When the COVID-19 pandemic started in Finland in March 2020, due to the uncertainty about how the pandemic would unfold, my family decided it was better to move from Helsinki to the countryside in South Karelia. Living in the countryside during the worst period of the pandemic proved to be a wise move that gave me ample time and opportunity to walk in the forest. During this time, forests replaced my human contacts, as I took long daily walks from our rental house to the natural forests behind the more pervasive plantation-style forests. These walks were a respite and delight and were the genesis of new kind of relation to the forest. I became much more sensitive to the importance of forests in so many ways. Within these forests alone, with family, or sometimes with friends we often talked about the old forest ways in Finland, what forests are, what it feels like to be in them, and how one should live in a reciprocal, caring relationship with forests. However, unbeknownst to us at the time, these forests would soon be clearcut, as part of the approximately 100,000 hectares of clearcuts done annually in Finland (Sulkava, Reference Sulkava2023). When these forests that I had spent so much time in were clearcut it felt like a part of myself was taken away, and with the loss came feelings of sadness, deprivation, anger, and inability to affect the situation. These situations and feelings are very common in Finland’s current clearcutting hegemony.

Introduction

Clearcutting and its effects became a dominant theme in my post-2020 forest walks (see Figure 8.1). First COVID-19, then the Russian invasion of Ukraine, dramatically increased the demand for and price of wood. For example, the export prices of cut spruce (Norway spruce, Picea abies L.) and pine (Scots pine, Pinus sylvestris) rose from the pre-COVID level of less than 200 eur/meters cubed (m³) to almost 400 eur/m³ in later 2021. It went down again in early 2022 to about 270 eur/m³ but rose again to over 350 eur/m³ in mid-2022 due to the Russian invasion of Ukraine (Maaseudun tulevaisuus, 2024). After these upheavals the export prices have come down, and as of July 2024 they were hovering at around 240 eur/m³. This example shows how epochal moments, such as pandemics and wars, create massive volatility and unpredictability in prices and markets, which has a negative effect on forests because it leads to rushed decisions to cut wood when the prices are high. South Karelia, which is Finland’s most overlogged region due to a heavy pulp and paper industry presence, was especially affected by the Russian border closing and the subsequent drop in wood availability, coupled with higher demand and prices. Since 2021, South Karelian forests have been a carbon emission source, due to overlogging, which was the first time this has happened in all of Finland’s net carbon impacts from land use (Statistics Finland, 2022). Finnish forestry and the forest industry are dominated by pulp, paper, and energywood production, with the production of sawn wood decreasing constantly. Even if this last type of wood was still highly in demand, there is not enough, due to the clearcutting of old forests and overlogging of sturdy trunks. When the Russian border closed, wood had to be procured in Finland, and even the last remaining old, natural growth forests were targeted, even those directly next to people’s houses. Over the last five or so years, I have witnessed the continuous advance of the clearcutting frontier over all the remaining old-growth stands. Almost nothing is left. These old forests could have been protected by their owners, who are our fellow citizens, neighbors, and friends (see Figure 8.2).

Figure 8.1 Map showing the most significant places in Finland discussed in this book.

Base map data from www.openstreetmap.org.

Figure 8.1Long description

A map of Finland highlighting significant. Key areas include Northern Finland, Varrio National Park, Aalisunturi forests, New Pulp Mill Kemi, Northern Ostrobothnia, Kainuu, New Pulp Mill A^̊nekoski, Western Finland, Tampere, Southern Finland, Turku, Helsinki, South Karelia, and Lappeenranta. The map also indicates the Arctic Circle, Sápmi Territory, national parks, regions, and cities.

Figure 8.2 An example in South Karelia that shows all the areas that have been clearcut within the last five years (not all clearcuts in the area are shown on this satellite image).

Source: Author’s field research, aerial photo from National Land Survey of Finland.

Figure 8.2Long description

Satellite image of South Karelia highlighting clear-cut areas within the last five years. The image shows various patches of deforested land, indicating recent clear-cutting activities. Roads and other land features are visible in the background.

The topic of these clearcuts has not been widely discussed, as it is practically a taboo subject. When it is brought up in discussion, the actions taken are rationalized and justified by irrational claims, typically that otherwise bark beetles would have eaten all the forests. There is a certain sense of impossibility around being able to voice one’s opinion about what neighbors and others in the community are doing to their forests, as these are in fact private forests. In the Finnish context, especially in the countryside, there is a historical precedent of being able to have the right to earn a living, which includes being free to decide how to use one’s own forests, including clearcutting them completely if that is the will of the owner (see Figure 8.3).

Figure 8.3 A clearcut of what was once was a large, old, natural forest covered with moss in South Karelia, Finland. May 22, 2022.

Photo by author.

Figure 8.3Long description

An image capturing a scene of extensive deforestation. Numerous tree stumps are scattered across the ground. Many of these stumps have visible rings. The ground is covered with discarded branches, twigs, and other woody debris, suggesting the remnants of the logging operation. A lone, tall deciduous tree, devoid of leaves, stands prominently in the midground. In the background, a dense forest line stands intact, providing a stark contrast to the cleared land.

Meanwhile, at the same time, a new generation of radical forest activists became active in Finland. These new activists draw on tactics common to Extinction Rebellion (XR), such as occupying company headquarters. This new forest movement built on the work of prior generations of activists doing work in the 1980s and 1990s, for example Luontoliitto (Nature Association) and Greenpeace. These organizations were also involved in radical forest acts and have shared their knowledge and skills with the new wave of activists, according to the members I have interviewed. The rise of the post-2020 forest movement came after a long pause in direct-action activism and seemed spurred into action after logging levels started to increase. I do not think that these are separate events, as many young people found that others were also feeling desperate, angry, and frustrated with seeing the continued destruction of even the last few remaining spots for engaging in forest life. This forest life includes, besides the worlds of all the other-than-humans, human activities of gathering berries, mushrooms, hunting, walking, or simply enjoying the beauty of the forests.

I watched in horror at how quickly new logging roads and bridges were built, to allow for the dragging down of entire moss-covered beautiful forests, transforming them into unrecognizable muddy clearcuts as the earth was turned over by heavy machinery and new trenches were dug so deep and wide one could hardly jump over them (see Figure 8.4).

Figure 8.4 Example of the deep trenches that are excavated in the clearcut areas. South Karelia, from the same clearcut area as the prior photo (Figure 8.3) taken two years earlier, showing how clearcut areas stay desolate and deforested for many years. April 16, 2024.

Photo by author.

Previously, these moss-covered old forests felt like places for forest spirits or other-than-humans, and indeed they were full of animal tracks during winter when skiing through them. Now, with all the old and natural forests gone that were within walking distance from where we stayed, only the plantations and seminatural forests remain. These areas are more difficult to walk through and do not have as many wild berries or mushrooms. With the destruction of these old-growth forests, I see very little reason to continue to stay in the countryside. It would be important – no, essential, for numerous reasons – to live next to raw nature and forests. However, in Finland it is currently easier to live next to a forest in the city than in the countryside, given the lack of conservation areas or security for forest cover. The worst thing is that people can no longer even dare to form emotional ties to the forests they enjoy, since those forests can be taken away from them at any time for any reason at the whim of the landowner. In cities there is at least some measure of democracy and some ability to affect municipal decision-making in relation to the forest management. In the countryside, there is none, as the private property ownership on forest estates expands. It is truly hard to fathom a situation where rural-dwellers could – without being ostracized – challenge or even voice discontent over the choices individual forest owners make.

In this setting, I spoke to seasoned forest professionals turned activists about the rise of the new generation forest movement with their contentious tactics. The consensus was that these new tactics are a good thing as they might possibly change the status quo as they could potentially shake people out of their indifferent stupor and make them begin to realize what is going on. We need to be asking questions like, what are we doing with our forests and what affect does this action have on forest beings? Who is making these decisions and why? What is driving this rise in clearcutting, even amidst the existential crises caused by climate change and biodiversity loss? In this chapter, I seek to provide systemic answers to these questions, based on global and national histories and extractivist systems’ power. I also explore how recent resistance is challenging the power of the clearcutting RDPE in Finland.

The Global Pulp Boom in Finland

The story of Finland’s new post-2015 pulp boom starts much earlier and involves places far outside of Finland. Since the 1970s, and especially since mid-2000s, a wave of new eucalyptus-based mega pulp mills have been built in the Global South, especially in Brazil, Uruguay, Chile, Malaysia, and Indonesia (Kröger, Reference Kröger2014). These mills have flooded the market with cheap hardwood pulp, which is used in tissue, paper, and cardboard production. However, to increase the quality for specific wood products such as paper packaging, pine and spruce softwood pulp is also required. This first large eucalyptus hardwood pulp boom in the Global South is causing major impacts in the Global North, especially in Finland, driving a new softwood pulp boom. The impacts of the northern boreal forest softwood pulp boom in Finland are most visible through the construction of new mega pulp mills in Äänekoski and Kemi. These mills were constructed by Metsä-Botnia (called Metsä Fibre since 2019), which left Uruguay after there were intense major protests against its Fray Bentos pulp mill by Argentineans across the border river (Kröger, Reference Kröger2007). The contested mill was then sold to UPM, which is a Finnish paper company that is one of the top three global paper companies by size. Stora Enso, another company, headquartered in Helsinki, is also in the global top three. However, even though these two companies are run from Finnish headquarters, over 60 percent of both are owned by foreigners and foreign institutions. Several activists explained to me in May 2024 that it is the presence of so many powerful forestry companies that pushes the continuation of clearcutting. I asked these activists how they thought individuals could influence clearcutting decisions. I was especially interested to hear which actions they thought could discontinue clearcutting, to which an expert linked to the Finnish Association for Nature Conservation (Suomen luonnonsuojeluliitto, SLL) replied:

However, another activist from the new, more radical Metsäliike (Forest Movement) group, Minka Virtanen (interview May 12, 2024), explained, based on her experiences, how they have managed to nevertheless stall some clearcuttings on state lands. I will return to these actions later. Besides the presence of these powerful national companies, foreign funds continue to play an even larger role in the purchase of Finnish forestlands, as forests are increasingly seen and treated by investment circles as an alternative commodity. This neoliberal global financialization of forests changes the way people treat forestland. It should be noted here that forest is a term that is not always clearly defined. Often, what these companies call a forest is increasingly viewed by locals and researchers as some form of tree plantation and not as an actual forest.

Finland has a long history as a core country in the global pulpwood expansion. First, it was a key player in the development of mega-plans to impose large pulp investment models on the Global South and in Finland itself, designed largely by Finnish forest industry engineers and consultants, such as Pöyry (merged in 2019 with a Swedish company into a new company called AFRY). In addition, Finnish innovation and machines are deeply important as over 70 percent of the world’s pulp flows through machines made in Finland in the Metso and ANDRITZ factories, while Ponsse is the world’s leading producer for forest harvesters. In addition, there are Finnish corporations involved deeply in the chemical industry, which is a crucial player in pulp- and papermaking. These companies have recently internationalized their ownership, but still retain key operations in Finland, where the physical forests are just a tiny fraction of the true global reach of the Finnish forest industry.

A peculiar feature of Finnish forestry in the global setting is the high number of family-held forest estates. This is due to a history of forest ownership being fragmented and divided due to a general parceling out of land at the end of the nineteenth century, followed by successive pro-poor land reforms that further divided forest ownership between 1920s and 1950s. Some key milestones in this socially just transition – from large estate and a tenant farmer system – were the 1930s agrarian reform laws named after President Kyösti Kallio, and the implementation of laws in the 1940s–1950s, which distributed land to approximately half a million Karelian War refugees after their lands were ceded to the Soviet Union in the Second World War (WWII) (Kröger & Raitio, Reference Kröger and Raitio2017). This has created a particular character and structure in which forestry capitalism operates in Finland. The key impact of this structure has been the need to turn industrial forestry into a national project by major social maneuvers, that have coerced, but mostly hegemonically allured, forest-owning and nonforest-owning citizens to support the goals of the forest industry as if these were the only right, righteous, and most beneficial developmental options. This rhetoric goes so deep that it paints industrial forestry as the basis of survival for the whole nation. These measures are important to secure wood from the hundreds of thousands of different small plot owners. Therefore, nascent attempts to conserve and protect more forests have been heavily criticized by the pulp and plantation forestry sectors. Meanwhile, criticism of the forest industry has been silenced, especially the critique of clearcutting.

Critiques of Clearcutting

The pulp industry is not only dominant but also hegemonic in Finland and especially in South Karelia. A researcher who requested to stay anonymous described the situation as follows:

The same researcher indicated that this greenwashing is happening a lot, “They have the resources to communicate as they wish about these things.” I also interviewed another source who requested anonymity, who is a member of the XR and the new more radical Metsäliike forest movement. Metsäliike mounts protests by physically occupying pulp mill entrances and headquarters using sit-ins and roadblocks. These techniques have a history in Finland dating back to the late 1970s; however, in those early protests it was more common to just bar loggings in forest areas. I asked this activist about whether the pulp industry has dominance and hegemony, and he saw that this is a “kind of truism, [or] obvious” in the Finnish forest politics and society. The activist saw that some entities form this kind of hegemonic grouping, including the big pulp companies, the forest owner associations linked to them like the Central Union of Agricultural Producers and Forest Owners (MTK), some parts of the state like the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry (MMM), and the economic part of Metsähallitus (a state-owned entity that oversees forest management). The activist elaborated that, “at least by us among the activists this is the assumption.”

