with the area tax through his salary until then. Some kinsman may warn the cottage folk but what use is it, money is a must. The transaction is made, the ban on the loggings ceases immediately and the forest ranger sells timber at the first winter for two or three times the purchase price.

Larger transactions are arranged with the forest authority and company. I closely followed one episode throughout the seventies. A young master inherited two hundred hectares of sturdy pine forest from his cheapskate of a father. Marked trees began to form and the master consecutively bought six Mercedes Benzes - which had to be white, as well - and then rolled and crashed them one at a time. He was fortunate too, as only the sixth one took away his licence. Anyway, a seventh one was ordered and I recall there was a long wait because the import dealer didn't have any white models that time. It was five hundred meters from the house to the local bar, and now the licenceless master drove five hundred meters to the opposite direction by a road of his own to the beach, from where he drove seven hundred meters with his motorboat to out-of-the-way corner of a bay and thus was spared from a three hundred meter walk to the bar.

But another story ran on beside that one. His pine forests were in two sections: one on the mainland, the other on the island. The forest on the mainland was worse off and quite used up, while the island was left with quite a lot of trees, but the silvicultural association locked it up. He began to lose his money now and eventually ran out. Of course, he panicked by selling the woods along with its floor on the island. The big farmers of the village coveted the section - even greatly - but in the end, who would engage in such a risky bargain: a logging ban in effect till the unknown future, the capital at a standstill and the area tax is always running. The Kymi corporation, it wasn't yet Kymmene at the time, swindled and swindled for three years, and after that, the purchase price wasn't anything notable. As usual, the logging ban came to an end at the moment of the transaction. Kymi's own men told me the exact numbers. On that occasion the price of the sale of standing timber which was taken from there in the first year was precisely five times the purchase price of the forest. And that wasn't even an emptying felling.

But lets return to the balance of forests of the country. I was in the heart of Savo this spring on a business trip - me too for once - buying a patch of forest for the upcoming nature preservation trust. I familiarized myself with the plan of forest economy in advance. During the last few years an enormous undertaking was accomplished in Finland which was quite unique: all privately owned forests were examined and logging plan created for every hectare. The patch in question was divided into patterns of one or two hectares with detailed information provided from each: the main type of tree, average age, and cubic volume. Judging by the information the forest appeared rather interesting.

We explored the forest thoroughly and were more and more disappointed after every meter. Not a single tree was felled after writing up the plan, but the information wasn't accurate at all: not about the composition of trees' ages and certainly not about the cubic volume, as one third of that was clearly open air. I can, wuth sureness, estimate the amount of forest in cubes, and this time I even was accompanied by a ranger - an acquaintance who actually was the forest purchaser for the company - and he shook his head at the same pace as I did. Faintly, we headed back; it wasn't very uplifting that even this humble forest was surrounded by hundreds of hectares of clearly logged area.

The experience is so recent that I've only gotten to tell it to one of my neighbours. He instantly had a similar experience to share: he had felled one of his spruce patches according to his forest economy lay-out, and he received two thirds of the amount of timber the plan had promised. I then called the province's environmental offices representative of purchases and was told that they were accustomed to deducting ten to twenty per cent from the tree estimates of the forest economy plans. On the grounds of the said experiences from the "private sector" those percents are likely underestimations as top prices are striven to be paid in the governmental purchases of nature conservation areas for the sake of image.

What can we deduce from this? Gullibility is seated in humans like a louse in tar. Even after everything I had witnessed before now I had maintained an impression that the tentacles of the forestry mob do not reach into every curve and into little units. Above I have already surmised that the terrain labour of making inventory about the country's forests would be done honestly and that the material wouldn't twist until it reached the offices of the department. But now the old fox receives a surprise after all. What kind of instructions have the writers of thse plans of forest economy been given? Has the national forest balance been thoroughly manipulated, area after area?

1993

I was brought up well. Even as a child I knew that even a wrongdoer shouldn't be treated poorly. I have also striven to adhere to common sense: inspection first, judgement second. Because of that, lets go through the statistics of the Department of Forest Research. Previous surveys missed the claim about the acceleration of the growth rate of trees - which stated that trees growing at the same rate increase in thickness more quickly than before.

It is naturally clear that the outrageous assertion about the growth of the country's timber reserves has to be explained in some way other than as a heavenly miracle, regardless of the fact that the amounts of timber exported from Finland keep reaching all-time records annually. These statistics are trumpeted by the forest industry triumphantlu. It uses them to prove what a benefactor it is to the society, the true supporter of the folk, victorious even over the depression. And those statistics are presumably correct as they aren't just the forest industry's, but also the statistics of the administrations of customs and port. Additionally the fact that they are accurate is indeed visible in the landscape of Finland.

But will wonders never cease! The statement about the acceleration of the growth in thickness of the trees is also sound in healthy forests - thanks to the increasing of carbon dioxide and nitrogen in our atmosphere.

However, how large an impact the growth rate has had on present-day timber reserves in this country is an entirely different matter. In fact, it is just about the growth of the so-called expectancy value of forests, and the future of the nurseries. There are tragically few grown forests and they are excessively sparse; quickened growth won't yield many extra cubes from them. And expectations are severely over-optimistic with nurseries. First of all, the acceleration of the trees' growth isn't very many percents; the trees still are and will always be a hopelessly slowly growing plant in Finland. The whole area of nurseries is no doubt large, but the failures, for whatever reason, have to be deducted from the calculations. I have seen too many of even those oldest of pine nurseries of "the time of Korea", those appalling monocultures, which have browned to their tops in the grasp of sprout cancer: these were only 30 to 40 year old young woods.

At the moment, nurseries are desperately young on average. In addition to the completely failed ones, there are delayed nurseries which have been created only after the second or third try or through mending plantings. Even the successful swampland nurseries are very young, just small twigs, as the emphasis on ditching the marshes wasn't until the 70's.

