
Last major primeval forest in Europe on 'brink of collapse' - a_w
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/may/23/worst-nightmare-europes-last-primeval-forest-brink-collapse-logging
======
jdavis703
How come the other countries were allowed to benefit from logging and
destroying their own primeval forests, but because Poland was the last one
they're being called out? If the UN or EU were serious about this, they'd
offer to buy out the forest at whatever the market rate is for this wood, and
Poland would use that money the retrain the forest workers.

~~~
danbruc
While I understand what you are aiming at, I don't think it is that simple.
Should someone pay me for not having slaves and not being able to profit from
exploiting them because I am a century or two late and missed the good old
time when it was not yet an unacceptable practice?

~~~
nordsieck
If you legally acquired them, then yes. The British experience ending slavery
was far more humane than the US one.

~~~
lkrubner
You can't own human beings, because it violates their fundamental rights. This
was true back when slavery was "legal". The Nazis could pass a law saying that
the Holocaust was legal, but the rest of the world felt free to disregard that
law, and put the Nazis on trial. Some laws are not legal, that is the whole
entire point of the West's 2,400 year old liberal tradition. Likewise, some
claims of ownership are not legal, and not binding. You can pay good money for
a slave, but you still don't own the slave, because no law can make it legal
to own another human being. And this was true for all of the thousands of
years that slavery was legal: none of those laws were ever legitimate, and
none of those ownership claims were ever legitimate.

~~~
Swizec
> You can't own human beings, because it violates their fundamental rights.
> This was true back when slavery was "legal".

There's no such thing as fundamental rights. Those were won by sweat and
blood.

Up until the enlightenment and humanist eras there was not even the idea that
such a thing as rights even exists. Some inkling of rights existed for royalty
in the codes of conduct and such things, but they were freedoms given by right
of birth and power of ancestor's sword.

For peasants, no such luck. They were property even though they weren't slaves
per se.

~~~
lkrubner
Until the Arabs came up with the concept of zero, no human had any idea about
zero, nor did mathematicians use the zero. Nevertheless, zero has always
existed. Just because humans didn't know about it doesn't mean zero didn't
matter. Likewise, all human beings have always had fundamental rights, and
that was true during the era when people did not spend much time talking about
rights. You assume this when you write "Those were won by sweat and blood."
The point is, why did people fight for them? Why did people think they had any
right to fight for them?

More so, you are wrong that the discussion of rights has only happened in the
modern era. Elaine Pagels, a historian of early Christianity, has studied why
women and slaves were often the strongest supporters of early Christianity --
part of the answer is the Christian church fought for their rights. Pagels
offers, as an example, a priest in North Africa who felt that slave owners
should be punished if they raped their slaves. At the time, the idea was
counter to Roman law, but of course the millions of slaves in the Empire were
supportive of such ideas.

~~~
deong
People fought and bled and died for the right to own slaves too.

The point is that there's no such thing as a universal right. There are only
rights some individual believes __should be __universal rights. If enough
individuals band together, they can get those rights enshrined by whatever
authority has the ability to grant and recognize rights for those people, but
as long as that authority refuses them, they don 't have that right. They just
__should __have that right, according to you or me or whoever.

~~~
anigbrowl
Yes, but they lost because ultimately they couldn't explain why one person
should own slaves and another should be enslaved, other than luck. Rights are
indeed what people assert, but to argue they have no conceptual existence is
to confuse them with power relations.

~~~
deong
No, they lost because their military power wasn't sufficient to impose their
view of "rights" onto those they were fighting.

Again, we all likely agree that there is a _moral_ imperative in play here
that slavery should not be tolerated. And had the South won, I'm sure the guy
being whipped against a post would be super comforted by us sitting around
talking about his universal human rights. He could think about them to take
his mind off the lashings.