There has always been some level of resistance to the clearcutting, even in the 1940s and 1950s. According to the same activist there were lot of local people resisting “the extension of this modern industrial power usage and land usage to even those areas,” referring to North Karelia’s very old forests, which was done in a top-down manner, “without asking much.” The activist indicated that in these regions there is still “collective trauma due to the way the industrial land use was milled through particularly this kind of areas.” Previously these areas, including Kainuu, Northern Finland, and Sápmi, had remained “relatively long out of the reach of intensive land use.” The process of industrial forestry coming to these areas is detailed by Ilmo Massa, an environmental historian, in his book Conquest of Northern Nature (Massa, Reference Massa1994). This process was also explored by Ritva Kovalainen, with some emotionally strong film footage of the North Karelians who had grown up walking the ancient and magnificent forests of Ilomantsi by the border with Russia, which were devastated by clearcutting. In the footage these people walk on the clearcut area, remembering the tall trees and what was lost when the area was taken by force (Kovalainen & Seppo, Reference Kovalainen and Seppo2018). The activist reflected on how it must have been when this landscape changed. He said, when it “started to be steamrolled, it must have been quite a stunning” experience as “people did not have the feeling” that this could be resisted as the clearcuts were linked to “national interest and wellbeing narratives … that it is about everyone’s interests, when [they are actually] talking about the interests of the industry.” This activist-scholar also indicated that it would be interesting to study the environmental history of ideas in relation to the Centre Party, which is the most pro-clearcutting party in Finland. In particular, he thought that it is important to develop a deeper understanding of how the Centre Party land use thought models “became so dominant especially in rural societies,” and of the explanatory factors behind this dominance.

What does deforestation and clearcutting mean in this context? Forest removal, or deforestation, as terms, should also be inclusive of areas where clearcutting completely transforms the character and web of life in a given area, even if the area is being planted with trees, left to regrow in a semicontrolled manner, or ultimately become a tree-covered area again in the future. While there are legal requirements in place that forest owners must plant new seedlings on logged forest land within five years of harvesting, the seedlings are not able to directly replace what was lost. In essence, the continued clearcutting of natural, seminatural, old-growth, and other forests that are more than 60 years of age results in forest removals even if new seedlings are subsequently planted. These forest removals are hard if not impossible to replace within a human lifetime and have devastating effects both ecologically and biologically. By clearcutting these last remaining natural or old forest areas, entire habitats, species, and webs of life are becoming extinct or further endangered by the resulting fragmentation and degradation. This is especially true in the areas immediately south of the large national parks in the northern parts of Finland. It is notable that most of the large national parks are located on the Sámi homeland, where Indigenous people’s rights have thus far been effectively mobilized by the Sámi, although intensive industrial loggings have ravaged large areas in Inari municipality and in the territory of the Lapland reindeer-grazing association, which both belong to the Sámi homeland. While many Sámi homeland areas have been extracted by industrial forestry and gold mining, much more natural forest is left in the Sámi homeland than in the Finnish part south of it. According to my informants, this is due to the mostly successful prevention of state logging in Sápmi, through the resistance efforts of the Sámi and reindeer herders. Besides national parks, there are also vast wilderness parks, which are mostly low producing in terms of cubic meters of wood and where clearcutting-based forestry would not be profitable. It takes a millennium in the far North to reach the point where you could even talk about primary or virgin forest area and already there are extremely limited areas of this kind of forest in Finland, namely the Värriö Strict Nature Reserve in Northern Finland and some other scattered plots (Kovalainen & Seppo, Reference Kovalainen and Seppo2023). To reach this point the forest needs to have several complete lifecycles (about 70–80 years) without the dramatic interruption of the lifecycle by clearcutting.

Origins of Clearcutting

The current emphasis on clearcutting was primarily enabled by post-WWII state actions, which were pushed by a consolidated paper and pulp industry that has now become dominant, and pulled by international demand for cheap, good-quality pulp and paper products that could be consistently and reliably delivered. Before WWII, clearcutting was called forest raping in Finland, but during the war Finland needed wood and foreign currency. This need led to the adoption of warlike attitudes and methods, which quickly turned vast areas of forest into money via clearcutting. Clearcutting was a rare exception before WWII and a special permit was required to even be able to clearcut. The word that was earlier used for clearcut, ravaged forests (raiskio) in Finnish was used later in its verb form (raiskata) to refer to sexual violence against humans. Considering the evolution of this term, one gets the idea that the first clearcuts must have been truly traumatic events for the people experiencing the loss of their old-growth forests, as they were forced to cede them. There was much violence and coercion involved in the initial clearcuts and throughout the process of slowly making people accept clearcuts as part of the scenery.

Clearcutting was a story of economic growth and served to quickly strengthen national welfare in a battle of survival among nations. After the war, Finland needed to rebuild its economy and it had to pay the Soviet Union compensation for its losses in the war. In this atmosphere, the forest industry was seen as a national-interest sector and an easily accessible way to increase revenues. Thus, the prior practice of selective loggings was banned in 1947 and clearcutting turned into the only way to practice forestry in Finland. It also became obligatory to belong to a regional forest stewardship association (metsänhoitoyhdistys), which in practice dictated to forest owners how to treat their forests. This was a top-down model which ended up severing the old ties Finns had to forests, which included taking care more personally of the heritage woods and trees. Historically, the forests, while used for resources, were not regarded with an extractivist and productivist attitude, but more with a more holistic and reciprocal attitude.

I asked expert informants what causes clearcutting in Finland. Jyri Mikkola, a forestry engineer and nature surveyor, mentioned to me in an interview on March 23, 2024, that it was, first, the “German, Central-European forestry tradition, which brought them [clearcuts] here.” This import of clearcutting had happened already in the first half of the twentieth century but clearcutting only started in earnest after WWII, due to the war reparations. In his view, the mentality of the postwar period “is still affecting here,” but he called the mentality a “great Finnish forest economy fable,” which claims that “everything is the best of the world in here [Finland] and everything has been done correctly and in best possible way in here.” This fable, myth, is a problem, as “particular generations in forestry have been taught into [believing] this.” The people trained under this mentality in the 1960s–1980s are still in power in Finnish forestry and they do not accept criticism of their ways of doing and knowing. “It was hammered hard onto their heads that clearcutting would supposedly mimic natural processes, and whatever,” so this story has been “created for practical political purposes,” to which those within the RDPE influence have “sticked onto, hanged on.” Mikkola mentioned that Nils Arthur Osara, who lent his name to the largest clearcut areas in Europe that were completed in the 1950s, known as Osaran aukot (the Clearcuts of Osara) in Pudasjärvi in Northern Finland, was a “servant executing and getting blamed for” these clearcuts, which Osara himself thought were a “great mistake” by the early 1960s. The clearcut area was about 18,000 hectares (Enbuske, Reference Enbuske2010: 261).

Second, a big part of the problem is that clearcutting became institutionalized and protected by a certain organization. This organization, with all its political influence, became a form of “machinery that adopted” clearcutting “as the only choice,” and consequently this story “has been maintained.” As time passed, the main motif of this pro-clearcutting organization became “to protect the organization, its actions, itself.” This attitude is still visible, especially in the Forest Management Associations (Metsänhoitoyhdistykset, MHYs), who get the most profit from mediating wood sales contracts between forest owners and companies, “earning a higher provision sum at a single time if more wood is taken at one time.” It is this system that drives clearcutting and had a role in “affecting [the] counseling advice” given to forest owners. “After clearcutting, forest is planted … and the same association provides the seedlings … and sells the services for sapling stand forestry.” The association earns “manyfold [more profit]” if they suggest clearcutting in comparison to what they would get with other types of forestry: “This is one reason, why so many clearcuttings are still done here, also much in such places where that would not be wise for the forest owner.” A forest carbon researcher wanting to remain anonymous out of fear of losing their job told me in May 2024 that “typically the metsänhoitoyhdistykset do not offer” these alternatives, but “have just this one way [clearcutting], by which forests are treated.” Yet, Mikkola told me that while clearcutting as the best and only choice is an “austere myth” and only a “business model,” it still must be faced because as a practice on the ground it is still “very real.”

The moral economy has been heavily molded to support clearcutting. “An idea that this is the only right way, only way to do more efficiently, has been inculcated in the forest owners and others,” which also explains the conundrum where clearcutting is continued at such a great scale. Approximately 70 percent of Finns do not support clearcutting (Juntti & Ruohonen, Reference Juntti and Ruohonen2023), thus, in this sense the hegemony in Finland might be based to great degree on fear, silence, passivity, and a dearth of contentious agency.

Post-2020 Forest Conflicts

Forest conflicts have been on the rise again recently (since the last wave of direct-action activism between 1980s and 2000s, see Greenpeace Suomi [Finland], 2009; Kauppinen, Reference Kauppinen2021; Raitio, Reference Raitio2008; Suomen luonnonsuojeluliiton Kainuun piiri ry [Kainuu district of the Finnish Nature Conservation Union], 2008), with most Finns demanding less clearcutting and more conservation of forests, but this intention is not often reflected in practice. Therefore, a new movement, called Metsäliike, has recently held forest protests; for example, in early 2023 this new generation of activists repeatedly blocked the logging of the Aalistunturi forests in western Lapland (Suutari, Reference Suutari2024). The activists in Metsäliike originally came from movements and organizations like XR, Greenpeace, and Luontoliitto. However, Metsäliike has since grown into its own independent movement that focuses on direct action. The activists have been met by police, armed with rubber bullets, ready to repeatedly drive them out of the logging sites, jail them, and issue tens of thousands of euros worth of fines for the damages the activists allegedly caused the loggers. The forests where they are protesting logging are owned by the state of Finland and administrated by the Finnish Forest Service or the “Forest Government,” which is the literal English translation of its name, Metsähallitus. Its subcompany, Metsätalous Oy, is the business firm responsible for logging on state forestry lands and pays rent to the state for using these lands. Thus, these forests are owned by Finnish citizens, yet the citizenry has very little control over how the forests are used. In the Aalistunturi case, locals proposed the creation of a new national park in the area, as there are too few continuous larger forest areas in that region, or in Finland overall. However, Ida Korhonen told me that the state forest company started to log despite these plans, which is why the Aalistunturi campaign called for the state to give more value to the wishes of locals. However, the MMM has traditionally favored increasing logging and has forbidden making changes to logging plans even on areas that have advanced to the assessment phase in other Ministries to be turned into natural parks, such as Evo, according to Jyri Mikkola.

There has been a rise in the documentation and voicing of the hidden sadness of the common Finn on the painful loss of the forests of their youth. These feelings of sadness and anger are not welcomed in the moral economy of clearcutting. Kovalainen and Seppo (Reference Kovalainen and Seppo2014) have documented the relationships some Finns have with specific trees; for example, holy trees, family trees, trees as friends, trees to talk to and communicate with, trees you do not cut. These trees carry much more meaning than the anthropocentric and productivist view of the forest offered by the dominant system through its language of cubic meters and the monetary valuation of all aspects of nature. Kovalainen and Seppo’s work has also included a collection on the forestry practices that have rendered places unrecognizable, especially by vast clearcuttings and the accompanying dredging of forests, which make them hard to pass through or walk in and pollutes lakes, rivers, and the Baltic Sea with silt and other debris. Approximately 1.4 million kilometers of forest trenches have been dug in Finland (Juntti & Ruohonen, Reference Juntti and Ruohonen2023).

As a response to these moves in the moral economy, rising voices from the pro-productivist camp have issued statements on social media emphasizing that ownership is holy and the landowner has the right to do whatever they want with (forest) land. The entities most strongly emphasizing the property and control rights of forest owners – for example MTK, MHYs (which are part of MTK), and the MMM – are interestingly those that earlier forced forest owners to clearcut against their will. This suggests that the issue is not actually about safeguarding forest owners’ rights to do what they will with their forests, but to ensure the continuation of clearcutting and the flow of cheap pulpwood. While there is much talk by the above entities’ spokespersons currently emphasizing that ownership should be holy or that a forest owner can do what they want to their own forests, these entities are, however, against increasing funding for voluntary conservation (possibly apart from MTK, which, according to Jyri Mikkola, has repeatedly taken a stand on increasing the funding of voluntary conservation). However, this kind of conservation option would increase the range of freedom of forest owners, allowing for the option to conserve instead of logging. Currently this option is very limited and depends on governmental decisions and the monies allocated to conservation, which have been low for several reasons. According to my informants, these reasons include lobbying by the industry, but also the ideological support among many political parties for forest economy and the support by the Ministry of Finance for decisions that do not increase the state budget.

In the moral economy, clearcuts are also at odds with the deeply rooted practice of “everyone’s rights” (jokaisenoikeudet) in Finland, which refers to the freedom to roam throughout the whole country, to collect mushrooms or berries, irrespective of who owns the forests. It is legal for the forest owner to clearcut irrespective of these established customs, but this does create conflicts between different forest users. Recently there have been growing demands to revise everyone’s rights, especially by vocal forest owners defending clearcutting, but in practice this has already happened due to the lessening of natural forest areas. Now too many forest areas are very hard or unpleasant to pass through due to the heavy logging, the spread of monoculture tree plantations that are too thick to run through, and the continuous tree thinning, which leaves the cut branches on the forest floor. In addition, these measures lead to the fragmentation of the forest. Kovalainen and Seppo (Reference Kovalainen and Seppo2014) calculated the amount of time it takes for one to walk across a forest patch in Southern Finland, which in most cases was only a few minutes, with journeys that took over half an hour a rarity (Kovalainen & Seppo, Reference Kovalainen and Seppo2009).