The oldest noteworthy age classes of seedlings are now 40 years old. A layman can believe anything said about their volume, whereas I must again be the gloomy expert. I have felled, lopped, cut, carried, piled and hauled with my horse a few hundred solid cubes of pine and spruce pulpwood from these very sites of first cuttings. And I know all too well how unbelievably many two or three meter long trunks one solid cube can hold in itself, and how awfully little timber there is in the nurseries until they really begin to grow in their fifties.

When the last genuine body of wildlands in Finland beyond the lake Inari was destroyed, I became to know the Northern Lapland's regional ranger, Veijola, as a competent opponent who left a pleasant memory as a person. Matters were actually discussed both in an office in Ivalo and on a pile of logs in the backwoods of Kessi - until the conversation was left for Inari's police, central criminal police of Finland, highway patrol and the frontier guard to deal with. Before that Veijola truthfully explained the forest balance of the area at his responsibility. On one hand he had primeval forests untouched by ax, and on the other, logged sites - primarily clear felled areas in which nurseries can't yield any timber for a long time. They don't offer significant work with the nurseries either - which can't be afforded unless the area starts producing selling profit. If all the old forests were left unscathed, a gap decades wide would form in the felling business, and there would be unemployment for several decades in the forestry profession in Inari. Employment is the number one priority for Veijola, and his position is consequential. It is an other matter that according to friends of nature and forest biologists, efficient forest economics should never have been commenced at these latitudes, let alone continued.

Variables altered appropriately, the situation Veijola describes can be generalized over the whole country. Timber reserves of the day are in horrible dearth and the production from plentiful nurseries moves far over the next millennium - presupposing that forest damages will not grow significantly from their present levels. But they likely will...

As the most outrageous of swindles exaggerating the growth rate of forests I recall a two-page coloured advertisement by the Central Association of Forest Industry in the newspaper Helsingin Sanomat a few years back. A famous man named Esko Ollila, a kind of guest star in banks and administrative boards, perhaps a minister at some point - you know the type of man - was shown on a meadow in front of faraway hills covered with blue forests to express some immortal words somewhere in Pelkosenniemi or Savukoski. The forests of those hills had helped Finland to get on its feet after the war, the lumber serving as reparations, and they stood there once again, strenghtening the realm's well-being as vigorous raw material for the forest industry. As a funny coincidence - although it probably wasn't noted by very many - an old forest technician from the same latitudes, Kittilä and Muonio, was interviewed on the radio during the same day. He mentioned that he had visited his first logging site from the year 1934, and he told the interview that those pines had grown to the thickness of fence poles.

I reckon I have spoken enough about these, should I say, "surface level" crimes of the Finnish forest economy. May it be a woeful example of its power in this country. A friend of nature and forests has to wriggle all his life in the economy amidst its valueless and raw undertakings, and has to debate with its own arguments. And still, the actual condition of his forest is lightyears away from solid cubes, pulp, ditchings, plowings and plantings. As a landscape and biocenose an economical forest is much further from an actual forest than a wheat field.

In a genuine Finnish forest there are a dozen varieties of trees and all the age classes from tiny seedlings to 400 year old pines. One fourth of them are alive, another snags, third cracked stubs and the remaining trees are lying on the ground. It is an immeasurably rich biocenose of thousands of species of plants, mushrooms and animals. Most importantly, the forest is a sanctuary where man won't rage and ravage. According to the grand writer of nature ,Allan Paulin, fthe orest is place to sit in complete silence, until the rustling of small feet is heard.

For a lover of nature the fate of the forest is a matter of life and death. Finland equals forest and it has the appearance of its coat of woods. Sure, Finland is also the land of lakes, sea, swamps and fells, but it is predominantly the realm of woodlands. It is a landscape populated only slightly by cities and villages. Architechts and constructors play meager supporting parts, as Finland is created by forest owners and rangers, and therein lies their staggering key role - and the shattering burden of sin for skinning this country.

In the natural economy of the world, whose significance has risen as a question of its threshold for humans as well, the importance of forests is essential. Besides producing oxygen, it has a crucial role in adjusting climate: windiness, rain levels and temperatures alike - and almost always so that the forest maintains conditions more beneficial for the diversity of life, and for humans too, than a bare area does. But in the situation of the modern world the most essential matter is that of binding of carbon in atmosphere to the vegetation and primarily, trees. Finland logged bare and open is shameful in this connection, among others - and vice versa, the re-forestation of Finland's great acreage would be an invaluable favour to life on this planet.

According to a national statistic - again from rhetoric to statistics - there are 94 m³ of tree in one hectare on average, and when we have to, judging from past experience, subtract almost a third from this count, it probably is 60-70 m³/ha in reality. As a matter of fact, it is unimportant which figure is the correct one as both of them are catastrophically puny. A full-grown and dense forest on a fresh moor in Southern Finland has at least 800 m³/ha of tree. I've heard from a layman source, which I haven't got to verify, that there is a model forest of the Honkola manor in Urjala which would have 1200 m³/ha. A great portion of our woodlands are barren moors of heather and lichen; there are stunted woods at crags and so on but most importantly, their yields degrade the further north they are. We can nevertheless estimate that our forests should have 300-400 m³/ha of tree on average - five times the present quantity. This would require almost the present effectiveness in preventing forest fires, and efficiency is well needed on that area.

Instead of our forests binding carbon as much as possible to reconcile the sins of the industrialised world, Finland's forest economy rushes headlong and in the frontline of rolling out ecological disasters. In no other nation is the main industry practised on a full scale on eighty percent of its land. No other branch of industry produces or transports such enormous volumes of material on land and sea, or covers up as much green productive soil (and thus deprives itself from own source of raw material) with their own roads, depots, factory grounds, warehouses, terminals, etc. The figures of the energy consumption by the forest industry are astronomical. When we begin from the building and usage requirements of its equipment, powerplants, oil drills and mines, and stop at the sales and distribution of its products to homes all over the world, considering the lifespan of all the machinery and products, we understand why the globe is asphalted, erodes and desertificates, and drowns in pollution and its own oceans as the climate warms up. In the light of all this, participating in the business of the forest economy is working as a genuine crook.