I'm not arguing that rights have no conceptual existence. I'm arguing that
conceptual existence isn't the existence that really matters. It's all lovely
for me to say that anyone has the right to draw whatever cartoons they want,
but there are 30 million people in Saudi Arabia who would rightly call me an
idiot. The _actual_ existence of the right is not some airy concept that I
just get to define because it pleases me. It's a very practical thing that
affects people's daily lives, and I don't get to declare otherwise just
because it suits me.

~~~
anigbrowl
That's certainly true once you get to the kinetic stage of war with people
actually battling, but I'd back up and look at the political breakdowns that
led to that outcome. It does feel like we basically agree though, and are just
describing the same thing from somewhat different perspectives, so I don't
want to be pedantic about it.

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myth_drannon
Belovezhskaya Pushcha is one of the oldest official natural reserves in
Europe. I can't give the sources right now but it was already protected area
600 hundred years ago. It had a special status since the early times of
Russian Empire. Even Nazi Germany during its invasion to USSR recognized the
importance of the forest and didn't sent the army through it and kept it
intact. Also it is a home to bisons which were extinct in North America and
recently some animals were transfered from it for repopulation.

~~~
qbaqbaqba
Belovezhskaya Pushcha - are you referring to the Belorussian part? Nazi
Germans were cutting the forest quite happily, USSR did some heavy damages by
draining whatever they could and European bison is quite different than the
American one.

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dgregd
I wonder how HN will explain this [1]:

"In western North America, the current outbreak of the mountain pine beetle
and its microbial associates has destroyed wide areas of lodgepole pine
forest, including more than 16 million of the 55 million hectares of forest in
British Columbia. The current outbreak in the Rocky Mountain National Park
began in 1996 and has caused the destruction of millions of acres of ponderosa
and lodgepole pine trees. According to an annual assessment by the state's
forest service, 264,000 acres of trees in Colorado were infested by the
mountain pine beetle at the beginning of 2013. This was much smaller than the
1.15 million acres that were affected in 2008 because the beetle has already
killed off most of the vulnerable trees"

Of course something similar cannot happen in Poland.

[1]
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mountain_pine_beetle](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mountain_pine_beetle)

~~~
omginternets
What, exactly, are you insinuating? That parasites are driving Poles to cut
down trees?

If so, where's the evidence that this is the case?

~~~
tabasz
That's what the Ministry of Environment is claiming. This does not
automatically make it true, but at least for me, it is a more reputable source
than Guardian and European Commission which both attacked Polish government on
numerous other occasions.

~~~
omginternets
>which both attacked Polish government on numerous other occasions.

 _Prima facie_ , this does not reduce their credibility.

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spatulon
Maciej Cegłowski wrote an essay about his trip to Białowieża forest some
number of years ago. Like everything on his site, it's worth reading.

[http://www.idlewords.com/2012/02/bia%C5%82owie%C5%BCa_forest...](http://www.idlewords.com/2012/02/bia%C5%82owie%C5%BCa_forest.htm)

~~~
frabbit
Thank you for that link. Well worth reading as it is both funny and
informative:

    
    
       The principal large mammals in Białowieża are
       the bison, moose, wolf, boar, bobcat, and graduate
       student. The last spends a lengthy juvenile period
       studying forest theory in Western Europe before
       migrating in to do field work and possibly mate.

------
jakozaur
Poland used to have reasonable government. Now we have Trump-lite version.

Just one example environment minister: Jan Szyszko

1\. Approves logging near national park on massive scale.

2\. Lax regulation for cutting down trees everywhere.

3\. Claims it is highly uncertain if global warming is due to human activity.

4\. Hunter, shoot to animals a lot while being environment minister.

5\. Works hard to protect coal mine industry.

~~~
patrickg_zill
As an aside, some hunters work to preserve the natural area, viewing hunting
and nature appreciation as something both enjoyable and to be passed down to
future generations.

For example, Ducks Unlimited [http://www.ducks.org/](http://www.ducks.org/) .