The scenarios that are drawn up for future forestry do not typically include the impacts of the disturbed global climate with its regional and global tipping points, pests, and other novel damages. Boreal forest removals constitute a regional climate tipping point, meaning that the overharvesting and climate-change-induced losses can result in irreversible losses of boreal forest cover and carbon sinks and storage, which now hold about one third of terrestrial carbon stocks (Planet Snapshots, 2023). Warming threatens to surpass ecological tipping points for many trees, which are not able to sequester carbon in the same way they could before (Rao et al., Reference Rao, Davi and Magney2023). Entire forest ecosystems, especially on southern edges of the boreal forests, can collapse, as an overly warm climate does not allow the trees to continue to photosynthesize to the same capacity. These processes flip forests from being carbon sinks to sources of carbon emissions and should be avoided at all costs. The best remedy for attaining more robust, climate resilient forest area is to avoid this type of flip, in addition to lowering carbon emissions and retaining natural forest cover by avoiding logging and plantation expansion (Law & Moomaw, Reference Law and Moomaw2024).

Reasons for Recent Clearcutting Expansion

I have felt these changes in Finland. I have personally seen the dramatic expansion of the clearcutting frontier over last remaining old and natural forests, especially in the southeastern parts of Finland, where there is the smallest amount of natural forest and the heaviest pressure for wood by the regionally concentrated forest industry plants. According to the Natural Resource Institute Finland (Luke), the overlogging, which routinely surpasses sustainable logging levels, was highest in the southeastern part of Finland between 2015 and 2018. It is important to note that the sustainable logging levels referred to by Luke do not refer to the actual, natural level of sustainable harvests (which are much lower), but to the ability to maintain the economic-technical aspects of yearly logging so that the amount logged in one year would not mean the decrease of logging volumes in the subsequent year. If Luke considered a sustainability which would include the needs of nature (this is seldom done), the level of sustainable loggings would be much lower. In May 2024, Ida Korhonen from Metsäliike told me that sustainability from a nature perspective is surpassed by the current logging in most of Finland’s provinces, possibly in all of them.

As the Russian imports have ceased, more wood is logged in Finland, especially in South Karelia, where the pulp and paper industries are dominant. About 4,000 people’s work was needed directly in the forest sector in South Karelia in 2020 according to Luke, with the figure expected to drop to 3,200 by 2040 (Kärkkäinen et al., Reference Kärkkäinen, Eyvindson and Haakana2024). The sector’s share of those employed was 7.7 percent and the value-added to the regional economy was 18.9 percent (approximately 750 million euros) in 2020. This is well above the numbers for the whole of Finland where the added value of the forest sector is just 4.5 percent and the share of employees is just 2.7 percent. According to Yrjö Haverinen (interview, April 24, 2024), a retired forestry professional who is currently active in the South Karelia SLL branch, more forests “have been logged than there has been growth” in South Karelia, meaning that “that capital has been eaten,” especially due to cessation of Russian wood imports. These imports from Russia were substantial, still approximately 9.3 million cubic meters (MCM) in 2021, which is about 10 percent of all wood usage by forest industry in Finland (Puukila, Reference Puukila2023). The South Karelian factories use around 12 MCM per year, but yearly growth is just about 3 MCM, meaning that not all 3 MCM could be cut sustainably. Haverinen stated that “This has caused an enormous pressure on these nearby forests.” For these reasons, no national park has been established in South Karelia, although the local “people would want” one. Haverinen was concerned because the average forest age is “fiercely young,” and “this is worrying as they [trees] are felled like as child, but if they would be left to grow to timber tree and even older, we could get more carbon stored from the atmosphere.” A local politician, a municipal councilor who wanted to remain anonymous due to fear of repercussions, commented on the situation in an interview in May 2024: “This has been like hitting the head on the wall … I have been a counselor for long,” including being a part of the decision-making bodies whose decisions affect the management of municipal forests in practice. “At times the municipality does give us a message that we need to please them [the forest industry] in the handling of our own forests [public forests], that we are their raw material producer, and we need to secure their continuity. This is not voiced officially,” but brought out “in discussions regularly,” which means that a lot of courage would be needed to “start to do something” for protection, “let alone conservation areas.” They had been involved in these politics for over two decades and, during this time, “only two conservation areas” were created, “these being the only victories” for forest conservation. “It has been really half-hearted, and it is really feared that what would for example UPM say” if more areas were protected.

The state and some cities have also their own internal yearly profit target from loggings. For Lappeenranta city this is around 400,000 euros: It is “not visible anywhere” and therefore it “cannot be governed by even decisionmakers.” The profit demand drives clearcutting decisions by the chief foresters, who, according to this informant in Lappeenranta, considered themselves to be “an objective party in all this.” However, in practice, these chiefs “have really a lot of power, and if they do not want something, it does not happen.” The key decision-making around forests in Finland is still very hierarchical and although most people would like to protect forests, the key foresters still hold pro-clearcutting views. The politician said that even though the foresters are basically in charge of what happens to the forest, “they have no expertise” to observe the ecological state of forests.

In Finland, the post-WWII establishment of a strong paper and pulp industry is the pivotal cause for clearcutting and decreasing the forest biodiversity (Mönkkönen, Reference Mönkkönen, Aakala and Blattert2022). This sector relies on transforming forests into resource reserves primarily for the pulp and paper industry and energywood. The production of fiber mass and the accompanying energy it produces are the key in delineating how forests are used, what kind of trees are grown, where, for how long, and based on what logic. In the fast-growth forests trees compete to reach heights faster, which means they are not producing as good material for wood construction as is found in natural forest trees. Undergrowth is also periodically removed, which harms biodiversity. As this process is very extensive and touches most Finnish forests, it is apt to speak of a regionally dominant sector that changes land areas to mirror its own long-term interests. The fiber and pulpwood interests lock in the use of lands for short-rotation pulp and energywood production by extending tree plantations over natural forests. This happens at the expense of bigger logs and lumber, such as floor and round timber and sawlogs, resulting in less old-growth timber forests. This type of technological lock-in that affects the land use is a very deep kind of power in politics and economy.

It is a different thing to transform the physical environment, the field of matter, than it is to make changes in the social or symbolic space, where in many cases transformations can be reversed or returned to closer to their original state. If an old forest is destroyed and a tree plantation extended over the space where the old forest once stood, it is not foreseeable that that place would eventually be turned back into a similar forest as it will now most likely be retained as an economic forest. Once the physical space has been spoiled this becomes a key industry argument for not protecting it, as the industry will say it is no longer a natural forest. The longevity of this transformation – forest removal through clearcutting – is also due to the fast-advancing climate catastrophe, which has not been considered in forest use planning and future horizons. This kind of lack of vision, which could be called recklessness, is also reigning in many other parts of the world and tropical forests, but it is astounding to note that this is also the case in Finland, which is widely considered to be a rational welfare state. Most trees planted are spruce and pine, although it is already clear now, and especially in the coming decades, that climate warming and diseases, pests, and other changes will transform the growth conditions in Finland to such a degree that deciduous trees will gain space from coniferous trees. Spruce monocultures will suffer especially in Southern Finland due to the expectation of longer and hotter dry seasons, which increases bark beetle outbreaks and other problems that lead to tree loss. It is expected in some future forecasts that the share of pine and birch will grow dramatically, while the share of spruce will decrease to only 8 percent, by the end of the twenty-first century (Tallinen, Reference Tallinen2019). It would therefore be wiser to already begin planting trees that can withstand the hotter and more varied climate expected in the future.

The irrationality reflects how destructive things can get when the destiny of a forest is decided by a mostly invisibly acting force like the market, but which on closer inspection is a specific bound economic grouping that is using political power to support its interests. In Finland, this is a limited group of corporate and landowners whose way of treating forests and driving their interests are shadowed by varying discourses and framings. Next, I will depict the history of how this sector was formed in Finland.

History of the Finnish Pulpwood System

In Chapter 8, I briefly mentioned the birth of modern forestry, which was premised on a clearcutting strategy; however, I will now delve into more detail about the historical roots and growth of modern Finnish forestry. As mentioned, clearcutting has a very short history in Finland, becoming the dominant method at the end of the 1940s (being used in some cases already by the First World War), but the impacts have been tremendous. In practice, clearcutting has resulted in the removal of old forest in most areas of Finland and especially in Southern Finland. The forests were then replaced by short-aged, single, or only few-species plantation-style sapling or seeding stands. Currently, approximately two-thirds of the forest land cover of Southern and Central Finland are young forests or sapling stands, while forests with a high timber volume are found only as small islands (Pukkala, Reference Pukkala2017b). Industrial forest use started already in the sixteenth century in Finland, and expanded immensely with the start of wood-based paper production in the late nineteenth century (Kuisma, Reference Kuisma2006; Metsäalan Ammattilehti, 2012). The current type of intensive forest economy, the RDPE of pulping, started to coalesce in the 1940s and was an important sector for paying the war indemnity to Soviet Union, thereby rebuilding and “developing” Finland. This development and modernization in Finland pushed structural social change, essentially changing Finland from an agrarian to an industrial society (Kekkonen, Reference Kekkonen2011). In the 1948 Statement on Selection Felling, the state made clearcutting the only available way of practicing forestry, forcing a forestry style of growing one generation of trees at a time, sequentially. In the 1950s, logging volumes tripled in many parts of Finland in comparison to the 1920s (Enbuske, Reference Enbuske2010: 261; Jokiranta et al., Reference Jokiranta, Juntti, Ruohonen and Räinä2019). The impetus for this came especially from the “needs of the forest industry,” although the official explanation was the “bad condition of forests,” with clearcutting promoted as the cheapest and fastest way for the industry to get large amounts of cheap wood to their mills (Jokiranta et al., Reference Jokiranta, Juntti, Ruohonen and Räinä2019: 37). This change in strategy was not optimal for forest owners, but the power of the paper and pulp industry managed to establish an understanding among the forest owners and their lobby groups that their interests would also be the interests of forest owners, thus enforcing clearcutting.

However, as the forest industry grew, and the budding Finnish welfare state became evermore tied into its success, a wood shortage was experienced in the 1960s. As a result, national programs aimed at forest growth were designed and implemented. Until 1975, the tree plantation model and the usage of heavy machinery spread to essentially all forest owner groups, which resulted in pine plantations being expanded over natural forests all around the country on both state and private lands (Jokiranta et al., Reference Jokiranta, Juntti, Ruohonen and Räinä2019). Lähde (Reference Lähde2015: 8), who made perhaps the most well-known long-term critique of the Finnish forest industry’s clearcutting model, considers the prime motor in this violent reduction of natural forests to be that “the industry did not want to pay logwood price” for its radically expanded demand for raw material for making pulp and paper. The 1948 Statement against selective logging was thus drafted and, according to Lähde, forest owners were obliged to do low thinning and clearcutting, which consistently produced lots of cheap, small-sized wood. This system of periodical forest growing; that is, one forest after another, ensures that clearcutting happens sooner rather than later. Lähde (Reference Lähde2015) describes how this clearcutting model was not received enthusiastically but required extensive lobbying wherein the industrial, intensive periodical growing was turned into a patriotic issue. Under this framing, all “forest men” who supported the national interests needed to adopt the new forestry practice in all forests. In fact, retaining set-aside forests for nonclearcutting practices was – and largely still is – framed as action that goes against the overall public, national, patriotic interest – meaning the interests of those within the pulping RDPE. This has made it difficult to change the forestry model into one where fragmentation, biodiversity loss, and degradation, loss of old-growth and natural forests, and loss of forest species due to excessive clearcutting would be transformed into a model where selective logging, ecological corridors, and conservation areas would also be allowed to exist to a greater extent. The reasons for not moving away from clearcutting, according to Lähde (Reference Lähde2015: 14), have been “different kinds of laws, guidelines and regulations, fixed attitudes, poor forest knowledge, poor professional skills, and the power and money interests of organizations.” This shows how, once it is established, a dominant and hegemonic RDPE can make it very hard to change the direction of how nature is used and the ensuing relations, even when change and the results of change would be rational.

While the 2014 Finnish Forest Act did reallow growing different age trees and forests, not enough resources, support, or guidance have been given for the shift by the key forest industry actors (Lähde, Reference Lähde2015; Kröger & Raitio, Reference Kröger and Raitio2017). According to Lähde (Reference Lähde2015: 14), this is because the forestry specialists have not been trained well enough on the selective logging practices and “do everything they can to impede continuous cover silviculture, not advising properly the interested forest owners.” It is common to hear in Finland that private forest owners are not being told about continuous cover forestry, which often is not even laid out as an option. Yet, knowledge does exist and there are test sites and training on different types of forestry, including CCF, which were also present in the twentieth century. The key explanation may thus not be the lack of knowledge, but the prioritization of the profit-making interests of the pulp and paper industry, along with active choices by leading governmental and corporate actors. The pulping RDPE still holds hegemony, although forest researchers, progressive state administrators, specialists, and environmentalists have become more aligned in their views since 2014, as they have been sidelined by the industry and government hard-liners supporting the productivist “bioeconomy” agenda (Kröger & Raitio, Reference Kröger and Raitio2017).

