OverviewThe Status Quo in the Carpathian Mountains in Poland
More and more trees are being felled in our neighboring country. And even though the foresting industry is boasting its reforestation and woodland protection projects, the truth is that timber production is still a main driver of profits. We have visited an activist camp in the Carpathian woods and a dropout from the forestry industry who now wants to grow his very own future jungle.
Many people consider Poland the “European Brazil” – for both positive and negative reasons: On the one hand, there is a lot of unspoiled woodland in Poland, and there are people willing to fight for it. On the other hand, this woodland is being cut down and so-called protected areas fail to deliver what they promise. As a journalist, I got the chance to see this for myself last year – and in the wake of my research, I was then publicly attacked by the forest industry.
Funded by the International Journalists’ Program (IJP), I traveled around Poland in 2022. Greenpeace made it possible for me to visit a camp of activists in the Bieszczadzki forest at division 73, Lutowiska forestry office, in the southeast of Poland, bordering Ukraine. That year, a team of 20 members of the Wild Carpathians initiative were preparing themselves for a cold and harsh winter: With the goal of protecting the forest from being cut down and saving the lives of the brown bears in the area, they had put up a camp of tree houses. However, their camp had already been attacked several times, once by a rout of four drunken men with baseball bats, who demolished their van and hit one of the camp women in the head.
The patch of forest they were fighting for should have been declared a nature reserve already 40 years before, but nothing had happened yet. Instead, the deforestation started, which was now largely inhibited only through the protests. Jakob “Kuba” Rok (36) is an economics teacher at Warsaw University and member of the Wild Carpathians initiative. In Poland, he says, there is a movement “against deforestation and the ignorance of the government”.
August 8, 2020 saw the first time a camp in the forests was cleared: “Nora 219a”, named after the sector, only about 5 kilometers away. The camp was cleared without prior notification. The official reason was suspected drug possession. According to Kuba, drugs are strictly prohibited in their camp – including alcohol, of course. They wouldn’t think much of that anyway, he says. Years have passed since the clearance and times have become more quiet: The police stops by every now and then, Kuba says. But he gets the feeling that the movement is getting more and more accepted by the people in the surrounding villages. And the activists are planning to stay as long as it may take for a natural reserve to be established here.
Rafał Osiecki, manager of the Lutowiska forestry office, is not in favor of the activist camp. “The activists refuse to see that every old tree was once young,” he says. “And planting new trees is urgently needed.”
After all, the trees at division 73 were very likely to survive. When the news broke that the bear caves in the forest were still inhabited, the Nature Heritage Foundation took legal action against the threat of logging. In September 2022, they were successful before the district court and ensured that the forest of division 73 must not be cut down. The bears’ habitat was saved. This proves that there are things worth fighting for.
Despite this positive news, the overall picture in Poland looks pretty gloomy: There are a total of 9 million hectares of forest area in Poland, only a mere one percent of it is protected as national parks. It seems like these areas are left untouched, but Greenpeace speaks of covert deforestation of the woodland bordering the national parks – which in turn would also lead to the destruction of the national parks.
“The national parks are in danger of being turned into islands,” says Tomasz Nowak (name changed to protect privacy), a bear scientist studying bears’ lives in the Carpathians for more than 20 years. “The parks are too small to ensure the survival of wolves, bears and wisents. These animals need huge habitats.” Nowak prefers his name not being published, because he does not want to get in trouble with the national forestry company Lasy Państwowe (English: “National Forests”). He is afraid that he might get sacked.
Just next to the national parks, there are “buffer zones” – deforestation is not prohibited here, although the forests are actually meant to be protected. The Nature Heritage Foundation criticizes this as “fake protection”, and they are sure that Poland violates EU law – after all, division 73, the one that is threatened by deforestation, is part of an area strictly protected by the EU, called Natura-2000. In these places, there are breeding and resting sites for brown bears, which must be protected. Osiecki, however, says that EU law does not prohibit commercial forestry in these areas even if brown bears are living there.
The question remains for how long there will still be wildlife in the Bieszczadzki forest if the deforestation continues. According to the “Living Planet Report 2022” by the World Wildlife Foundation (WWF), the global population of wild animals has slumped by 69% since 1970. Europe especially is one of the regions that rank worst in terms of the “integrity of biodiversity”.
The deforestation of European woodland goes on and on – and Poland is ahead of the pack. Meanwhile, the price for timber in Europe has been increasing drastically. According to the “Polish Timber Coalition”, timber prices in the EU rose by 27% in 2023 compared to the previous year, and in Poland alone by almost 60%.
Polish forestry officials claimed to pick only very few trees to remove from the forests and “get some more light in”. It was necessary for new trees to grow. Besides, the authority said, they protected nature and planted 500 million new trees around the country every year. Greenpeace, however, says that the authority was destroying the forest. Their activists would very much like to see the forests not be cleaned up. Actually, everything should stay the way nature creates it, as nature does not need humans to decide over nature’s ecosystems.
Biology professor and beaver expert Andrzej Czech also lives in the Carpathian Mountains. He bought several hectares of forest more than 20 years ago to leave the area as it is. While taking a walk through his patch of forest, Czech says that dead wood should be left where it is, as this is important for the diversity of the ecosystem. Forests also do not need to get more light in through targeted deforestation.
Czech himself used to work as a forest guard, an official employee at the Polish state forestry, and his task was to care for “more light in the forest”. Today, he looks at his former employer differently. “Commercial forestry is nothing else but deforestation – the rest is bullshit,” he says. He and his wife have built a cottage in the woods, where they live mostly autonomously on solar energy, and they use drones to scare away hunters. But he is not the only dropout. An anonymous user on Twitter has been talking about the “wheelings and dealings of commercial forestry” since 2017 and speaks of their greed for profit.
In fact, the Polish state forestry is a giant commercial enterprise, managing almost a third of Poland’s total area. The pay in forestry is good and the local training center is highly regarded.
“Most employees in forestry are good people,” Czech says. “But they have no idea of the industry they are involved in. They think it’s OK to take trees from the forest occasionally, because there is so much forest left, and they plant new ones. But cutting down trees disturbs the system, which may cause the forest to deteriorate. And the trees planted by the state are not meant for the animals, but only to provide timber for the industry.”
When I published an article on woodlands in Poland in the German newspaper Der Tagesspiegel in 2022, I was attacked publicly by the Polish state forestry and some other media that are in line with the Polish government. Lasy Państwowe replied in a statement accusing me of lying, suggesting that I had been commissioned by the German government to write a report on the Polish bears. Some of the more conservative media just copied their reply without asking me for a counter statement. Only the Gazetta Wybolcza, one of the biggest newspapers in Poland, invited me to an interview after I knocked on their door. They had also reported on deforestation before, so they are aware of the issues with the forestry industry.