Let's look a bit deeper. There are also people who admit the massive damage and ruin of the environment by the forest industry with a sore conscience, but they see them as inevitable - destined to happen. "Finland lives on the forests" is a belief held by the persevering majority. In reality, the slogan is nothing but an absurdity. In Finland, likewise to every other country, people live on cultivation, cattle-farming, gathering, fishing and hunting. The forest economy produces, in addition to the little firewood and construction lumber that's necessary, only luxury, of which 90 per cent is harmful to man in every aspect.

By decimating its woodlands, Finland has created the grounds for the prosperity, which we can thank for giving us - among other things - two million cars, millions of gleaming, grey-black boxes of electric entertainment, their thousands of variations, and unnecessary buildings covering green earth. Wealth and surplus money have enabled the nearly incomprehensible plotting of casino economics and mindboggling social injustice, in which the roulette of golf-courses, top hotels, holiday palaces, cornering and Swiss bank accounts has ended up financed by "the ordinary people". But foremost, because of this wealth people are more frustrated, unemployed, unhappier, more suicidal, immobile, worthless and without purpose than ever before in history. A downright miserable exchange.

1993

I have got to read your and five of your companions' writing about "Forest War" in Koillis-Sanomat 22.11.1994.

I have witnessed a lot of gloom in my life but not a single as deceitful and foul attack against protection of life. With it, you stab a knife in the backs of the only people, forest activists, who actually do something for nature in this country. I wish those lines of yours would have at least been an answer to the interview in the paper, but instead you have spontaneously sent your filthy writing!

I sat a long time with you in the snowfalls of the last spring. You are undeniably quite sociable. The visit left a positive memory, although conversations were primarily about the huge royalties from your books and your lifestyle of a renaissance lord; not a word about environmental conservation. As I left I thought wistfully that perhaps the world can bear one extraordinary, immensely rich personality, even though he is also great as a burden on the environment with his ateliers, studios, snowmobiles and million dollar gear. I took consolation in that your books and paintings have indirectly raised favourable feelings towards nature - at least in times, when such basic shaping of the crowd was needed.

Your stance in Koillis-Sanomat, which you wrote as "you were worried about the potential misunderstandings which had occurred in the 'forest war'" collapsed everything: you are an atrocious, cynical cashier of nature. I am ashamed to have your books in my library.

You think that "it's perfectly clear that conservation of areas at the proposed scale (23500 ha) isn't realistic". So your gang has the nerve to state that the tiny fragment of woodland preserved in the south-east corner of raped Kuusamo is too large to be a conservation area? You must be aware of what all researchers in this country know: that amazingly, scandalously little of forest, timber, trees counted in cubes have been protected in Finland; a miniscule fraction even from the most cautious of international standards. We do have preserved mountain fell birch woods and tundra, plus somewhat of bare marshlands...

Has all the knowledge about conservation areas escaped your wits - even the fact repeated over and over again, that protection of species and fostering of the biodiversity specifically requires large consistent acreages, and that the saved chips of some few thousand hectares are just tiny islands where many species cannot survive. The 23500 ha of south-eastern Kuusamo would be, if not a hectare was lost from it, a preservation area of a helpful size and especially if larger areas could be connected to it from behind the border. Like the honoured researcher of primeval forests, Yrjä Haila, wrote in Helsingin Sanomat: "It seems that the most valuable of wild woodlands have been discovered from Koillismaa, near the eastern border and in lands of the shared forest of Kuusamo."

"The thought about the conservation of the old parts of Kuusamo's shared forest doesn't originate from the nature club. Also, we the members of Kuusamo's environment club do not approve at any rate the illegalities that have occurred on behalf of protection." The hypocrisy about "illegalities" is your writing's madnesses. I have been among friends and students of nature for years, and you have to know what everyone else knows: that Finnish law is exactly what environmental conservationists are fighting against, their arch enemy. You know, if you want to, that the Finnish legislation, the law book, is the instrument of economical growth and raping of nature and even ruining of the coming human generations, and it must be re-written in order to survive. You speak like the most dreadful of MTKK's (The Department of Forest Research) gangsters that areas under environmental conservation (those, in which rape is abstained from) should be recompensed fully for the forest owner. In other words, the owner doesn't have even the slightest responsibility of preserving the fatherland. And you know perfectly well that this very principle of full repayment prevents the realizing of preservation programs. I don't expect even a single sane thought from you like the one of forming of conservation areas, but must you too attack protectors of life, who defend nature with personal sacrifices and in hostile environment? I wholeheartedly agree with Yrjö Halla: "The protection of Finland's woodlands would be in a lot worse shape if not for the contributions of nature preservationists... Forest activists should be given an honourable mention on the next indepence day..."

Since a small boy I have observed the condition of Kuusamo through my uncle who lives there and travelled criss-cross the county at summers and winters in the 1950's, infinitely more comprehensively than you ever have had by driving to a few hidden tent sites of yours. I know - at the accuracy of a single patch of grass - both Kitkas, Kuusamojärvi, Muojärvi, Joukamo, Kirpistö, Kiitämö and Suininki from countless of rowing trips, including innumerable little lakes and ponds. I journeyed at the peregrine nests of Kouvervaara when you were sucking your mother's tit, and Julma Ölkky and Somerjärvi at a time when those places saw a dozen hikers per year. I suppose I was the first naturalist to hike to Näränkävaara, invited by the head of the house at the time, Reino Mäntysola. Even the most insane of rangers' deliriums of future weren't haunted by forest roads at that time, and one could get across the lakes that cut the path by being rowed by little flaxen-haired girls and boys. I explored the hawk nests at the rocks of far hillsides with Mäntysola, and we rested on a field at a yard atop a hill and to the west, we had a breathtaking landscape before us - divine, pure, without the cutting wounds from clear fellings. Two-barred crossbills chattered in spruce woods.