In addition, many forest owners have become increasingly critical of clearcutting since the 1970s, as the bad sides of clearcutting have surfaced (Lähde, Reference Lähde2015: 144). There were trials in the 1970s–1980s against so-called harsintahakkuu (selection felling), for “destroying” forests (Juntti & Ruohonen, Reference Juntti and Ruohonen2023). In peak years over 100,000 hectares of private landholders’ forests were “pacified” from their owners (in a quite Orwellian use of words, pacification in this case does not mean conservation, but the opposite). At times state officials forcibly clearcut these private forests (Juntti & Ruohonen, Reference Juntti and Ruohonen2023). Since the 1940s, the state needed to control the forests to serve the continued development and growth strategy that it pursued, thus ensuring cheap prime resources. According to Kekkonen (Reference Kekkonen2011: 78), “intensive forestry thinking penetrated the whole forest industry” and state programs subsidized mechanization, building a vast network of logging roads to private forests and plantations, draining especially wet areas and bogs, clearcutting, and aerial sprayings. In essence, an extractivist forest industry was created without proper research or consideration of what the most productive and sustainable form of forestry would be.

Current Politics of Forests: Carbon, Logging Volumes, and Bioeconomy Policies

In the overall setting, the large paper companies and energywood burners can avoid taking responsibility and paying for the costs of ecological-climatic transition, which are now being paid by the state, forest owners, other sectors, and other forest users. The dominance of the pulp corporations has meant that harvesting is done too early and too extensively, which, as of 2021, has caused Finnish land use to turn from a net carbon sink into a source of emissions. Meanwhile the emissions in Finland in non-LULUCF sectors have decreased from about 80 million tons of CO₂ in 2003 to less than 50 million tons of CO₂ after 2021. Those sectors that fall under the LULUCF exemptions increased their emissions from approximately negative 25 million tons of CO₂ in 2003 to over zero by 2021 (thus turning from a sink to a source of carbon) (Statistics Finland, 2022). This was principally due to increased logging under the guise of “bioeconomy,” which has eaten away the benefits attained by lowering emissions in society at large. Pulp mills emit about double the carbon dioxide for each ton of pulp produced – remember these producers do not need to compensate or buy emission rights for these activities, as the sector is considered “green” in the current carbon regulation and trading schemes, and claims to be “carbon-free” in many of its mills (see Metsä Group, 2024). Thus, these “bioeconomy” mills have used the possibility of lowered overall Finnish emissions to increase their private wealth and revenue making, while simultaneously they are not participating in the common cause of combating climate change. The emissions are calculated at the LULUCF phase, when wood is harvested, but then the forest industry claims that it would store the carbon. This is not the case, as the processes required for paper pulping result in massive carbon emissions and is a direct cause of global warming. This is unjust to other sectors, which do have to pay compensation for their emissions, such as the metal industry, and to the taxpayers who need to pay for buying emission rights from other EU states.

To somewhat remedy the situation, Lauri Mehtätalo, a professor of forest planning, has suggested that the rotation cycle should be extended by 10–20 years, which postpones the harvesting and allows increased growth by shifting the harvesting age from the current 60–100 years to 70–120 years, which would be ecologically beneficial (Puttonen, Reference Puttonen2023). The Chair of the Finnish Climate Change Panel, Professor Markku Ollikainen, argues that to meet the requirement of compensating the 49–81 million tons of extra emissions between 2021 and 2025, the forest industry should also participate, so that the high costs of buying emissions rights from abroad – which needs to be done if harvesting is not curtailed – are not passed on to the taxpayers (Ollikainen, Reference Ollikainen2023). Mehtätalo sees no other option to attain the EU carbon sink goals than to delimit harvesting levels. This is because Finland has reached the upper limit of forest growth of 110 MCM per year and the lack of growth is not expected to curtail the emissions.

Most wood harvested now quickly returns to the atmosphere as carbon, as only 4 percent of wood products constitute a long-term carbon sink (most go to pulp, paper, cardboard, burning, and even sawn wood is burned after used for a short time). In 2021, forest removal in Finland was 91.6 MCM, of which 9.7 MCM were wasted in harvests and 6.8 MCM was used by households, mostly for heating. The industry used 69.5 MCM, of which 36.7 MCM went directly for pulp, 29 MCM for timber, and 3.8 MCM to wood chips for energywood. As the share of pulping is so high, and the amount of wood carbon stored in longer-term products such as housing, furniture, and infrastructure is low, Mehtätalo sees that postponing the harvesting age would help in the transition from pulp to lumber and long-term wood products. Yet, the figures given hide the fact that in processes of pulping and making sawn timber most of the wood parts are used directly or indirectly for wood energy. Thus, when the usage of dry wood is measured in tons, about 15 million tons were used for forest products in 2022, while about 22 million tons were used for wood energy. Until 2007, these figures followed each other closely, with both between 15 and 19 million tons, but since then wood energy usage has grown substantially (Luke, 2023b). Meanwhile, the added value of the pulp and paper sector per 10 cubic meters of wood has decreased dramatically, from 1.5 to 2.3 billion euros per year during 1995–2005 to about 0.7 billion euros in 2018. Thus, Professor Ollikainen thinks that curtailing harvests would guide the forest industry to use wood in less wasteful ways and to compete for wood with the energywood sector, which now uses 60 percent of dry wood (Vadén & Majava, Reference Vaden and Majava2023).Footnote ¹

As the average added value in the forest industry in 2024 was just half of what it was approximately 20 years ago, this drives the trend of “trying to all the time increase volumes” of logging, according to Jyri Mikkola. “When paper does not sell then pulp is sold,” this meaning that a cubic meter of wood “brings just half of the profit” as pulp in comparison to being processed into wood products. This trend has led to increasing logging volume to retain quartile profits; without this lowering of added value of wood “the forest nature would on average be doing quite well,” but instead, now, “all growth is foreclosed.”

Nevertheless, in 2022, forest industry exports still represented about 18 percent of the value of goods exports of Finland (Luke, 2023a), which totaled 14.6 billion euros and helps to explain the continued political support for the sector. Wood product industries (sawn goods and plywood) represented €4.1, while pulp and paper industries €10.5. The large export share of the fiber industry partly explains why the state has continued to actively promote the clearcutting–pulping model, instead of the wood product sector that could be maintained and grown by the continuous cover model. The usage of sawn wood in Finland has decreased dramatically, from over 5 MCM in 2005 to less than 2 MCM in 2024, with practically all the sawn wood produced in Finland going to construction (Aalto, Reference Aalto2024). The government has discontinued programs that support wood construction and watered down the demands for considering climatic impacts in laws, as asserted in 2024 by Tino Aalto, the chief operating officer (CEO) of Sahateollisuus RY, the industry association of the sawmill sector in Finland (Aalto, Reference Aalto2024). This was lamented by the sawn wood and construction industry, showing how the pulp and energywood sectors are supported by heavy subsidies, while more climate-friendly sectors, using trunks, are not. The sawn wood industry can be seen as subjected to the paper and pulp corporations, which also own sawmills. Currently a smaller part of a single log brought to a sawmill will end up as sawn timber, as a larger part than before of the log is purportedly taken as pulp chip wood (interview with Jyri Mikkola, March 2024). That pulp chip cannot contain bark, so “now all logs are debarked,” while earlier bark was not removed so there was more board wood. Previously before being sawn into lath, the other log parts such as stump edges were used in construction, “but now this also goes to pulp chip at the sawmill as this has a better profit margin than lath” (see Figure 9.1).

Figure 9.1 Logs and sawdust at the frontlines of clearcut logging in Finland. In this location, which is next to houses, an old spruce forest with tall trees once existed. South Karelia, November 2022.

Photo by author.

The government has actively tried to increase production volumes of pulp- and energywood, and create new and added-value product segments through several forest policies, such as the Forest Cluster Research Strategy (passed in 2006 and updated in 2010 to shift attention back to pulp from other bioproducts, as it was noticed then that pulping was not ending in Finland as expected, Jyri Mikkola explained), the 2014 National Bioeconomy Strategy (updated 2020–2021), the 2020 Low Carbon Roadmap of the Forest Sector, and the 2019 National Forest Strategy (see Vadén et al., Reference Vadén, Järvensivu, Majava, Toivanen and Eronen2021). The last one of these aims to turn private forest owners’ forestry into a more corporate form to make them more “active,” “growth-centered,” and “profitable” (Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry, 2019: 44, 59). However, these measures have mostly just increased production volumes and have not led to new product lines or added value, as Jakob Donner-Amnell has documented extensively (Puukila, Reference Puukila2023).

A key rupture took place in the 2000s, when paper demand collapsed; yet, due to the power and inertia of the RDPE, the sector clung too long and too intensely to paper production. The only new sector the paper sector betted heavily on was wood-based biofuels, with UPM opening a large biodiesel plant in Lappeenranta. However, these ventures flopped as the price of oil did not skyrocket and electrification became the key driver in car markets, which the forest industry did not manage to foresee (Puukila, Reference Puukila2024). Since 2013, cardboard, wood products, and especially pulp have been the key products, not paper. According to Donner-Amnell, with whom I have spoken several times at length throughout the past several years, the forest sector is in a crisis, but this is not yet recognized by the companies, which makes it harder to remedy the situation. He sees that it is difficult to try to increase the economic value-adding by the forest sector without a considerable increase in state and EU investments. Even with additional investment the economic future of the sector depends on the global market and technology developments, as well as other sectors such as the petrochemical sector, which are more powerful globally than the forest sector when it comes to designing the key policy and subsidy lines for raw material usage. China has also become the core of the global paper and pulp sector in many senses, as it is actively trying to establish its own pulp sector, which could lead to a lesser demand for pulp from Finland (Donner-Amnell, personal communication, 2023).

New Contentious Forest Politics and Debates

Since 2016, the clearcutting focus of Finnish forestry has received increased criticism and outright resistance by more vocal activist groups. This is due in part to the rise of pulping, the increase in harvesting, and the overall rise in environmental and climate consciousness and movements, especially among young people. This has resulted in the development of Metsäliike, which is an active and more radical forest movement. This forest activism is aligned with the views of many experts, researchers, and environmentalists who have been largely sidelined in the forest policy decision-making, which is mostly revolving around productivism under the guise of “bioeconomy.” This dominant pathway “is based less on science, (self-) criticism, or autonomous state bureaucracies, and more on governmental decision-making that is strongly aligned with the wishes of industry, landholders, and the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry” (Kröger & Raitio, Reference Kröger and Raitio2017: 12).Footnote ² In 2017, over 60 worried researchers made a public statement calling for the government to follow science and not increase logging levels through its bioeconomy strategy, which would cause major negative impacts to the climate and biodiversity (BIOS, 2017). In 2022, the country’s leading conservative newspaper, Helsingin Sanomat, published an article based on the Finnish Climate Change Panel’s report on the state of forestry, titled, “Finnish Forests are being Logged for Reasons that Have No Scientific Basis” (Saavalainen, Reference Saavalainen2022). The report assesses the claims made about the supposed climate benefits of the current forestry practices, showing how the increase of harvesting is not an act combating climate change, nor is it increasing wood construction or the use of wood products (Seppälä et al., Reference Seppälä, Heinonen and Kilpeläinen2022). The loss of carbon sinks in forests is due to harvesting practices that outweigh the benefits gained from carbon storage in wood construction. Seppälä et al. (Reference Seppälä, Heinonen and Kilpeläinen2022) recommend 72 MCM per year as the upper limit of harvesting, which should then be decreased year on year. Between 2000 and 2014 an average of 60 MCM were logged yearly (Landström et al., Reference Landström, Kohl, Puroila, Sihvonen and Tamminen2021: 116), the jump after that represents too drastic an increase.

For years I have observed the public debates and discussions around forests in media, social media, and different events and places in Finland. Based on these observations, it seems that it has been very hard for the industry, pro-industry decision-makers, forestry professionals, and quite a few forest owners “inside the system” to give space to recognize or accept the findings of latest scientific research on forestry and forest situation. This is because clearcutting has been established based on private interests rather than interdisciplinary research and debate (Jalonen et al., Reference Jalonen, Hanski and Kuuluvainen2006; Parkatti, Reference Parkatti2021). This means the proponents of clearcutting find it very hard to accept other viewpoints. Forestry research in Finland focused for a long time on only “advanc[ing] the clearcutting model” (Pihlajaniemi, Reference Pihlajaniemi2018). For this reason, a forest professional and owner, Heikki Ala-Aho, argues that:

Ala-Aho shows a growing standpoint among forest owners by counterarguing in his newspaper opinion piece against the claim that “nothing is enough” for nature conservationists (Siikajokilaakso, 2023a). For example, he mentions that of the Northern Ostrobothnia land surface 79 percent is covered by forests, of which only 4 percent are protected. He argues that it is a reasonable aim to try and adhere to scientific finding that at least 10 percent of all nature types should be protected (Siikajokilaakso, 2023a).

