When Arvi Sepp was a boy in Soviet-ruled central Estonia, his parents went into the woods and carried gifts.
“They would bring the first piece of meat from a cow, the first cup of beer from a barrel.” He smiles and touches his beginner’s hat over his white hair. “The first glass of vodka from the bottle.”
As he walked quietly over the cobblestones, Sepp recalls how his family decades earlier would follow old hiking trails to find a spring in the middle of the hill that rises like a fist from the marshy lowlands near his village of Paluküla. There, where the water bubbled up under a birch roof, they made the offer.
Sacred places like this still exist in Estonia, a country where today thousands follow a pre-Christian religion of forestry called Maausk. But the feeling that Sepp grew up with – that certain places in the forest must be kept sacred and offensive – is no longer so universal.
A paper published in Nature in July stated that Estonia had one of the highest rates of forest losses in Europe – after a sudden increase from 2016 to 2018 that raised the clearing rate by 85 percent compared to what it had been in the last decade. The overvoltage was largely changed by the demand for wood pellets for bioenergy, the authors of the study found.
Worldwide, as the forest area has decreased by more than 440 million acres since 1990, tree plantations have increased by more than 300 million acres. Forests are being transformed into industrial tree fields – and little Estonia has become a clear case study in this global transformation. The loss of natural forests cuts deep into Estonian history and religion.
The Estonian cultural association House of Groves lists 80 holy places which have been cleared by industry loggers, a list they emphasize is not exhaustive. They have mapped 1,200 additional websites, many of which have no formal protection, which means they risk being logged. Most of the sites are located in old growth forests, which make up about 2 percent of Estonia’s remaining forest cover. Only half of these are set aside as protected areas; a quarter are under limited protection, and another quarter are not protected at all.
At the heart of Estonian culture, says Sepp, is the idea of the forest as an active presence, something that people do not create but rather “get out of the way of.” The reverence for nature here is powerful. The non-violent independence movement that ousted the Soviet occupying force in the 1990s began as an environmental protest.
But in the decades following independence, Scandinavian investment and logistical support flowed in, and Estonians driving the country’s highways began to see harvesters on the edge of forests and pick trees like daisies. In their place have come evenly distributed rows of spruce and spruce planted for the global market, a replacement of the forest with something much simpler and more profitable, as the Estonian ecologist Asko Lõhmus has said.
“You can plant trees,” says Lõhmus, “but you cannot plant a forest.”
In this distinction lurks a world of debate about the global future of forestry: will natural forests have to follow their own destiny – as in the traditional Estonian model – or will landscapes be bent to the will of the commodity market. So far it has been the other.
What is a forest?
In the early 2000s, Estonian lawyer Raul Kirjanen saw an opportunity to break into the growing world of green energy. To feed the demand in nearby Sweden for coal alternatives, Kirjanen founded a company, called Graanul, to turn Estonian sawdust into wood pellets that can be burned in coal-fired power plants.
But when the supply of sawdust ceased, Graanul turned to the forest that Lõhmus called “the only good that the Soviets left us”: the scattering stands of conifers and oak that had grown wild in fields whose workers had been killed, deported or scattered by the upheavals and the state terror from Stalinism and World War II.
During the first decades of the new millennium, Scandinavian timber companies cleared thousands of hectares of this forest and replanted it with conifers. Since 2009, when the European Union decided that biomass energy was carbon neutral – meaning it would probably not release any new carbon into the atmosphere – Graanulhas favored the resulting market, emerging as the world’s second largest pellet producer, behind Maryland’s Enviva. As Estonia’s forest loss has become increasingly visible, the debate over biomass felling – a small but rapidly growing slice of a forest industry that also produces paper and other consumer products for export – has come to the fore in the larger conflict over the country’s forests.
But what exactly is a forest?
As both the US Forest Service and the Estonian Ministry of the Environment define it, a forest can only have one type of tree on it – or even be a stump field. “Forest”, as these agencies use the word, is a zoning category: it means that the land is intended for trees, not rye fields or houses.
That definition, says Lõhmus, overrides a huge difference between natural woodlands and those planted and harvested. Tree planting of this type and the biomass products that come from it are often discussed as natural climate solutions trees absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
But what happens in Estonia, where natural forests are logged for wood pellets and then replaced with plantations, is something completely different, says Lõhmus. It is not just that the carbon stored in the trees is released when the pellets are burned. When the forest is cleared – with its dozens of tree species, hundreds of plants, thousands of insect species – the carbon that has built up in the soil oxidizes for decades or centuries. It releases a continuous plume of carbon dioxide which – according to a study of the Center for Sustainable Economy—May last more than a decade.
And the plantation that replaces it according to 2020 study published in Environmental research letter, may holds 30 to 50 percent less carbon than the natural forestand even the less reliable in the long run. It will also be less resistant to drought, but the reasons why are not yet clear.