The last long and extensive trips to Kuusamo took place on this decade. I know the every little corner of this land like the back of my hand, and I have followed Kuusamo's alteration especially sharply. It does hurt. Barren opening next to another - and Kuusamo's people have such a material standard of living that it shocks the people living in the modest conditions of southern Finland's rural areas. The average number of cars per household is from three to four plus snowmobiles - at every cottage, far away from fishing grounds, just pure luxury. During summer at the yard or rusting behind a shed, as disposable commodity. And booze flows. This is the bullying you are defending.

Shared forest is in itself the most crass and worst form of forest owning. No personal ties to the forest as the only connection is the dividend coming to bank. That doesn't differ in any way from other stock economists and jobbers. You are defending these coupon cutters. Even though the collective forest was forcibly claimed by the state as a nature reserve, wrong would undoubtedly be committed according to the ideals of capitalism, but not greater an iniquity than what has befallen those tens of thousands of Finns who have lost all their savings and reserves for old age in the last few years' staggering of the Homo Sapiens. There would be plenty of room for that injustice in the exuberance of Kuusamo's people.

I'm the most horrified when your gang announces to school the young nature enthusiasts of Kuusamo. I wish that some providence would discontinue that undermining of yours. You are cowards, wretches and rats. I hope that through you, greetings will be delivered to your five other rat friends - Paavo Hamunen, Olli Heikkilä, Jyrki Mäkelä, Seppo Määttä and especially Heikki Seppänen. I have heard that he was the main bully also behind that car race of ornitologists that fills the last corners of your utopia with exhaust gases.

1995

Many speeches have been heard about forests this year. The subject should be topmost, always and not just in waves because Finland equals forest.

But when many are confused after what they've read and are demanding the ultimate truth about the condition and utilization of Finnish forests, they are on wrong tracks. People are very similar with each in physical attributes and emotional life, but light years apart in opinions. Regarding woodlands, some hold Finland's economical growth as the highest value, others the preservation of life on earth. No discussion can arise between these two stances, we have to settle with separate speeches. Part of them may still be valuable.

The outlook on forests is thus linked with the most basic of questions and values, conception of life, human and its place in biocenosis (biosphere). For a protector of life, tender of life's diversity (biodiversity), it is an intangible thought that all the area on earth would belong only to one animal species, human. Behold man, he says. Behold him in Bosnia, Palestine, Rwanda, Kurdistan - or behold it at a Finnish division of inheritance, sex phone, trade union movement. Is it above all other forms of life, does it have the right to command over the fates of all the millions of basically similar species, is it the image of God?

For a preserver of life, forest is the last piece of land that is left for nature. He may accept construction lumber for modest buildings and sparing use of firewood and a part of the returns from mushrooms' and berries' harvest. Forest industry on the other hand, does not have anything to do with the livelihood of man. Living is acquired from agriculture, fishing and gathering throughout the land. Forest industry is only used to achieve luxury, "economic growth".

The protector of life leans on rockhard reasoning. The science of the world is unanimous in it's judgement: if economic growth is continued, the human culture will collapse in a few decades. Those who think in longer terms see human extinction after the ecological catastrophes. The avalanche of other species' extinctions is already humongous, half a million animal-, plant- and fungal species in a year according to the statistics compiled by the Finnish science centrum Heureka.

The report by the UN-constituted Brundtland committee was the result of many compromises and dilutions. Nevertheless, it concluded at halving of energy consumption of industrial countries as a minimum requirement. This means that in Finland, in addition to energy consumption of households, traffic, construction etc. also forest industry has to be cut down to half. In the light of this, increasing forest industry's capacity even more by founding Rauma's pulp factory, is an enormous environmental crime and primarily classified as insane.

The same applies for all the first aid issued by the land's decision-makers, striving back to economic growth after the recession, onto the path of destruction. Nothing have they learned, nothing will they understand. Unbelievable speeches related with this occur in the public. Mining counsellor Casimir Ehrnrooth inquires that how the society can tolerate such a delayer of timber trade like the Department of Forest Research. The real question is: how the society can live with such a whip for the economic growth, arch-enemy of the biocenosis and mankind.

If we have a look at a less significant, distinct problem, the quality of man's life, the burden of sin is blood-red upon the shoulders of the forest industry. Precisely it has acquired the supplementary luxury for Finland, which's misfortune is culminated in horrible casino economy. The timber torn from woodlands is accountable for high technology, automation, high level of education - and the huge decline of our standard of living: massive unemployment (including the meaningless shelter jobs and aimless studying), frustration, emptiness, gap between generations and genders, and physical deficiency resulting from abandoning physical work.

The wintry writings of German newspapers about the devastation of Finnish forests received much more attention than similar indigenous calls for help over the course of years. This time the dog which was hit by the stick, also whined very noisily. Forest industry's campaign of lies has been remarkably vigorous. To someone who has like me journeyed through the forests of over 250 Finnish counties, the writings and photos of German papers seem to point at the right direction, but are still very tame when compared to the nightmarish reality.

Virtually, Finnish woods are stripped so bare, so sold out and first and foremost, so long way off from genuine diverse natural forest, that the resources of language will not permit excessive words. Finnish forest economy has been compared to the ravaging of rain forests. Nevertheless, the noteworthy difference is that there is a half or two thirds left from rain forests, but from Finnish forests there is left - excluding arctic Lapland - 0,6 per cent.