In real-world politics, the rising demand and need for retaining forest cover and increasing carbon sinks has meant that the industry proponents in Finland have promulgated a view that it is better to log now rather than wait for your forests to be conserved by force. This has led to fear-based preventive logging by many forest owners in the last few years to avoid having their forest areas turned into conservation areas (Sirviö et al., Reference Sirviö, Meriläinen, Lehtinen, Kellokumpu and Luukkonen2023). Maaseudun Tulevaisuus (The Future of the Countryside), the leading newspaper of farmers in Finland, surveyed the population in remote areas in rural Finland about their feelings toward conservation: 44 percent resisted the increase in conservation and 37 percent asked for more conservation (Koivula, Reference Koivula2022). Of all respondents to the survey, 58 percent had a positive opinion on the Finnish and EU plans to increase conservation in 2022 (Koivula, Reference Koivula2022). The high level of conservation criticism coming from the countryside is important, as farmholders are in a key position to decide whether to cut their trees or not. There is a deep-seated fear among Finnish forest-owning farmers of losing control of their lands, especially to top-down forest conservation and green measures coming from the capital and the EU. They experienced this situation in the early 1990s when Natura was established in a top-down process, where forestholders’ viewpoints were not considered and they were not asked if they wanted to protect their forests. In my view, this emphasis on the control of one’s own lands is a key feature that helps to explain why people clearcut and why they would side with the pulping impetus on the clearcut–plantation replacement of natural forests. This way they can feel they retain control and can maintain the possibility in the future to sell wood. Many are also fearful of losing control over their forests when they die, which is a reason they demand that their forests are clearcut before they die or they mandate it in their will. The basis of this moral economy is grounded in the concept of having private ownership of the tree biomass, which, in the ideal setting of these landholder imaginations, should be passed on in the family as an inheritance.

A further obstacle in steering away from the pulping RDPE is that clearcutting has become quite consolidated as part of the identity of forest owners and forestry professionals (Halla et al., Reference Halla, Karhunkorva and Laine2020). They feel that the propositions of decreasing clearcutting and offering other methods are not respecting their knowhow and expertise and, thus, they need to resist all other suggestions. Other studies on the extractivism–identity linkage worldwide have shown how it is connected to populist politics and the rise of authoritarianism and (re)enforcement of traditional gender roles, where, for example, men working in the coal mine feel threatened by the climate change mitigation pressures and subsequently started voting for Trump in the US presidential elections (Kojola, Reference Kojola2019). Similar tendencies toward polarization and taking more extreme positions related to environmentalism and activists have been visible in Finland in social media and in the articles in forestry professionals’ newspapers, which are more often becoming part of the post-truth media phenomenon with their nonfactual positions, science denying, and hostile claims. The issue is framed and understood, in the deep cores of identity, as defending one’s job and way of life. According to Jokiranta et al. (Reference Jokiranta, Juntti, Ruohonen and Räinä2019: 55), a large part of forestry professionals cannot fathom that there could be alternatives to clearcutting, since that means that they would need to question the validity of the 70 years of clearcutting experimentation in Finland. It is psychologically almost impossible for these forestry practitioners to accept or voice this. Such psychological impediments to moving away from clearcuttings dominance are also linked to patriarchal structures and tight gender roles regarding masculinity and a lack of the emotional skills to allow oneself to be wrong.Footnote ³ This confluence of circumstances and attitudes does not help when trying to solve the polarization, which is spurred on by a culture hostile to discussion in social media and society.

In the current public debate events around forests, such as at the 2021 Environmental Dialogue event on forest certifications (Ympäristötieto, 2021), clearcutting is taken as the norm and CCF is seldom mentioned. The certification schemes such as the FSC and especially Programme for the Endorsement of Forest Certification (PEFC) have been heavily criticized for greenwashing and not providing real solutions to the problems at hand.Footnote ⁴ The “alternatives” that are presented include leaving a few retention areas or seed tree stands within the clearcut. This kind of logging has increased as a tactic to avoid calling the areas clearcut, but such areas are in practice still mostly clearcut. The critics of clearcutting are framed as pursuing the complete and strict protection of all forests, which is not the case. Forest owners are being manipulated so that they make “premonition loggings,” fearing the EU will protect their forests against their will. This happens also when someone marks their forest as having high nature value (HNV) or a high conservation value (HCV), which leads to them to log these forests before they are protected, as for example Samuel Uusitalo, a rural entrepreneur, shared in the 2021 event where he was talking with researchers and industry representatives.

In May 2024, an activist and scholar battling for over two decades to promote forest conservation gave me insight into the kind of responses in the debates around clearcutting in Finland. Clearcutting is such a “central part of forestry” that “if you want to do something else,” “immediately” someone starts to “talk for example about the storage of forests in a museum, as if just a few percent protection would lead right away to 100 percent, if wanting for example more conservation areas.” These kinds of arguments are typical.

An anonymous politician who is a member of one Regional Council in Finland (Finland is administratively divided into these regional, provincial boards) said to me that “no one except me talks about nature there.” It should be noted that these councils are highly important in establishing landscape planning, possible ecological corridors, and other planning actions that affect forests:

This politician saw that the forest sector has been able to somehow fully root into Finnish spoken language that the forest expert is now the forester and that some biologist who knows about forests from a scientific perspective is not an expert. He explained further, “That they do not understand about tree growth and economic viewpoint apparently anything, so they are not listened to, but the forestry expert is listened to. So, in a way that conversation has already been cordoned off, so that we cannot enter into the area of another expert to say something.”

This kind of system-internal power hierarchy and inability to even voice dissent resembles a doxa situation, in terms of Pierre Bourdieu (Reference Bourdieu1991, Reference Bourdieu1977), where the debate has not even been divided into one between orthodoxy and heterodoxy, with doxa referring to the unquestioned truths in a society, not open to differing opinions which are openly discussed (Bourdieu, Reference Bourdieu1977). One grows into, socializes into a society, learning in this environment the “truths,” which are, however, created by argumentation by certain entities. The maintenance of doxa is related to creation of expert habituses by practices and language, where it is taken as granted. In the case of Finnish forests, according to the regional council politician, this is expressed through the sentiment “They know best.…We have it so that regarding forests, the expert is like a god.” This stance does not allow the decision-makers to use their voices fully in relation to regional planning (as so much of Finland is forest land). Rather, the chief foresters can sideline the actual, trained land use planning experts “who are more deeply trained experts.” It was hard to get any land changed in the regional plan according to them to anything other than forest land, “as this is seen as [an] possible impediment to forest economy. That is really a holy cow, in this province.” There were not tools to their knowledge in Finnish legislation to allow for the creation of green corridors and increased connectivity of the very fragmented remaining natural forests, although the industry claims that Finland is one of the world’s most forested countries.

Especially problematic are the directed mass-scale campaigns that serve to perpetuate false claims. Kajander (Reference Kajander2020) lists campaigns funded by forest industry actors and the state that spread erroneous information. Started in 2020, the Forests of Finland campaign (Metsien Suomi, n.d.), spread false information about forest protection through major television, radio, and outdoor advertising. A key message in this campaign is that half of the protected forests in the EU are in Finland, which is not true. The aim is to garner an image of Finnish forest policy as sustainable and ecologically responsible. This campaign also claims that 13 percent of Finnish forests are protected, but arriving at such a high figure requires counting swamps, fells, and other practically nonwooded areas as forests. It should be noted that it would not even be possible to do clearcutting on many of these areas (such as swamps, meadows, open fells, barren lands, and so on). The 13 percent figure also includes areas that have been conserved only partially, not wholly, and where logging, even clearcutting, are allowed (such as ridge protection areas). That figure would also have to include areas that companies have voluntarily – for the time being – left outside of logging (until the company decides to log them in the future). In addition, temporary protection areas (protected for certain number of years only) are also counted in the figure. This includes the many forests that are important to reindeer herding in Sápmi, which will soon be losing their protection status because Metsähallitus protected them for only 20 years in early 2000s. Therefore, the legally binding share of actual wood-based forest land protection on a national scale is only about 6 percent (Kajander, Reference Kajander2020). Most of these wood-based forests are in Northern Finland, as approximately 97 percent of the Southern Finland forests are on nonprotected lands. The Forests of Finland campaign is being funded by the Finnish Forest Foundation (Suomen Metsäsäätiö), the Industrial Forestry Association (Metsäteollisuus ry), Metsähallitus, MTK, the MMM (Maa- ja metsätalousministeriö), the Bioenergy Association (Bioenergia ry), the Finnish Forest Center (Suomen metsäkeskus), the Wood Processing Engineers Association (Puunjalostusinsinöörit ry), the Forest Workers’ Foundation (Metsämiesten Säätiö), and by 380,000 euros of taxpayer money. This is just one example of the widespread distortion of facts and information that legitimizes the continuation of current forestry practices. This has been especially visible in the decades-long dismissal and misrepresentation of CCF, which continues unabated in the current bioeconomy and carbon-capture debates.

There are also many other myths that are repeated by forestry practitioners although science has proven them wrong. Ala-Aho lists three such myths, starting with the claim that clearcutting would mimic natural forest disturbances such as fire, which is myth because after a fire the dead wood stays in the forest, unlike in logging (Siikajokilaakso, 2023b). Second, another detrimental and continuing practice is the drainage that is needed in lowlands after clearcutting, as the trenches are dug to compensate for the lower evaporation caused by removing the trees. These trenches have ravaged lakes and rivers, yet the practice of renewing old trenches continues, even though the RDPE proponents claim that the trenching had stopped. I have personally witnessed these differences when I have walked in forests before and after clearcuts. After clearcutting, the shallow and walkable old, moss-covered trenches have been dug very deep, much deeper than ever before. Third, there is an understanding that taking dead wood out of forests would be a virtue as this practice makes forests “hygienic” and there continues to be buyers for the dead wood. However, retaining this wood in the forest would also be economically beneficial as dead wood is the home of thousands of forest species, including the natural enemies of the tree-eating pests and parasites that have recently turned into an epidemic that significantly impacts the health of forests and paradoxically drives the further expansion of the clearcutting–plantation nexus, especially in old spruce forests. Ala-Aho sees that “we have become estranged from the natural cycle of forest,” and because of this estrangement “insane decisions on forest health and biodiversity” are taken, such as removing the dead wood (Siikajokilaakso, 2023b).

Myths are often spread from current forestry professionals to forest owners. For example, these forestry professionals claim that CCF would be suitable only in certain places and times, or it would weaken the quality of trees and forest wood; however, these claims mostly do not apply if the method is used correctly. These claims are perpetuated by different actors in Finnish forestry, for example the MHY. The director of South Karelia’s MHY, Markku Vaario, argued in 2019 that adopting continuous cover forestry “is not advisable” as “it is not an economic solution to the forest owner” (Tolpo & Hakkarainen, Reference Tolpo and Hakkarainen2019). However, the forestry specialist Aapo Latvajärvi from the Pirkanmaa MHY argued that there are some exceptions; for example, he asserted that the economic returns can be the same or better in CCF, in an optimal situation (Tolpo & Hakkarainen, Reference Tolpo and Hakkarainen2019). Currently there is a growing body of rigorous academic research in forestry analyzing the best forestry methods (e.g. Lundmark et al., Reference Lundmark, Bergh, Nordin, Fahlvik and Poudel2016; Pukkala et al., Reference Pukkala, Lähde, Laiho, Salo and Hotanen2011; Rämö & Tahvonen, Reference Rämö and Tahvonen2014). The growth of this kind of academic research was especially important in pushing for the 2014 repeal of the CCF ban in the new laws (Forest Act 1085/2013 and Forest Decree 1308/2013). Even with increased popularity of the research field, CCF literature remains scarce in comparison to RFM literature (Parkatti, Reference Parkatti2021).

In sum, there is a very deep-seated narrative where Finnish forestry has been framed as a sustainable, world-class system that can be and has been exported abroad. The so-called successful Finnish forestry model is used abroad to market mega pulp mill projects to the Global South, where people wish to develop as Finland did. However, this cannot and will not happen in these areas of the Global South as the Finnish corporations own or control the bulk of the lands, not the local small forest owners as is the case in Finland (Kröger, Reference Kröger2013a). Challenging forestry in Finland means stepping on the many vested interests that form the core of the Finnish node of global forestry capitalism. Finland is a frontrunner and core proponent of global forestry in terms of selling pulping plans, machinery, knowhow, and worldviews. This generates huge revenues for those working in the broader forest consulting and technology sectors. Thus, what happens in Finland and its moral economy does not stay in Finland. There have been truly global repercussions due to how the key players in Finland understand forests. In this overarching climate and moral economy, resistance means challenging a development narrative where the stench from pulping processes is called the “smell of money” in Finnish pulp mill towns.

Who Would Lose with Diminished Clearcutting?

In trying to understand who has the interest and motivation to try to retain the clearcutting–plantation RDPE, it is useful to look at who stands to lose their established business revenues if clearcutting is reduced and/or the pulping model is challenged. To begin, Finland’s largest forest management consulting company, Tapio, which is owned by the state and whose tree seeds account for about half of the currently planted Finnish forests (Tapio, n.d.), would lose massive revenue streams if clearcutting is curtailed as there would be less demand for tree seeds and saplings since they are not required in the same way under CCF practices. Thus, in their advising there is strong interest to give preference to clearcutting methods. In addition to the one-on-one work they do with forest owners, they also publish Metsälehti (Forest Magazine), which has approximately 200,000 subscribers and is the major opinion forum among private and other forest owners. Given their reach and dominance in the market, they are a key professional organization for forest management, but they also own the companies that produce the saplings.

In the 1980s, Tapio and the regional forest boards (also called Forest Centers) produced over 80 percent of the saplings used in reforestation, which were “sold by force to reforesters” according to Lähde (Reference Lähde2015: 77). One had to clearcut, one had to replant, and there was an almost monopoly by the state company in providing the saplings and seeds. Due to this conflict of interest, during the 2000s the MMM recommended that Tapio and the Forest Centers would give up their own sapling and tree seed production (Halkonen, Reference Halkonen2013). In 2013, Tapio, the Finnish Forest Center, and Tornator sold their Taimi-Tapio firm to its two acting directors. Taimi-Tapio was the second largest sapling company in Finland, producing approximately 25 million saplings annually (Vaara, Reference Vaara2013). This example shows how benefits are shared in a closed-in group of company directors within the Finnish natural resource sectors. I say sectors here because the measures taken in forestry are also typical in the mining sector (Kröger & Lalander, Reference Kröger and Lalander2016).

