A few weeks ago, I spotted a post on social media referencing an article published in the Latvian press nearly a century ago, which predicted that forests would very soon be completely clear-cut and, as a result of excessive human interference, would be unable to properly regenerate. Nothing has changed since then, the author of the post concluded.

One could simply point out that the exact opposite of what was predicted has occurred – while in 1920 forests covered only 27% of Latvia's territory (with land being used extensively for agriculture), by 2018 this had reached 51%. The data confirms that the "end of the world" predictions made at various times are flawed and stubbornly fail to come true. However, I believe the post confirms how little we grasp about the impact of human-conscious intervention in forests, and that this impact is very often not just to be assessed with a minus sign. When people call for no intervention (or as little intervention as possible) in nature, they surely cannot imagine what our country's territory would look like in such a scenario.