If we think about timber reserves instead of forests, we know forest industry's own statistical number which states that there are 94 solid cubic metres of timber per hectare in Finnish "forests". Many a factor speaks for the fact that the number has been forged as too large. But it would be horrendous even if it was true: full forest covering would be at least 300-400 cubes per hectare on average. Merely the rectifying of global carbon balance, the most grave of grand problems, would require that forest industry was shut down for decades.

Over half a century I have seen dozens of forest preservation programs and newsletters. All of them have been practically destined to end up to trashbin. The guidelines of "softer silviculture" of this spring may point to a more serious purpose. Environmentalists, those easily swindled ones, have received them with cautious favorableness: as long as it is seen in the reality of logging sites... In fact, it seems that the factory in Rauma would waste everything, according to calculations.

My 1450 km long trip through the woodlands of Eastern Häme and Savo only strenghtened the despair. Fellings were more ferocious than ever if possible, the total length of wood piles very many kilometres, and they had logs younger than ever before in them, 20 to 30 year old wretched little ones, clear cuttings and plowings remained unchanged. A strong impression is left: that soft programs are a hoax after all, designed to trick European paper buyers.

In the "Suomen Luonto"-magazine forest doctor Risto Seppälä demands that "environmentalists" resign from additional aims "in the name of honesty", pleading the new forest platform. From what has been said above, even Seppälä will probably realize the insanity of the claim. A meagre compromise of a kind would be that half of the woodlands were fully protected. That would simultaneously be the recommendation of the Brundtland committee. But it is absurd to think of a compromise with the defiants of economical growth, whose all arguments are those of ruin and doom.

1995

Last winter the last forest, an old fir forest loosely spotted by large birches, by the side of home village's road was felled. Simultaneously tall seed pines were taken from a widespread opening at the opposite end of the road; an opening made fifteen years ago, on which thumb-thick seedlings grow now. I currently live on a hectare of plot almost in an island, surrounded by logging sites. It is spacious and roomy.

This opening was indeed made at winter, not at the beginning of summer when animals breed and flowers bloom, like half of clear cuttings of the area. I have noticed this good aspect, which must always be discovered from matters. A creek flows through the opening and a sparse row of single trees was left on its edge, to "protect the key biotope", I assume. They don't protect the microclimate of the creek nor any ferns. It would have been better for the landscape if this wretched line of trees mutilated by logs felled next to them wasn't left to haunt there. All in all, some other trees were left in the opening, each after gaps of twenty or fifty meters.

The logging itself was impressive, like they are nowadays. There is no greater lie than the one about countryside becoming desolate. Now it is truly alive; there's booming and crashing, screeching, crunching, squeaking and howling and clanking of steel scoops.

The main of the job was carried out by two multitask machines painted eco-friendly green. After opening up this gap they moved on to "the large forests" beyond the state road. The virgin woods of my youth and even middle age were all wind-blown scanty woods. Still there was enough work for the machines, further and further away every passing week: gradually crashing changed into banging, banging into distant booming in the end, until it faded inaudible as spring arrived.

Equally heavy trucks took the logs away. I do not know where they were taken this time; earlier dead trees were taken from here to Kaskinen, 300 kilometres away past many forest factories.

Then a new, gigantic red tractor came and hoarded branches and tops with its claw into great pyres beside road. This is done to ensure that there isn't even humus left on the opening. After that, it was the turn of a yellow excavator that tore ground into ditches. During the last years all logging sites here have been ploughed, sometimes even two years after the felling so that green sprouting raspberry bushes have been ripped off and the scenery has been rendered once again monotonously black. This time ploughing was carried off immediately (hooray, found a second good aspect).

All these machines avoided a little patch of preserved trees (third good aspect!). Midst the mighty fir woods there was a small damp concentration of trees, in which no value trees grew. A pretty little tuft of alders was left there. At summer, a local villa inhabitant felled the alders as firewood by the request of the owner of either the forest or opening (the third good aspect is cancelled).

In March I was journeying to a village with a horse and I happened to be in a hurry as well. The road was blocked by two trucks, one carrying a wood chipping machine, other a chip container. At least they gave road for me by backing up inconveniently far off to state road and rumbled on back. I was still quite badly late. The whole enormous mass of snow from the last winter, a mattress half a meter thick, laid on the piles of wood chips. Half of the contents of the chip load was snow that had swirled in. I concluded with my common sense that the energy released from burning the chips is used up in drying up the chips themselves. Some days later I happened to read some calculations from a newspaper, which stated that the efficiency ratio of soaked wet wood chips verges near null.

Then came spring. Giant machines had trampled the road so dense, that frost had frozen the drum shut with oozing waters at the depression. That drum had never frozen before. There was a half a meter pond for many weeks on that road. Fortunately the road was inclined so that pedestrians and people who led their bicycles could get past it along the other shoulder of the road (a new third, good aspect).

At the edge of summer Taimi-Tapio's planting group arrived and planted spruce seedlings into the opening (so small, that I have seen but two tiny green dots from the road with my bare, old eyes). Cardboard boxes weren't left scattered about the opening (fourth good aspect) but were piled up on the side of the road into three tall pyres. And there they were left, increasingly faded, cracking under sun and in rain. Luckily, rains were really uncommon last summer (fifth...). Regardless of that, it looked like three truckloads of household waste had been dumped by the road.

It was discussed with the president of the road government that whose responsibility it is to remove the piles, owner of the opening or the planting company. The latter assumption proved to be correct. The president then caught up with the forester in question. Nothing happened. After all, we are talking about forestry professionals (not a single good aspect). In August as I had been dazzled by the junkyard scenery on some twenty village visits, I complained to Valkeakoski's inspector of environmental preservation, who called forwards to Taimi-Tapio. The piles stayed.