In addition to the conflict of interest outlined, MHY, which are regionally based, profit-making companies whose membership was obligatory until 2014, have sales targets for saplings, fertilization, tillage, and other measures that cost and are sold with the clearcutting–plantation package. Due to the need to meet specific sales targets, these regional forestry experts have an incentive to recommend as many maneuvers as possible in the forests. This is at odds with what the professional role of MHY is supposed to be as they should be offering objective advice about different methods. In 2021, in one MHY team the sales targets were as follows: 275,000 saplings, 137,000 plantings, 125 hectares of land modification, 200 hectares of young forest thinning, 125 hectares of fertilization, 42,500 m³ of wood sales by warrant, 5,750 MCM of harvesting services (including energywood), 1,250 hectares of forest planning and evaluation services, and 25,000 meters of trenching. In the tweet that shared this internal document, the commentator Jussi Alanko (a writer who has published books, including one on the massive negative impacts of forestry-driven bog drainage on lakes and emissions), argues that “A forestry professional must sell all kinds of nature-destroying services to forest owners. They generate profit for MHY. Recommending continuous tree-growing is unprofitable for MHY, so it is dissuaded in every way” (Alanko, Reference Alanko2021). Yrjö Haverinen (interview, April 24, 2024) put this bluntly: CCF would allow “amassing the paycheck every twenty years,” which would be “much more nature friendly forestry in comparison to the current rotational [RFM], where all are logged at once and even the natural seedlings are crushed, and then saplings are bought expensively, and the ground is broken and thus soil organisms are destroyed.” He said that new teaching material about CCF should be created, forestry schools should adapt this, and MHY should adopt these teachings in their advising repertoire. “As a simple answer has been, that there is no information. And who would like to bring forth their ignorance,” Haverinen said in his interview, referring to MHY and other forest professionals on advising about CCF.

CCF does not require so many salable forestry services. In 2019, the WWF found in a survey among forest owners on their experiences with the MHY, that about half of the owners were not asked by MHY what their aims and wishes are in relation to their forests. Only one-third of the forest owners had been offered the option of CCF or were even told about the possibility of joining the forest conservation Metso program (Fritze, Reference Fritze2019). The situation is now problematic as the MHY should be the organization advancing the interests of forest owners, who are MHY members, and thinking of their best interests. Yet, there is a conflict of interest as MHY sell forestry services, with forest owners and taxpayers (in the form of industry subsidies) paying the costs of this cheap wood strategy. According to surveys, in 2011 a quarter of forest owners were ready to change to CCF, which was not allowed until 2014, and half were interested in knowing more about the method (Jokiranta et al., Reference Jokiranta, Juntti, Ruohonen and Räinä2019). Haverinen saw that if the MHY, MTK, “and others that should defend the side of the forest owner” would give good advice, it would start a “total” distribution of information about CCF to the “field,” “then there would be hope that this would start to change a bit more nature friendly, this concept of forest.” The forest industry would “still get a good amount of wood” by CCF, but “should invest much more in research, new products with less wood.”

Solution Suggestions

In the current uncertain world situation with rapid, unexpected changes in climatic-ecological conditions and a growing danger of crises and problems, the CCF system is a much more reliable way to manage forestry. This is because it allows and relies on making logging interventions much more often (every 15–20 years), whereas the RFM system, with its end clearcutting happening only after 50 years or more, produces mostly just cheap pulp and energywood. Under the CCF model one can adjust the growth and at the same time pursue other-than-wood growth aims. This system also allows for new tree species to take over, which is important as the climate rapidly warms. In addition, when the species are more varied one can more easily avoid the danger of pests and diseases that could strike and devastate an even-aged monoculture. That said, while CCF is a more beneficial form of logging than RFM when considering forest nature and human needs according to current knowledge, there should still be areas conserved and left outside of forestry altogether. There are also many types of CCF definitions and practices, some that are not great for forest ecosystems – the misappropriation of the term is also a problem. Furthermore, some critics of CCF have argued that in some cases CCF could be used to justify the extension of forestry to natural or old-growth forests, which have been left aside thus far, arguing that this milder forestry could be used in these places. I experienced this personally when the old, beautiful forest I had been walking through in our family lands in Eastern Finland was logged by CCF. Even this method completely transformed the forest to such a point where one could not walk there anymore. After that logging, done badly by a heavy machine, the rest of the trees next to the clearcut area have fallen in storms, which has meant that now the whole forest has turned into a clearcut, as the fallen trees have been taken out (see Figure 9.2). The best in that situation would have been to not to touch the forest at all, or treat it as my grandfather did, taking out just a few trees each year by chainsaw and pulling the trunk out with a winch behind a small tractor from the roadside in the winter, taking care even in the details of the forest landscape, so that it remained beautiful and walkable.

Figure 9.2 An example of an old, natural forest, which was first logged by CCF, but then clearcut as the remaining trees fell due to the clearcutting of an adjacent forest, usage of heavy machinery damaging roots, and winds. Since this photo was taken even the remaining trees have fallen or been felled, the clearcut expanding itself in this way naturally. The image also shows the heavy footprint of the harvester’s muddy tracks. Northern Savo, June 4, 2021.

Photo by author.

In general, there seems to be a tendency and a real danger that the pulping–plantation RDPE adherents may tarnish the reputation of CCF as a concept, by making harvests that they call CCF, but which are very badly done or should not be considered CCF. They can use the term as an excuse to enter new areas. For example, Metsähallitus had an earlier rule to not log above a certain altitude, this applying mostly to areas in Northern Finland. Now they have started to say those areas can be logged by CCF methods, which is against the tenets of CCF as coined by its key proponents, for example Erkki Lähde, Timo Pukkala, and others. Forest activists managed to discontinue the loggings in Karttimonjoki, Suomussalmi, by Metsähallitus, which in 2020–2021 started to cut down an over 120-year-old forest with over 350-year-old trees under the guise of doing “research” on CCF methods.

Greenpeace wrote that this 129 hectare forest had several endangered species living in it and forests like this should be protected by the EU biodiversity strategy and by the guidelines of Metsähallitus (Greenpeace Suomi, n.d.b). Jyri Mikkola from SLL was the first among the environmentalists to make a survey on Karttimonjoki, which was then continued by Luonnonmetsätyöryhmä (a natural forest work group). He explained to me that the CCF researchers of Luke rigged this logging, which was unintelligent, which is the reason he and others participated in a resistance action and managed to postpone the start of the loggings. Once the loggings started, Greenpeace took over and managed to stop them. I will return to the Karttimonjoki case in more in detail in Chapter 10, on resistance.

Another issue is cities that are purporting to be “green,” such as Lappeenranta, which has a dominant and hegemonic paper and pulp industry (the UPM Kaukas mill and Metsä Group pulp mill). According to local experts I interviewed, Lappeenranta actively and savagely logged inside the city and within people’s beloved neighborhood forests to guarantee cheap wood flow to the city pulp mills. For example, the city ravaged a beautiful forest that originated in the 1890s in Voisalmi, which caused the local people shed tears when they saw the forest was gone (Värtö, Reference Värtö2022). A local politician shared with me that the problem is the overarching power given to the city chief forester, who responded to calls for turning to CCF by claiming this would “cause carbon sinks to become clogged up and other similar stuff,” myths that researchers had showed were wrong. However, currently the chief forester claims that CCF “would be applied,” for example in this Voisalmi loggings “where he had done these with his own so-called expertise … taking out for example all the underwood and turned the ground upside down.” An expert shared with me the following, “I have a bit of a fear that this continuous cover forestry is quite a wild jungle, that you can claim to be doing it in many ways, and that kind of expertise single people do not necessarily even have.” The expert continued to share that the bulk of loggings still focus on plain clearcutting with no talk of CCF. According to a city councilor I interviewed, even the paper companies would be more careful not to log inside the city perimeter in such a way, but the chief forester – and the city decision-makers in general – have an old-school understanding where they support heavy forestry and want to ensure enough wood from city forests to the companies. “No biologists work for the city … and [the] biodiversity program was created only a year or two ago,” “and forests have been left out of the biodiversity program although about 70 percent of city land area are forests,” commented the councilor (interview May 2, 2024). Yet, all this did not bar the city from being granted the European Green Leaf 2021 title by the European Commission and boasting that “nature and green values are centerpiece to our actions” (VisitLappenranta, n.d.). It is in these moral economic struggles and power hierarchies that CCF has entered as a potential tool to be wielded to support not only milder harvests, but also to frame whatever actions under the guise of CCF, to garner support for logging expansion.

A key bottleneck for the more nature-considering and milder version of CCF (there are many variants of CCF, some focusing more on profit and thus having more negative impacts) is also the availability of suitable harvesters, as most are currently too heavy and big. Heavy harvesters do, however, also have an advantage of having the mass and power to make the needed precision fallings (that do not damage the other trees remaining in the forest), Jyri Mikkola shared with me. While some CCF experts are developing suitable machinery, there would need to be a more general change in the forestry model so that large machinery companies would start to make their machines suitable for CCF. Now the lack of harvester drivers who know how to do CCF loggings, or the absence of harvesters with modified parts for CCF (the crane and harvester heads), are used as excuses to not do CCF. Additionally, much more general expertise is needed. Although there are now some companies offering advice on CCF, this information should be streamlined across the MHY of the country, updating their business packages and knowhow of their personnel. Currently, new forestry consulting companies have been created by the experts on CCF, these competing with the MHY, including the Yhteismetsä Tuohi, a jointly owned forest, pooling private forest lands, treating them with CCF based on their expertise, generating “yield without clearcutting” to their shareholders (Yhteismetsä Tuohi, 2023). A forestry expert, who is also a part-owner of the company, said to me in a May 2024 interview that, based on her experience, they have a CCF forester, Jussi Saarinen, “who goes to look at each tree locally.” They also have expertise in planning and use of forestry machines, which has generated “good results” for forests “and money to the account quite often, so it works.” The situation is more worrying when a forester who is used to clearcutting “just looks through the Tapio [general CCF] recommendations and then goes on and blindly follows”Footnote ⁵ just a part of them, possibly not even watching over the logging or advising the harvester driver. “Then saying this is CCF can turn the public opinion against it.” She could see this scenario play out in Finland in areas under the weight of the forest industry if this is the way CCF is starting to be applied.

Therefore, while the book Muuttuva Metsä (Juntti & Ruohonen, Reference Juntti and Ruohonen2023), a guide to CCF, details the pros and pitfalls of CCF, it struck me while reading how the key systemic power of the pulping RDPE was left practically unmentioned. While I understand the reasoning of not wanting to create enemies in the polarized atmosphere, reading the book made me realize there is much more need to speak out about the actual power relations and structures, which are likely to make the advance of CCF much harder than now described in Muuttuva Metsä. There, it is shown how CCF has grown slowly but steadily since 2014, so that now over a sixth of all forest owners say they have turned their forests completely under CCF and a much higher proportion say they have turned a part of their forests to CCF. However, this drive of CCF expansion needs to face and overcome the vested interests of the pulping–plantation industry, as this is pretty much a question of whether to produce cheap wood pulp or sturdy trunks. There are many different bottlenecks for transformation to CCF – principally, the role of MHY, “their level of knowledge and expertise,” and “then these chief foresters and similar” figures taking care of the implementation of forestry, as an expert explained to me in May 2024. Other, emerging bottlenecks are the generational transition of forest ownership to younger generations who often live far from the forests and do not know about forestry. It was explained to me that they “treat their forests then through the local MHYs, these just telling [them] what to do.” In these situations, forest stewardship and “all expertise” have been “kind of outsourced.”

Finland has an established tradition of protests at harvest sites by organizations like Greenpeace and Luontoliitto, which have affected the national-level and local policymaking. However, long-term daily Finnish forest activism has focused on observing public announcements or public permit applications for large, scenery-changing loggings and then activist experts have tried to convince the loggers not to log. A strategy here is to discuss the logging in question with local branches of the SLL. Activist Minka Virtanen (interview May 12, 2024) told me that because these permits are public and can be followed by forestry activists on a national level, they are one key knowledge source about where logging is planned in the natural or old-growth forests managed by Metsähallitus.

Seasoned activists and experts in the Finnish forest context, for example in the SLL, have also focused on building the knowledge base on the impacts of clearcutting. In Yrjö Haverinen’s view, when “so much factual information is known it cannot be denied or sidelined.” In an interview with the author on April 24, 2024, he continued that, in his estimation, in the face of these truths even the forest industry “needs to think” how forests are handled in the long term. The NGOs have shed light on the aspects of forestry that are not brought up by industry or the state. This approach to activism is more akin to the older Finnish way of relying on expert knowledge, the power of information and facts, and soft negotiations behind the scenes directly with decision-makers. Jyri Mikkola from SLL saw that the rise of the new generation forest movement reflected “how far Finland’s forest situation still is from where it should be.” He added that “also the younger generation representatives have the will to act to remedy this.” In this chapter, I will discuss this new resistance and the ways resisters have approached forestry activism in Finland.

