You come from what was once a well-known and prolific Kalns family in these parts, whose branches have spread far across the world into various fields. You are the only one who has returned and now tends the family home at “Segļi” in Kurmāle parish.
My children are the seventh generation in the family’s known history. In the late 19th century, once some time had passed since the abolition of serfdom and Latvians could grow prosperous through their own labour, the second generation signed a purchase agreement with the manor lord. They borrowed 3,500 silver roubles. I’ve no idea what that’s worth today – I’d guess it’s comparable to around 350,000 euros now. They apparently also got another 1,500 silver roubles through something like a present-day “Altum” programme.
That was the foundation of the “Segļi” farm. Twists of fate, wars and repressions have battered and scattered the family. I never really left these parts, since as a child we often came from Liepāja to visit my grandmother. Little by little our family took over running the farm, and we moved to Kuldīga. I was away more during my studies, but I quickly realised that living in Riga wasn’t enough for me and that I needed to come back to “Segļi” now and then. I’ve been the permanent farmer here for more than 15 years now.
Is the farm large?
As a study by the Latvia University of Agriculture puts it, our 60 hectares would be enough for growing berries and vegetables. Since “Segļi” is split roughly evenly between forest and arable land, that gives extra support for keeping the family and the farmstead going. The farmland is worked by a local farmer, and I try to manage the forest myself, though when heavy machinery is needed, forestry companies step in to help.
You’re a lawyer by training. What drew you to the forestry sector?
Life makes you take up various opportunities. I trained as a lawyer at the Police Academy, worked for a while at a ministry, then at “Lattelekom”, after which I managed to get into Latvijas valsts meži, where I got to know forestry processes from various angles, until I ended up in real estate, and for more than ten years now I’ve headed the relevant division there. I’m more of a manager than a lawyer these days, though real estate is often bound up with legal nuances, and it helps if a manager understands them. I don’t think of forest only as real estate. I look at how everything that happens there ties in with the goals of foresters, timber harvesters and nature conservationists.
And how does that tie in? What, in your view, is happening with Latvia’s forests?
Forest owners are still doing well, both economically and in terms of development, and our forests keep adding to the nation’s wealth. But there are serious complications tied to various demands for uniform European standards. Anyone who has travelled, or even just looked at the statistics, understands that forests in Denmark, Spain, Latvia or elsewhere can’t be measured with the same ruler. For us, and also for Sweden, Finland, Slovenia and Slovakia, land management is one of the foundations of national prosperity.
Given how large Latvia’s forest cover is, we can’t go along with the scale of nature protection being pushed on us from various directions. Sweden and Finland have said they won’t protect 30%, because that much isn’t needed and the effect would be the opposite – the climate would worsen and forest value would fall.
The question is: should this be compulsory or voluntary? Are we heirs of the Soviet system, who only protect and preserve under strict “directives”, or can we take part in this process voluntarily?
This debate seems to have been running without any result ever since independence was restored.
Because each side is fighting for its own interests. Even in the press of the 1930s you can find anxious articles: “Oh no, all of Latvia is being felled, soon there’ll be no forests left!” What actually happened? There’s twice as much forest now, and standing timber volume is three and a half times greater. Politicians are very good at counting voters. There are around 100,000 forest owners, plus another half as many again working in the sector who don’t own forest themselves. Non-forest-owners are far more numerous – theoretically almost a million voters against a mere 150,000.
Everyone is fighting for their own reputation, money, livelihood. There’s a certain methodology for assessing natural habitats that determines the outcome. Let me give you an example from school: over a term you get marks of 8, 9, 7, 9 and one 2.
That methodology works like this: if one parameter gets a 2, your overall term mark is also a 2, regardless of how good the rest were. On that basis you can declare that the meadows are in a bad state, and so are the waters, the forests, the habitats.
Everything is bad, and suddenly it needs protecting, needs money, and projects can be written. None of the environmental quality assessors has ever said that things are fine somewhere. No nature conservation organisation has ever said that enough is now enough. Not a single protected area has ever been lifted in Latvia, even where the old tree with the bird’s nest that justified the micro-reserve is long gone.
The owner isn’t fairly compensated for that value. Those are the contradictions in the regulation. However properly the rules are drafted, there’s a great deal of ambiguity in them, no balance, and that breeds inequality.