In September I visited Valkeakoski to negotiate with the inspector. I appealed to the fact that the road is formally city's street, with street signs and all (although there are 7 kilometres to a shop or bus stop) and that twenty households live by it, including summer cottages. Couldn't the construction- or park department of the town clear up the waste with their equipment and bill the party in question afterwards? The inspector thought with the heavy burden of experience on his shoulders, that it would lead to a complaintment circle of years and that the town probably wouldn't risk to get its fingers burnt. Nevertheless, we devised a plan that based on the well-known meager mental capabilities of foresters. Presumably, they wouldn't be able to imagine the whole process to its end when confronted, all the way to the triumphant complaints. A mere stern threat would not have the town into a difficult intermediary, on the other hand it might work. During half-way of September the piles disappeared, after a three and a half month long season of decoration.

I have gone ahead of me. At the start of June, during a weekend, the first storm arrived and felled many lone trees from the opening (and the spared row from beside the creek). One of them dropped a telephone wire. It was exactly because the storm that I had to discontinue my three month long row after aquatic birds and visit home. I needed phone by then, but I managed with a two kilometer hike to a neighbouring village, because the line was cut for three days as electricians came on Monday.

But the storm of midsummer was harsh and spanned over the province. It fell more trees from the opening (only a few were left). The telephone wire came down again by many pole intervals. A world without phone would undoubtedly be a much better place to live in. But then the life of humans would be arranged in another manner. Now that we have assumed attitude that phone exists, its absence causes great difficulties. I had to call about the endoscopic surgery to hospital, my 92-year-old mother, fellow hikers, and taxi to transport me back to my boat in the far away villages. I visited home for two additional times, many days between them, and still the village was without phone. I cycled in turns to acquiantances in nearby villages whose phones worked.

After many tries the failure had been managed to be reported. On the second week I called a couple of times from those acquiantances to the fault center to find out about maintenance schedules. The phone had been cut before too, and then it was called from the village to Valkeakoski or Toijala and electricians came the same day. Only the national fault center works now. Welcome to Sonera's free service. We are reserved at the moment. You are in the line... Then five minutes of music. Welcome to Sonera's free... Five minutes of music. Welcome to Sonera's... The same indescribably sweet voice which aroused a lust to kill.

Connection was never established, but precisely after ten days electricians arrived. Sonera had fired half of their electricians and the situation was uncontrollable after the stronger storm. A close neighbour of mine is involved with the story: a 85 year old woman living by herself, whose daughter calls her daily from Tampere to make sure she is fine. It was of almost inconceivable luck that her grandchild had a short vacation at that beach cottage just when the lines were cut, and he could take care of his grandmother and simultaneously maintain connection to Tampere with the threefold rate of mobile phone.

Piles of waste are gone and the phone (and the old lady) is working. But the covering and merciful snow is delaying. Now that forest economy doesn't have restraints anymore nor restrictions on the brutality of its methods (I don't mean the paper paragraphs of the forest law or swindles like certificates, but reality), and that ploughed openings of former woodlands connect with each other and fields in deserts kilometres wide, the nightmare is absolute. Yet fifteen years ago all houses of nearby villages had cattle and half of the field was green grass. Now there isn't a single calf or green patch of grass. A great share of the village area is plowed, fields and forests torn into black soil.

This is my Fatherland. Fatherland must be loved. So I love this. I love, love, love, I assure myself. What else would I love if not this? It must be loved, an intangibly bitter must.

1999

At the beginning of February media shocked the Finnish friend of nature in an exceptional manner. The strike came from an unexpected direction and thus was especially unsettling. International WWF, the World Wildlife Fund, had given a announcement which stated that Finland was - after Switzerland - the second best of EU-countries in forestry. Estonia and Latvia came off as the worst.

We know that the forest economy of Finland is the greatest environmental catastrophe of the new Europe - result of the massive clearing for fields centuries ago. Our 200 000 km² of woodlands have been utterly razed after the wars, our timber reserves are now 50-70 solid m³/ha: in other words, just a little over 10 per cent of the full, natural amount (400-500 m³/ha).

The bulk of the Finnish so-called forest is either new, bare opening which can't be discerned from a field at winter like now, or nursery thick as wrist at most. Tree-filled patches are stand out from landscape as tiny islands and tufts. They too disappear at an incomprehensible rate, harvesters open hundreds of new sites every day.

Nothing like the devastation of this kind happens in any other European country (praises to all gods for that). In 1986-98, I have myself made forest inventories of thousands of kilometres in the most of European countries, so the situation there is more than familiar to me. (In the homeland I have made inventories of tens of thousands of kilometres of woodlands in nearly 250 counties during the years 1948-99.) In most European countries - Germany especially - forest covering is almost untouched, although originating partly from ancient plantings and manipulated for some time. Estonia, Latvia (and Lithuania) have the most overwhelmingly inviolated, fabulous virgin forests.

I have discussed about this public statement, which's information regarding Finnish silviculture is from Finland, with Timo Tanninen, the head secretary of WWF's Finnish fund, without receiving a clear explanation. To clarify matters he has sent 135 pages of English text - straight to the trash bin (how can it occur to someone that a friend of nature and protector of forests from Häme would know even a word of English?) - and a page-long Finnish leaflet which has no sense whatsoever. In it it's speaken incoherently about excellent forestry and at the same time, the small area of conserved forests.

WWF and its Finnish fund must be aware that "forestry" is a precisely opposed human action against protection. Regardless of euphemistic terminology, it means cutting down the forest, logging, and thus is clearly an (arch) enemy of nature preservation. Giving a statement about differing methods of loggings, that is, ravaging forest, is none of WWF's business.

WWF can't be uninformed of that the forest industry utilizes its statement in its raging information war, by which they are trying to conceal the utter devastation of Finnish forests from European purchasers of wood products. Or has WWF changed into a branching department of the forest industry, a criminal organization, in the thoroughly corrupted Finland and Europe?