Metsäliike, which is linked to XR and distinct from the wider forest movement, has organized many protests to demand that the devastation of forests be stopped, especially on state lands. As part of the broader forest movement, the 2018-founded Meidän Metsämme (Our Forests) social movement has focused on organizing forest dialogues with all stakeholders to affect experts, researchers, and locals (Meidän Metsämme, n.d.). In contrast, Metsäliike has been more radical and focused on civil disobedience. For example, on February 9, 2023, I observed a protest in the streets in front of the MMM, which is in the heart of downtown Helsinki and near the University of Helsinki (see Figure 10.1).

Figure 10.1 A march for nature that happened in the center of Helsinki.

Photo by author.

The protestors demanded that the state stop logging in the Aalistunturi area in western Lapland. Ida Korhonen, an activist in the movement and one of the key characters in the prize-winning Havumetsän lapset (Once Upon a Time in a Forest) documentary film by Virpi Suutari (Reference Suutari2024), spoke at the event. She had recently arrived from Aalistunturi, which at the time was covered in thick snow, and where trees were being harvested by machines. They had also been protesting at the logging site when the multiple police had come to forcefully remove the protestors. Ida shared her thoughts in the rally about why she participates in the movement (translated from Finnish):

Korhonen spoke in the rally about how Finland has had a long history of forest activism, where people have risen against the destruction of nature, and that it felt great to be part of this history. She continued:

By this, Korhonen was referring to the area being suggested for the creation of a national park, as there are very few old-growth forests, nature areas, or national parks in that part of western Lapland. This is a telling example of how pro-forestry Finnish powerholders, such as the current Orpo government and its Minister of Forestry and Agriculture Sari Essayah, seem to systematically try to ensure that conservation is kept limited, which in turn dooms many of the remaining forests. The threshold criteria for forest protection in this concept is too high now, argued Jyri Mikkola, although some state lands are also moved away from economic use. The focus of the Metsäliike has been on state forests, as it would be problematic to target the hundreds of thousands of private forest owners, many of whom gain an important part of their income from forestry. However, the logging carried out by Metsähallitus represents only 8 percent of all logging in Finland and the bulk of wood availability is decided by private forest sales (Frilander & Eskonen, Reference Frilander and Eskonen2020). Furthermore, there are about 50–80,000 hectares of state forests whose conservation value would be as high or higher than the Metso private forest conservation areas, making the protection of state forests more efficient (and less costly) than buying private areas for conversation (Frilander & Eskonen, Reference Frilander and Eskonen2020). The problem is that the state is letting forests be logged that would have at least the same value if protected as what they are spending to buy forest from private owners elsewhere to protect, Jyri Mikkola argued during our interview. Along these lines, Korhonen asked the protesters during the demonstration:

To this, the crowd replied by shouting: “No!!!,” after which Korhonen exclaimed how Metsähallitus “logs natural forests, conceals information, lies … fearing that researchers may find and protect natural forests. And at the same time Metsähallitus claims that we do not log any natural forests anywhere … we all know that they are being logged all the time.” Korhonen reminded the crowd that according to many surveys most Finns want more nature conservation and that it is high time to compensate for the logging that was done to create the welfare state. People can best pay nature back by protection and restoration.

There is also an important nonanthropocentric view of community present here that includes humans and forests being discursively reflected and built in the mobilization, which is a big difference in comparison to the materialist, economistic, rational, and human utilitarian view to forests by the industry proponents. Korhonen was able to articulate this:

Korhonen emphasized that what happens to nature and forests is the responsibility of everyone, but especially the people elected to parliament and those working at the Ministry. However, each blames the other for ordering or retaining clearcutting, for example in Aalistunturi. Metsähallitus asserts that they are ordered to act by the politicians, while the politicians insist that Metsähallitus has the autonomy and liberty to do what it wants. This maintains an image that no one is ultimately responsible, which is a common feature in RDPE settings where blame, responsibility, and agency are rarely assigned to the powerholders, as they often refer to these processes as running by themselves. Korhonen called for accountability:

In this setting, with growing pressure toward a shift in business as usual, some corporations have taken reformative measures in their harvesting policies. For example, according to Jyri Mikkola, UPM has followed the FSC certificate demands and placed at least 5 percent of its productive forest land permanently outside of loggings. The company has also said it would not completely clearcut about 6–7 percent of its forest areas (some of these are drained spruce bogs). The Tornator and Metsä Group have similar initiatives, which seem like cosmetic changes in the overall picture, but which Lassila (Reference Lassila2021) argues should be understood in the historical context where any idea of nonclearcutting harvesting was unheard of for decades and CCF was almost a “swear word to many forest directors.” Clearcutting in bogs is particularly harmful for the climate and water and companies fear this may be prohibited soon, which is a reason they might be trying to change some practices preemptively (Lassila, Reference Lassila2021).

New Media Activism

In March 2024, the Finnish government indicated that it would oppose the EU’s Restoration Act, which is a move made in collaboration with the Orbán government in Hungary. Critiques on social media platform X (formerly Twitter) were shocked by this alignment with Orbán’s far-right regime, which is openly hostile to nature. In a discussion of the EU Restoration Act on X on March 21, 2024, commentators referred to how the pulp industry has captured and dominated the Finnish government and several political parties’ key agendas. @NiklasKaskeala (Kaskeala, Reference Kaskeala2024) argued that the Finnish and Swedish forest industry, through their lobbying, managed to overturn the Restoration Act, “One sector firmly stuck on the wrong side of history manages to keep as a hostage the actions of the whole Union to stop nature loss.” To this, @TarmoKetola (Ketola, Reference Ketola2024b) added, “This is starting to get absurd when an industry that is becoming all the time less and less productive and employing is holding the rest of society hostage in its arsing around.” In another posting on the Restoration Act, @MariPantsar (Pantsar, Reference Pantsar2024), the director of the Kone Foundation “Metsän puolella” (“On the Side of the Forest”) initiative, argued: “I thought the government would no longer be able to surprise with its anti-nature and anti-climate nature. I guess I was wrong again. #restoresetting [ennallistamisasetus].” Another commentator, @MaiKivela (Kivelä, Reference Kivelä2024), a Left Alliance MP, tried to explain how it is not beneficial to Finns and forest owners to go against the Restoration Act, “The restoration regulation is about the possibility of using money to improve the state of Finnish nature, while at the same time employing Finnish people, above all those living in rural areas. In other words, the restoration money is directed to Finnish landowners, machine operators and contractors.” In the end, on June 17, 2024, Finland, along with five other EU states, voted against the Restoration Act (all of these, excepting Poland, have a right-wing government with a strong populist party), which was however passed, as, surprisingly, the majority of countries supported the Act.

These remarks are telling of the contemporary debates around clearcutting in Finland. In the past few years, many good new books critical of clearcutting in different ways have been published in Finnish. Huuto kaupunkiluonnon puolesta (A Yell for City Nature) (2022) explores how forest loss extends even to the cores of city forests across Finland, as city planners are ravaging forests for intensifying urban building. In the book, one of its writers, Sanni Seppo (Kanninen & Seppo, Reference Kanninen and Seppo2022: 255–256), asks while walking in a beloved forest under threat of being cut:

Similar tension between worry and action is reflected in Puut puhuvat (Trees Talk) (Forsberg & Jussila, Reference Forsberg and Jussila2023), inspired by Simard’s (Reference Simard2021) Finding the Mother Tree and based on in-depth experiences of the Finnish Natural Heritage Foundation members, as the foundation buying natural forests for permanent protection (Finnish Natural Heritage Foundation, 2023). The book includes a long history of maternal forest relations in Finland, broken by the arrival of agriculture, Christianity, and paternalism. Suomalainen metsäkylpy (A Finnish Forest Bath) (Leppänen & Pajunen, Reference Leppänen and Pajunen2019) explores the health and other myriad benefits of natural forest exposure and forest walks. The book also has an extensive discussion on the long-term history of forest relations in Finland before the modern forest industry, where forests and trees were central for culture, religion, and livelihoods. Juha Kauppinen (Reference Kauppinen2021), a long-term nature activist and journalist, records the past decades of history of environmental activism in Finland, including those movements against clearcuts in the 1970s–1990s. In his book, Heräämisiä (Awakenings) (2021), he also details how one can become an activist in practice. These are just some examples – besides the other recent references in this chapter – on how scholars and activists are now becoming ever more active in voicing dissent and dissatisfaction over the continuation of clearcutting. This forest activism has spread in concert with a general resistance to rampant mining expansion and demands for climate action.

The Kone Foundation (2023) has started a new major funding scheme called “Metsän puolella” to support research and action around natural forests in Finland and internationally. The Foundation has given grants to many key activists, for example XR, and to a broad group of nature surveyors who worked across Finland mapping valuable old forests that should be conserved. After this enormous work, this survey yielded a detailed and updated map on where to conserve first, considering biodiversity and importance. However, the government disregarded this mapping project and instead initiated its own mapping project, which experts have called a notorious debacle of continuing to sideline expertise and creating window-dressing to push down the bar of what can be clearcut, thereby decreasing conserved forest land size. Haverinen from SLL argued that the criteria that these Kone Foundation-funded mappers have used when evaluating forests “should be accepted by the government and politicians.” The mappers identified 201 public forests (totaling about 60,000 hectares) between 2020 and 2023 around Finland that should not be logged (Greenpeace Suomi, n.d.a).

The government announced in early June 2024 that it will water down the criteria for defining old-growth forests in Finland, making the criteria so strict that according to researchers and environmentalists, such as Panu Halme, there will be practically no old-growth forests left in Southern Finland because everything will be allowed to be cut (Hallikainen, Reference Hallikainen2024). Green Party and other politicians criticized this as a scandalous rigging of ecological criteria, demanded as part of the EU biodiversity strategy to end nature loss. For example, Ville Niinistö, a Member of European Parliament (Greens), tweeted on June 5, 2024, “The impudent attempt to falsify the criteria for the old forest, so that the forests would not need to be protected, is completely exceptional in Finland. The EU Commission has the authority to intervene in an unscientific definition” (@VilleNiinisto; Niinisto, Reference Niinisto2024). The decision was made on June 3, but still on June 4 Orpo met with the Finnish Nature Panel (an independent panel of scientific experts, consisting of leading researchers gathering research data for decision-makers) to pretend his government would discuss the issue with researchers (as he had previously promised that old forests would be protected), which Kaisa Kosonen from Greenpeace saw as a sign of the current state of “science-based decision making” (Kosonen, Reference Kosonen2024).

Latest Conflicts and Trends

There is currently an unprecedented urgency in Finland to retain and protect conservation areas, as the status of Natura 2000 and all conservation areas is put into question by Anglo American, which has carried out – with state and police backing – mining prospecting on top of the Viiankiaapa Natura area in Sodankylä, Northern Finland. This prospecting was resisted by the Metsäliike and XR activists in the spring of 2024, by actively blocking the machinery at the entrance (see Figure 10.2).

Figure 10.2 Protesters from XR block the entrance to the Metsä Group Kemi pulp mill complex. Kemi, Finland, September 2023.

Photo by Elokapina.

Figure 10.2Long description

Protesters from XR block the entrance to the Metsä Group Kemi pulp mill complex. Five individuals, dressed in winter clothing, hold a banner reading "TULE MUUKAAN SEARVVA KAPINAAN! STUIBMÄI! JOIN THE REBELLION!" One protester sits atop a tripod structure, while others stand beside the banner. The scene is set in Kemi, Finland, with a sign for the Metsä Group visible in the background.

The activists fear that if this activity is allowed, all companies, including pulp companies, can start logging inside conservation areas, making them de facto unprotected. If these activities move forward, the so-called green transition can be considered more important than previous nature conservation legislation. The fear is that then companies would be allowed to enter protected areas, claiming they are doing this for the “bioeconomy” or “green transition,” Ida Korhonen told me in May 2024.

Meanwhile, the state has not been willing to grant self-governance rights to the Sámi, in fear of them attaining too much power to make decisions related to land use in Sápmi and thus, be able to ban all logging, mining, and wind farming. Therefore, the increasingly vocal movement of Sámi activists, and especially young Sámi activists, for their rights can be considered as an important part of the overall resistance to clearcutting in Finland, as most of the remaining old forests are in Northern Finland. The delimiting of Sámi rights as an action is aligned in this sense with retaining extractivisms rather than protecting nature.

However, slowly more and more people have started to defend forests, questioning the story from the forest industry that clearcutting would be sustainable way to interact with the forest. This growing expression of grievances also brings into question the framing that only those who own forests have the right to decide what happens to them (meaning in practice they have the right to remove them). Typically, this forest activism starts with nearby forests. For example, on February 16, 2023, in Isnäs, a village in Loviisa, a local millionaire forest owner decided to clearcut and sell his forests to UPM. These forests were next to a school in the middle of town and were widely loved by the children. The locals resisted this and the parents of the children tried to block the clearcutting – although eventually most of the forest was destroyed, which shows the power of the RDPE. This example shows how people have started to defend loved places and dare to question the legitimacy of the current forestry system to act as it wishes. In the end, 16 hectares were logged, while about 5 hectares next to the school were retained, in a solution UPM called a “compromise,” due to the local resistance (Joukanen, Reference Joukanen2023). Greenpeace noted how UPM company representative gave untruthful answers to questions from the children before the logging. When the children asked what would happen to the animals in the forest, the UPM employee responded that “nothing would happen to the animals” and that the animals “would continue to live here as before,” and that a “new home would be found for them” (Joukanen, Reference Joukanen2023). In fact, such claims are representative of the underlying extractivist mindsets and myopia that are required to carry out the foundational violence that is required by those in this line of work. Existences must be denied and hidden in the process of destroying entire habitats. For those that operate inside the extractivist and deforesting RDPEs, the range of existences actively registered and realized in their minds is very limited. This allows them to perpetuate the falsehoods that dominate the thinking about what happens to other living beings and their homes with clearcutting. Children have not yet succumbed to the trap of nontruths about existences that is omnipresent in modern consumer societies.