~~~
adrianN
Since we've eliminated so many predators, hunting is necessary to control
populations. I would however prefer it if we reintroduced natural predators
instead.

~~~
GFischer
I saw a pretty cool documentary on how reintroducing wolves to Yellowstone
changed the ecosystem for the better.

Not the one I saw but very similar:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ysa5OBhXz-Q](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ysa5OBhXz-Q)

More serious article:

[http://www.yellowstonepark.com/wolf-reintroduction-
changes-e...](http://www.yellowstonepark.com/wolf-reintroduction-changes-
ecosystem/)

------
pjc50
This is basically the same process as the logging of the rainforest; it's
nominally protected, but a combination of poverty, greed and weak law
enforcement means the protection is ineffective.

~~~
baq
The difference here is that this logging is state-sanctioned.

------
kgabis
This title is false and clickbaity. Puszcza Białowieska is definitely not on
"brink of collapse". Please take a look at
[http://www.lasy.gov.pl/information/all-about-bialowieza-
fore...](http://www.lasy.gov.pl/information/all-about-bialowieza-
forest/10-facts-about-the-bialowieza-primeval-forest).

------
DaggerDagger
Trees grow back, and so do forests. Let's focus on the plasticization of the
oceans instead of the trees which grow in the ground. The Earth is mostly
ocean and it's actually a good thing to cut down forests, it creates new
opportunities for new organisms to move in and pioneer the land. North
Carolina used to be a large portion of prairie called Piedmont. But the dense
farming of the NC piedmont resulted in the new growth forests springing up
when people moved westward and farms died. Forests grow so quickly we forget
that "old growth" is like a hundred year old tree. Deforestation and
reforestation is a natural cycle and it's actually not as bad as say a giant
miasma of microplastic or a giant toxic algae bloom caused by agricultural run
off.

~~~
batrat
You work for Ikea? The problem is that nobody is planting them back.

~~~
maxerickson
It isn't necessarily required to plant trees back. It depends on the type of
management and cutting being done.

One strategy is to remove the highest value trees from time to time, as they
tend to be larger and removing them creates space for smaller trees to grow
larger. Such harvests will also remove smaller trees that are unlikely to
increase in value (often sold as paper pulp or wood chips, not necessarily
discarded). This creates space for new trees to grow.

At the extreme you do have companies cutting down everything and using
herbicide cocktails to prepare the ground for planting.

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EGreg
Why don't they put a lot of sunlight-powered cameras around the forest to find
people coming and going?

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Markoff
good luck Polish government for destroying one if the three reasons I am
considering visit of Poland (other two would be sand dunes on the beach and
Osviecim)

~~~
oz
I spent two weeks in Poland last summer. Might I recommend Zakopane, hell, the
entire Tatra Mountains region while we're at it? Absolutely spectacular.

~~~
Markoff
I heard they are less touristy on Slovak side.

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onestone
Seems clickbaity and inaccurate. List of many other "primeval" forests in
Europe: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_old-
growth_forests#Eur...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_old-
growth_forests#Eurasia)

~~~
JohnDuh
The Hacker News headline is misleading. The article calls it the "last major
primeval forest in Europe" which is more accurate. Białowieża forest is around
40 000 hectares, while very few of the other ones left is bigger than 2000
hectares.

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hagakure0c
We should grow hemp all over the planet, industrial scale, low THC grade of
course. From space we can look at our blue and green hemp planet.

~~~
wavefunction
I've been casually investigating hemp as a carbon fixer, as a hobby. I think
paired with bamboo it could provide both sustainable materials for much of
life's needs along with a terrific ability to fix atmospheric carbon. If
nothing else the plant material can be bio-charred upon post-harvest and
processing.

Also been looking at bamboo and hemp for things like water/soil/air
purification, though it's all very casual.

~~~
hagakure0c
We can also use hemp for nutrition, clothing, building materials, paper among
many other things. Yes, grow this plant on an industrial scale all over the
planet.