There has been no canceling to be heard of that gross statement. The situation is bitter for such a companion of nature who has, like me, supported WWF's Finnish fund to get up on its own feet with many arduous campaigns when it was being founded, and who has been part of its administrative board for a long time and till these days, given a large share of one's income in its fund-raising campaigns.

2000

There is much to comment on in WWF's chief secretary's report (Helsingin Sanomat (8/03). Even the main question remained shrouded in mystery: why WWF even bothers to present estimations about forestry in different countries, when the state of forests is the only interest of nature conservation (Estonia and Latvia topping, Finland as the very last).

Tanninen's outline "WWF acknowledges that forests are also taken economic advantage of", is wretched. "WWF admits it as reality that forests are being taken economic advantage of": that sentence would make sense. It is a logical impossibility for an environmentalist to accept forest industry. WWF shouldn't worry even in the least about forest economy or business in general, as they have enough people looking after their interests. WWF should care only about nature. An unambiguous definition of preservation: it is defending the rights and living space of animals, plants and fungi and likewise restricting the rights, living space and economic life of humans.

Fortunately the activity of WWF - unlike the statements - is nature conservation exactly like that. It collects funds from people, both from donations by friends of nature and companies and royalties, and transfers them into campaigns for nature. The consumption capacity of environmentalists declines and businesses' possibilities of operation and investing weaken by the amount of these coins. Of course WWF must have good relations with enterprises although the ecological balance of their products or services often isn't very praiseworthy or - to use the newest term - their "ecological backpack" is light. But there must be a limit. Wood industry is the only one whose whole business idea is hundred percent direct and immediate destruction of nature. If WWF speaks with its mouth, there's something inherently rotten in it.

Forest economy is certainly my negotiation partner, but not on its own conditions. The bare minimum, uncompromising demand by nature conservation is at least that clear cuttings and summer loggings are completely banned. Finland's Winter War is a valid comparison example. At that time it was first persistently negotiated but when the conditions of the larger one were unconscionable, fire was fought with fire. And lo, the little one succeeded incomparably better than what the odds proclaimed.

It is unforgivable that Tanninen uses statistics by the Department of Forest Research. Nature scientists and woodsmen haven't believed in them for decades. The wintry satellite photos of the 70s, where grown forest appeared as black and nurseries and clearings as white, are remembered. Even back then the borders of Finland stood out like they would have been drawn on a map: white Finland between black Karelia and Sweden. The Department Of Forest Research coughed on for some time until it decided that those pictures were fake...

The Department of Forest Research is an organ of forest industry that has nothing do with pure science like university research does, although its officials are confusingly called as professors. By its regulations, it is an institute which's duty is to produce the information that the industry needs.

It's common sense to say it is impossible for the Department of Forest Research to report that the country's timber reserves have declined 30 % - let alone 70 % - which might come close to the truth. What would then be the status and image of wood industry, and what would be the preconditions of its operation? The Department of Forest Research has to announce that the reserves are increasing, even when the last berry bush is being dragged to a factory.

There's corruption and cheating everywhere in the world where there is a lot of loose money. The money of the Seafaring Committee and Workers' Savings Bank are mere coins compared to those that circulate in forest economy. If someone presents a supposition that one can not find any cheating or corruption in that industry, not a single sociologist, psychologist or sociopsychologist will verify that claim.

The claim that timber reserves would have increased from the end of the 40s, is mostly absurd. Back then a large part of Northern and Eastern Finland was "zero tolerance area"; the enormous logging savings from the five years of war accumulated with timber reserves; according to the customs' statistics, export of forest industry was a small part of the present one, and clear cutting was prohibited in the forest law as "wasting of woodlands".

The situation in forests is now the same as it was at waters some time ago. Then too it was uselessly being bawled about how factories themselves measured their pollution emissions. Not until their own workers and engineers joined with the people's mutiny because their sauna beaches morphed into stinking sludge, industry had to distribute pollution from water to air as fallouts.

WWF (and other nature organizations) focuses on full preservation of tiny fragments of woodlands. This is the way of despair, every conserved area means extra loggings elsewhere. Old forest's microclimate, it's vegetation or especially animals, will not endure in small isolated forest islands. The bait that forest industry offers, "ecological passages", is fool's game.

Forest preservation can only be protection of the whole area of forests and the only main number is the amount of annual logging, "loss". That can it be managed to decrease is something that everything depends on. I'll again draw a comparison with the Winter War. Should Finnish negotiators at autumn 1939 have presented: "We understand and acknowledge that the Soviet Union requires, for the needs of its growing population, our agricultural production, forest reserves and industry and for seafaring, the harbors of the gulf of Finland, Aland Islands and the gulf of Bothnia, but we suggest that a few islands of a string-like country are built mainly to Northern Finland to preserve Finnish language and folk tradition." But look at what they did: Finland did fight for its whole acreage.

It is an essentially important fact that the negotiating positions of the forest industry have decisively abated. Regardless of forest industry's insanely grown export amounts their relative share of all export trade has fallen under 30 %. That means we wouldn't even have to abandon our luxurious lifestyle if the whole foreign trade of wood industry was discontinued. Pruning of the worst humbug trash from import would suffice. Homeland's consumption is a different matter but for example, our dear Helsingin Sanomat could well manage its pivotal mission of information with a tenth of the present amount of paper.

Fighting for forests is fighting for Finland. Three fourths of Finland is woodland. What the forest looks like is what Finland looks like. Finland equals forest. If forest is flayed, Finland is flayed.

2000

Finland has the most potent forest industry in the world. What efficiency means here as well is explained by the known, witty aphorism: efficiency = extermination.