I tried to ask several activists and experts for some current examples of successful resistance against clearcutting, but, for example in South Karelia, the answers from the SLL regional environmentalists were bleak – with none really during the past 20 years. A Lappeenranta-based activist told me that, “I do not see any [successes] here, no victories. Or then they are really marginal,” such as possibly allowing CCF in some municipalities in theory, or agreeing on some spoken level that CCF should be favored on peat lands. Other locals also answered that there are no successes, as the clearcutting has expanded so much since 2014. However, Jyri Mikkola thought that there were some successes, “but not many,” including the forest-preserving alternations to the forest plan in the city of Imatra (which also has a major pulp and paper mill, owned by Stora Enso). However, in the bigger picture the situation remains bleak. This dire situation is the current reality; therefore, this book has focused far less on resistance and their successful strategies than my other books. This reflects the reality of the deforesting RDPEs that are currently in power. This means that first the root causes of the RDPE need to be identified, to be able to even understand the situation. Once the situation is understood, then it is easier to start to affect and improve the situation. Even to talk about these things in Finland felt “therapeutic” for many informants, as many told me at the end of their interviews they have felt so alone under the crush of the pro-clearcutting and pulping hegemony.

In the past few years many former forestry professionals have turned to forest activism, trying to conserve forests by voluntary mapping and being active in conservation NGOs and movements. For example, Yrjö Haverinen (interview April 24, 2024), trained as forest products engineer at the Helsinki University of Technology in 1971, has been active since around 2010 in the forest conservation efforts in South Karelia. Previously, he worked for years for the Kemijärvi and Kuusankoski pulp mills and was a trainer for new paper engineers. As time passed, “the more worried I have become of the background history of Finnish forest industry. That greedy wood use, forgetting other things except mere wood growth, that forest is also so much more.” He thinks the root cause of the current clearcutting is the 1948 continuance of the practical ban on forestry methods other than clearcutting. In addition, he sees the pulp mills themselves as a huge part of the problem. He shared some thoughts about the state of affairs:

But now we have come so far in this usage of trees that our forests tolerance starts to be tested, and this has resulted in the forest scenery that, when you travel Finland east to west, or west to east, or south to north, or down, so, there is quite a bit of patchwork quilt, consisting of those clearcut, young forests.

This has negatively affected many aspects of the forest ecosystem, including “biodiversity, climate change, water pollution, human health, and recreation.” Haverinen felt that the real question is “what price and importance” should be given to these different aspects of the forest and the surrounding nature. When I asked Haverinen about what the role of civil society has been in affecting this state of affairs in South Karelia, he referred to the still important yet decreasing role of forest industry in offering jobs, tax income, and export yields. However, he indicated that as this role gets weaker “people start to value the local environment near forests as helping in recreation and health. They like to go mushroom picking, collecting berries, enjoying the nature on their free time.” When I asked if logging in important places has been stopped, the answer was negative. He said that “there have not been any larger confrontations here.” He referred to “dismal-looking” clearcuts on the shores of the Saimaa lakes that stand in stark contradiction to the promotion of tourism industry and job creation in the area. He said that when “the scenery turns baldhead does that please those coming from the south or elsewhere, as it does not even please the locals.” It was interesting to hear that very little contentious agency was actively and openly present, which again demonstrates the dominance and hegemony of the pulping RDPE in South Karelia.

Metsäliike Protests at Aalistunturi and Karttimonjoki

Meanwhile, the new Metsäliike, which, according to one member, has about 250 people in its communication list of insider activists, “with a few dozen really active coordinators,” has acted notably. This group has especially protested in Northern Finland in some very visible campaigns, such as Aalistunturi (see Figure 10.3). An activist of the movement, who wanted to remain anonymous, gave me some insight into the current setting of forest activism in Finland. Metsäliike “focuses especially on these old natural forests and particularly in state lands, and the means cavalcade includes direct action,” unlike most other forest activist groups that are more established in Finland. Metsäliike is a “quite horizontal grassroots level organization and [carries out] for example forest guard action, where some people have kind of recruited to watch over weekly some valuable state natural forests under a logging notice.”

Figure 10.3 Metsäliike members as forest guards in Aalistunturi, Finland, January 2023.

Photo taken by Elokapina.

I asked what their key strategies had been, he answered that the strategies

The Metsäliike member relayed the story about how they went to Aalistunturi from Helsinki with others, after hearing about the action:

The next day “there arrived an erätarkastaja [warden] of Metsähallitus, which is a kind of official who can give expulsion orders, that has some police like powers.” He told them to leave even before the police arrived. The activist I was speaking to had to leave earlier than the others for other reasons and saw many more police driving to the spot (see Figure 10.4):

Figure 10.4 The police patrolling at Aalistunturi, Finland, January 2023.

Photo by Elokapina.

If a person managed to ski close to the machine and signal the driver, they stopped the logging. “We understood that Metsähallitus paid a compensation to them for the stalled time.”

I asked how it felt to set up the camp: “Quite varied, if I remember, always before something like this happens there is a kind of nervous and tense feeling, but then when the tent was up there in the middle of the night, then you maybe relax, that the objective has been kind of fulfilled.” He said it also felt like that way they

This activist, like others, emphasized that Metsäliike goes to ongoing struggles to help when asked: “These struggles do not come from nowhere, and they are not invited by some national movement, but collaborations with local environmentalists. But this is often left invisible in the official campaigns, as these local actors do not necessarily want to be in the most heated direct-action phase so actively with their own face and name in publicity.”

He saw that in the state cases where they had campaigned they had “hardly attained conservation victories,” “as this protection is so difficult as we have this pulp industry that has left from a mitten [lähteä lapasesta, a common idiomatic expression in Finnish meaning that a situation has gone out of control] during the past 15 years.” However, there were some places, like Karttimonjoki, where “a logging notice issued had not been executed, or had been postponed, due to campaigning.”

I talked to another activist, Minka, who has participated as a forest activist in many events, for example camping for two weeks at Karttimonjoki in Kainuu to serve as a “forest guard,” in case Metsähallitus wanted to restart logging there. This case had multiple meanings and was essential in forging the new Metsäliike. According to Jyri Mikkola, the environmentalists first heard about these logging plans in the dialogue process between Metsähallitus, SLL, SLL Kainuu, and Greenpeace. Later, he checked the place and did a species survey as a member of the Luonnonmetsätyöryhmä. As Metsähallitus did not completely withdraw from the logging, Greenpeace took over the retainment of the forests, after which Metsäliike and XR entered the picture. Minka was with them and, during our interview, she told me about the episode and the feelings she experienced in these forests:

Then Greenpeace shifted the coordination to XR, and having stayed in the area for two to three weeks, Minka stayed to introduce newcomers to the forest area:

This happened in late autumn and winter of 2021. Minka said she was surprised to learn that in practice the activism was not so rough as is often thought and the general conditions were better. She was not expected to chain herself to a tree; instead the key tactics were making social media posts and walking close to the harvester. During this stay she learned how bad the situation of forests in Finland was and she said she “felt like I had been scammed. I was angry, why has no one told me, a silly feeling, that I had thought all is so nicely, and so possibly all others think … while many things are going to hell.”

This is a sign of the doxa turning to heterodoxy, when the assumed state of affairs is shown to be something else, Minka expressing feeling that

At this point she looked at her notebook and then proceeded to share what she had written, “I feel a bit like when being really enamored … maybe I am then enamored with those forests that carry the world … I couldn’t possibly be away from there!” She continued, “well, the whole place has become important to me, it has been somehow miraculous. I have been to natural and old forests also before,” but in that region the drastic difference to clearcuts around “highlighted the gorgeousness of natural state,” “when there was time to be” in that forest for weeks.

They had thought before arriving that the locals would be hostile to activists coming from Helsinki but found this was not the case. She shares that “there were locals we met, who said that also others share the opinion that enough has been logged here, but no one dares to say this aloud. We received this kind of half-furtive comments.” They also made local friends and allies. She told me of one such interaction:

The hunters in general, although not approving of XR or Greenpeace in many senses, were supportive of the logging protests, saying that it was “good that you are here.” A young local politician also expressed support for them, but being from the Centre Party, quickly received reprimands from her “Centre party colleagues, especially older ones”; therefore, she had to backpedal, saying that she had only said her personal opinions. Yet, even despite the fallout she was “still visiting us and wanting to help us.” There were also local tourism entrepreneurs who helped in the effort and were happy for them to be there, according to Minka.

I asked what the outcome was; she said simply, “Well, the forest is still standing.” She continued to elaborate, “It is in a passive state, the logging announcement is still active.” Yet, when they had actively watched over the area for two months and got good local and national publicity, “the logging thing was frozen” and continues to be as of February 2025. The activists also signaled they are ready to pursue more radical means if needed, which potentially makes the area more of a no-go for Metsähallitus. Greenpeace was there after the 2021 camp to put a lot of ropes between treetops (Greenpeace Suomi, 2023). Minka indicated that it did this “as this might slow down somehow the loggings, as it makes using harvesters hazardous, and also result in plastic powder” from the ropes possibly ending up in pulp digesters, there being also metal parts used to attach the ropes that make logging hazardous. She continued, “and then someone [from the company] went and saw this roping, and nothing has happened after that.” This ended up saving the nest of a protected species of large bird, which if the presence of the nest was verified would “protect a substantial area.” Minka shared that, “The area is being still watched over by us.”

The Karttimonjoki episode was important to forge the Metsäliike, as “it was realized that yes we do have all these different strengths, and that this thing is working well, this created connection between the forest sections.” The connections created most strongly were between XR and Greenpeace, and others, such as Luontoliitto. This action also allowed “Metsäliike to become independent as a kind of own social movement.” This was also an important battle “symbolically”:

I asked if she felt a feeling of succeeding after the episode, she said, “Definitely yes, I feel that after activism I have had” a feeling that one can affect things:

I asked what the current state of forest activism in Finland is, to which Minka replied: “I have heard from people having done this longer that in the past two years many new things have happened, with new interest, new things starting differently. Not a huge landslide [of activism] but a constant” interest by people to educate themselves and hear more. She has now talked to large masses, audiences of hundreds of people, and is known as one of the key characters in the Havumetsän lapset (literally meaning Children of the Coniferous Forest) film. She felt that there was “a kind of hard consensus” reigning:

This last sentence refers to more positive times in society in relation to forest conservation. Besides Minka, other activists also indicated that they felt the same, as another Metsäliike member said to me in May 2024:

Thus, there is a kind of deepening rupture between what most people want and what the ruling elites and the RDPE do. This is a possible explanation of why Finland (and Sweden, where similar dynamics are taking place) is experiencing more hostile police responses to the new clearcutting and pulp company blockades put up by forest activists.

I asked Minka what a person could do upon seeing the destruction of their nearby forest. If they were feeling sadness and anger, how could they react? She said, “It is worth it to mourn those sorrows, it is worthwhile to feel those feelings, since they are really valid. If sorrow comes, agony.” During the press tour she had heard a lot of these stories:

There has been a surge of new literature on experiencing and feeling the painful emotions and distress caused by the ecological and climate crises, the traumas. Writing from an ecopsychology perspective, therapist Harri Virtanen (Reference Virtanen2022) argues in his book on surviving eco-anxiety, Trauma ja Luonto (Trauma and Nature), that these emotions are not individual per se, but they flow from the worsening quality of the environment, of which we are a part. It is a misunderstanding borne by the individualization of all issues and problems in modern society that one mischaracterizes the feelings as one’s own fault, while they should be seen as natural consequences of the cause of ecological degradation taking place and being witnessed. This eco-anxiety is becoming increasingly common and is a source of serious mental distress, especially among the youth. However, activism could be considered a cure for these helpful feelings, which are themselves helpful signals to act. However, one needs to start by recognizing and not sidelining the emotions. Minka told me about encountering these feelings en masse due to Finnish clearcutting, “People have huge experiences of losses, sorrow and anxiety for losing their nearby areas and even single trees.” This statement refers to the practice that many Finns still have of having important or sacred family trees (see Tree People by Kovalainen and Seppo [Reference Kovalainen and Seppo2014]). These feelings can have “gnawed the person for years or decades.”

Minka continued, it is “no small thing that a huge ecosystem is lost, so it is worth it to feel the sorrow. That is a huge thing, that it is somehow lost, that one should be near to the feelings, but not attach” oneself to them. “If one notices that there is something wrong, and feels bad, then one can try to stop it, that it would not happen again somewhere else. Or spread information about it.” She recommended that it is important to be active locally in different ways.

However, this is easier said than done, especially if one lives on the deforesting frontier in the rural areas of Finland, with a strong pulping hegemony present. Minka said that it helps her to put these actions into the perspective of where the planet is going, the predicted huge problems due to the climatic-ecological catastrophes, climatic collapse. She closed with the thought: “Relating one’s own personal fears to the enormous, bigger also personal fears can be what helps. At least it helps me at times if I am afraid in some protest or somewhere. So, then I think of those things, that really make me afraid, really really, and suddenly it feels a bit easier to be there.”