EP wrote:I wish. We could use this Merve guy in south-eastern Finland.
Well from what I can tell ...as a general remark, Finland seems to have a higher level of respect for nature than you would generally find in Canada, though a significant part of the Canadian population is quite environmentally aware. And about Merve...well, guys like him are kind of rare everywhere I guess... Intelligent, energetic, and highly-principled... I guess you would say he has a "Victorian" personality... I remember other people like him when I was growing up... though they were rare back then and even rarer these days... I suppose it's the Victorian mindset at its best...
Just like Penelope I had thought that huge areas wiped out are something that was left in the 1970s. I had not seen a wiped out forest in 30 years, so this summer was a shock to me. We went to the cottage in the beginning of June, and right after we had turned from the main road to the forest road we saw HUGE areas with not a single tree on both sides of the road. Husband just shrugged his shoulders and said: "Well, looks like the owner´s daughter now has an apartment in the center of Helsinki." And we thought that that was it. But last month even bigger are was wiped out, and THAT is right next to where our forest begins.
Yes...You see just too much of that in the forests in my part of the world...it's not as bad as it was, but it still goes on... And it's not as though it doesn't cause other problems...fast runoffs during spring snowmelt; flooding; land slides (...and typically any nearby logger will get away with saying something lame such as it was an unusually heavy rainfall that caused the slide... We can easily see the problems poor forestry practices are having in China...every year now they have serious flood events...)
But you do need effective government policies to deal with forest issues...there are many other values involved...water and air quality, wildlife, recreation, climate on the macro-scale... To allow individuals to make their decisions "in a vacuum" is just too shortsighted... Almost always you will run into the "tragedy of the commons'....it is almost always in the individual's short-term interest to liquidate a long term asset like timber, unless they have inducements not to... That Helsinki apartment can look rather appealing...
penelope wrote:...I think the stripped out forests look awful, like some nuclear meltdown disaster zone, and the damage to wildlife must be substantial.
I agree...and on a small scale, just to show what happens, in the mid-90s there was a rather large residential development put in less than a kilometre from my house....it was part of a huge block of land that had once been a prison facility, built back when the area was quite rural. Part of the land was developed for housing, and the larger part of it was incorporated into a large suburban park. Anyway...we had an "invasion" of birds and other small animals ...squirrels and raccoons... fleeing the destruction... The connection really was obvious. The squirrels were both the native Douglas squirrel..pretty much equivalent to the British red squirrel, and the introduced gray squirrel...(yes the same culprit as in the "squirrel wars" going on in England)... Eventually the natural balance restored itself, but I'm sure I don't need to tell you which squirrel lost out...