The history of this country's wood industry has many phases, each gloomier than the previous one. After hunting-grounds and fishing-waters had been conquered and fields cleared and a perfect livelihood obtained for the folk from them, forests were still mercilessly cut down. Only a small share is meant for absolutely necessary use, such as construction and firewood. Also this usage is more and more unavailing and harmful. The building frenzy of Finns and the amount and acreage of useless buildings is unique in the whole world, likewise the extremely unhealthily high room temperature being a world record (excepting dwellings in the tropic). And carbon dioxide puffs to the sky from hundreds of thousands of saunas, without which the rest of mankind splendidly fares.

An evergrowing share of Finnish forest end up as products that have never had anything to do with livelihood. According to somewhat sensible criteria, not a tenth of the main product of Finnish woods, paper, is used even for enriching human culture - or life. A significant portion of paper causes only growing impatience and frustration. Paper is pollution of even grander proportions than smog and sewage of paper mills or emissions from transports on ground and water are. When this is realized, forest industry will lose its basis and justification.

Since tar of olden times, most of the products by wood industry have been freighted to distant lands beyond seas. Finland has the position of Europe's colony, its skin is peeled off for the needs of host countries. There is one difference to the classic colony arrangement as also the colony itself wastes its timber and paper: yet again a world record for Finland in paper consumption per person. But there's one term on which the comparison to the trade of developing countries is valid: host countries pay with useless junk. When their use of paper and wood likely won't be any more necessary than that of the producing country, we are in fact speaking of garbage trade: trash for trash. There is the sensibility of the whole foreign trade. Chillingly fierce environmental influences are a different matter altogether.

Since tar burning and export saw industry that lighted up one and a half century ago, Finland's woodlands have had hard times. Nevertheless, the loggings before the wars were child's play compared to these days; they did provide work for enormously many men and horses, but amounts of timber - and export especially - were mostly pathetic compared to nowadays.

During the wars forests could rest, and only near settlements it was worked at, voluntarily gathering firewood. Still until 1950s vast areas of forest in Eastern and Northern Finland, and in the heartlands of Southern Finland too beyond the so-called "zero limit", hummed in the calm of many a millennia. Chainsaw (and the first wave of unemployment) arrived at the end of the decade. And at the end of 1960s a definition unknown until then, a forest road - a road that doesn't lead to a house - was given birth. After that even the greatest of woodlands were cut into tiny pieces, the zero limit ceased to exist, and the whole country was under loggings.

Soon after the wars also a forest law that forbid (excluding clearing for fields) clear fellings of forests as "wasting of woodlands", as the term read, was abolished. And when the forest labour was transferred to so-called multitasking machines in 1980s - and when nine out of ten loggers went unemployed - clear cutting became the leading method of logging. Primitive and cumbersome over-wide machines cannot operate in a selectively felled forest, so all trees have to be flatted down.

In every phase of wood industry, logging quantities and first and foremost, export, have increased sharply. Although, there is a slight crack at the closeout sale of the end of the millennium. On the other hand, forest companies have had to give a bit of respect to the protests of indigenous environmental organizations and the big crowd and on the other hand, protests of the paper purchasers of Germany and Great Britain. UPM-Kymmene's conservation of nearly 2000 ha in Repovesi is, without any spite, magnificent and the giant company has small preserved forests elsewhere, too - and a hired full-time official of nature conservation. Even in the state-owned forests from whence the majority of national and nature parks have been cleaved from, extra admissions have been made, deep plowings abandoned and a maximum size set for clear fellings.

But those little improvements will not have an effect to the overall status of woodlands in Southern or Central Finland either, as forests are practically almost fully in private ownership, and that sector is jet black. There isn't a sign of "softer silviculture" or restrictions on clear felling acreages to be seen in the reality of privately owned forests.

The largest clearing of a single patch of forest in Tavastia I've seen myself was in Pälkäne two years ago, a hundred hectares, and in Sääksmäki, too, the clear cuttings of even half a dozen patches joined each other into an enormous desert where the only thing standing was a telephone mast, towering from an elevation. When I managed to procure a conservation area of an old forest little under seven hectares in size at autumn before last, there were standing equally superb-looking sections of woods of five different forest owners by its borders or corners - two of them were even older and more lovely than the preserved area itself. Three weeks then, the last one of them was razed in a clear cutting: there is no "ecological corridor", a connection to the outside world anymore from the protected woodland.

Horrifying examples of a forest industry that grows more brutal and mauling each day are evident to every man from the countryside. The story of the desert born from three clear fellings at the junction of my home road and a state road is illustrative. When a harvester came to pick up the few trunks left as decoy which fell immediately in a storm, it promptly mangled a warning triangle-roadsign of the crossroads to a ditch.

It is easy to describe the present situation at the woodlands of Southern Finland. The great acreages of forest in the backlands, which were virginal woods a century ago, were cut down in the 60s, 70s and 80s, and now they tardily grow wrist-thick - or shin-thick, at best - thicket from nurseries that have struggled through from under the grass. The sides of roads, fields and villages that were bare meadows, pastures or burnt-over clearings in the 19th century - the best, most nutritional soil - grew until the recent years rather noble hundred year old forest, mostly populated with fir trees.

Those forests at edges, scenic woods, were largely kept untouched until the very last moments, mainly out of piety. Now a "clearance sale" final solution is under way; all restrictions have become void. The purchasing organizations, forest committees and silvicultural associations of insatiable wood industry, these death dealers and officials of the apocalypse, have put up a relentless campaign. Countrywide aerial scouting reveals densely grown forest patterns, the owner is found out and untiring persuasion is begun. It is said again and again that the forest rots while standing and the coming change in the forest tax is used as an excuse.

Excluding the bullheads countable with fingers, forest owners' - usually old, uncertain, helpless - archaic sense of honor is managed to be cracked and care of home area's landscapes, people's berry and mushroom grounds, ruined. And the duo arrives, a multitasking machine and a forest tractor, and a truck with a trailer behind them. A few days of crashing, crunching, clanking and chains' clinking and the wasteland is spotted only by empty oil canisters. The wind howls in corners. Finis Finlandiae.

2003