For Lõhmus, the key to a healthy forest ecology is a basic understanding that forests do not have to be for any human use – an understanding, he states, that creeps in nicely with the traditional forest religion in Maausk. Maa is Estonian for “country.” Maausk is sometimes translated as “nature worship” or “earth believers” or even “neo-pagans.” For his part, Sepp, the linguist, likes the word “pagan”, a Germanic word that suggests one who goes to worship in heath-heath outside the city.
Past linguistic coincidence, he notes, “heath” reasons with hiis, the Estonian name of the holy places, and both bear the common memory of the beliefs that were native to Europe in the ages before its indigenous faith most disappeared, along with the heath itself.
Unlike the Celtic Druids and the ancient Germanic religions replaced by Christianity, Maausk and its practitioners – like the small remnants of ancient forests in Estonia – have to some extent escaped this fate. The Maausk shrine stands as relics from a time when the faith was equally inseparable from Europe’s northern forests as Shinto is today from those from Japan.
A forest people
In Estonia, traditions are rooted in almost a millennium of traumatic history. Far below the fortress where Arvi Sepp and I hike, Lake Viljandi glitters in a valley cut by ice age glaciers. Some claim that Estonians have been there since the ice retreated.
During the Middle Ages, Christianity crept northward as missionaries, merchants, and crusaders sent by the pope penetrated the Baltic forests. The crucifix Sepp and I visit stands on a hill where Lembitu, the last great Estonian resistance leader, died in battle in 1217. Thereafter, the Estonian population was forced to convert to Christianity and was ruled – and periodically enslaved – by Swedes, Germans, Poles, Russians and Danes.
“It was a word from that time,” says the folklorist Marju Kõivupuu“That ‘an Estonian is a tool that speaks.’” When Lutheranism swept in from Germany and Sweden, or Soviet communism from Russia, says Kõivupuu, the forest lands helped to promote “a secret order that stood against the religion forced on Estonians.”
Which is that the forest took on a more extreme version of the role it plays everywhere, of a divided public, the place outside the city where wild and civilized met and flowed together; where farmers could find berries, meat, clean water, firewood and shelter. Renegades could live there without money, apart from civilization, like Estonia Forest Brothers’ resistance movement did during World War II.
When the Soviets finally withdrew from Estonia in the 1990s, and the country became independent, Estonian environmental activists argued that the country should return to its traditional model of low-intensity forestry – mushroom collection, berry picking, beekeeping, selective wood cutting, wood collection – in in contrast to the industrial timber harvest that is common among Estonia’s rich Scandinavian neighbors. Finland, for example, had invested heavily in high-yield, high-quality but extremely expensive and often invasive forestry, a model based on reclamation of the landscape around some carefully occurring species, planted in square blocks and harvested clearly.
“Instead of clearing the principal,” says ecologist Asko Lõhmus, “we can live off the interest.”
“What people need to remember,” says Lõhmus, “is that behind every environmental policy debate there is a moral debate. The question is what is important to us? What do we value? ”
The sacred forest
That question resonates far beyond Estonia. On the hot July day, Sepp and I wander around Viljandi Castle, we meet an international group of forest activists who visit some of the remaining Maausk sites. They have come from Britain, Tasmania and the Appalachian Mountains of North Carolina, all regions that have also seen their natural forests replaced by the plantation model.
The movement against industrial forests in, for example, North Carolina is not as explicitly religious as for Maausk’s advocates – environmental activists in the United States talk more about benefits such as carbon sequestration and other “ecosystem services” rather than spiritual value. But even for such activists, Maausk reasoned like a beaten tuning fork: a reminder of a different view of value.
“There’s this heart-mind connection that people feel with forests,” said Rita Frost, a campaigner for the North Carolina-based Dogwood Alliance. That feeling, she says, drives people to action in a way that more quantitative approaches do not.
The same day, Sepp and I drive north through rye fields. We pass newly planted young trees fighting for their piece of the sky. An hour north of Viljandi, the old hiis drops over the fields like a kind of animal, its fur made of trees. At the top we are greeted by Eha Metsallik, a beekeeper of 60 and with hot pink Nikes and long, white gold hair. And Maausk practitioners, she sells honey from her bees, which she keeps in hiis the forest, because the fields where she used to keep them are now poisoned with herbicide, she says.
This site is now protected, thanks in part to a local civic movement that fought its cleansing of a ski slope a decade ago. But like many other sites, it faces another threat that may be even harder to fight: the death of those who know where the holy sites are. Ahto Kaasik, the 51-year-old head of the House of Groves cultural association, has estimated that thousands of seats could disappear in the coming decade, first lost to collective memory and then eventually to the harvests.
At the moment we are walking slowly through a green tunnel with 80-year-old birches, Metsallik’s voice is singing and melodic. She recites half poetry to herself, syncopated with the branches that break under our feet. “This is the silence that protects the world,” she says. “The whole world needs the wonderful silence. Every needle, every blade. ”
On the plains below, pine and spruce grow in lines, intended for pellets, pulp, paper and consumer products in distant lands. Hiisskogen where we stand is free, self-organizing, a vision and a thin remnant of land left to manage itself and a culture that moves out of the way.
Source: sn.dk