Do you have any wish to go into politics yourself?
For now my children are small, and I want to protect them. If I went into politics, I wouldn’t want to play the role of a grey card-carrier, but would take a clear stand. Timber industry people and forest owners need to get involved, they also need to inform the public, but unlike the other side of the debate, we have to work practically in our sector day to day. Those who write projects and do research have more time to talk and shape the public conversation. I’m not shy about saying, and our fellow countryman Kristaps Pētersons shares the view, that public broadcasting does a very poor job of shaping public opinion on financial literacy and business assessment. Switch on the television on a Sunday evening and mostly what you see is a contest over who can badmouth politicians more. Defence, education and healthcare matter to us, and they need funding, but you can’t earn money from those fields themselves. We need to think about the country’s economic development. Political uncertainty and the unemotional acceptance of every European Union requirement is a threat to Latvia. We know how many seedlings we grow in Latvia every year, how large an area of forest we replant, how much we tend. Who are the first men you meet on the road in the morning? Forest workers heading out with brushcutters to tend the stands.
How do you picture the forest of the future?
Like a mosaic, if you looked at it from the air. If everywhere had forests of the same age and the same kind, they wouldn’t be as rich as when there’s a younger stand next door, and a clear-cut too, where raspberries and wild strawberries grow nicely, ready to be picked from the same spot for at least a year, rather than gathered along ditch banks. It won’t be the case that, the moment restrictions are lifted, forest owners will fell everything. First, there won’t be enough people to do it. Second, as soon as supply on the market grows, prices will fall sharply. That’s another story where simple economic laws aren’t understood, yet the public gets stirred up regardless. Unfortunately, some friends of the green movement particularly cultivate and dramatise the situation, ignoring the fact that forest owners aren’t cutting down forests, they’re renewing them.
What other resources does Latvia have?
Following overall economic development, Latvia isn’t at the bottom of the pile globally. We’re a member of the OECD and the European Union, among the 50 most developed countries in the world. We live comparatively well, though of course things could be even better.
The Lithuanians, who used to be in a worse position, have somehow moved further ahead. They’ve been better at cooperating, squabbling less, trusting more, and letting investment into their country. In Latvia it saddens me to see how easily the public can be stirred up by claims that wind farms are bad. Is everyone in Denmark, the Netherlands, Ireland or Scotland unhappy, then? Clearly wind farms alone won’t be enough, the Daugava isn’t enough, and we won’t be building a hydropower plant on the Venta. We need to use whatever energy we have, for instance making more use of wood chips. We import far too much without reckoning that for every ship coming in, wagon-loads of money go out the other way. Constantly proclaiming that the landscape is untouchable and sacred, we seem to have become a nation of bast-shoe wearers. There used to be a saying: “Better in bast shoes, but in a free Latvia.” Yes, that was an emotional stance back then, but now we need to think about the country in real terms! We need to educate our children, teachers need decent salaries so they can deal with troublemakers and cope with today’s misunderstood human rights, which stop them from speaking up loudly enough to say that others shouldn’t be disturbed while learning. Somehow we’re losing our natural instinct as custodians of the land.
Perhaps the fear of foreign investment comes from the worry that we’d no longer be the owners of our own land. A large share of wind farm developers are foreign companies.
What, by definition, is “your own land”? Everyone has their own property, and as a nation we all govern the state together. Back in 2014 it was already clear that trade with Russia wasn’t possible, and now we’ve given up the electricity market with it too, yet we still import a huge amount of resources from unfriendly states. Who can say for certain that, say, gas no longer comes from Russia?
I don’t believe Latvia will end up building more than ten large wind farms. Looking at the trends, turbines are being scaled down, natural values are protected, and distances from homes are respected. Our society has plenty of other problems behind why people sleep badly or have poor health. Of course, you can also understand those who want to live in an absolutely untouched landscape. Then let’s get all the protesters together, from Pāvilosta to Nītaure, from Riebiņi to Ēdole, and agree on where to build the power station. I’d bet every one of them would say: “There are places like that in Latvia, just not here, not in my back yard.” Foreign investment isn’t the worst story going. It’s good that there’s more of it, because it makes NATO more interested in defending us.
You were born in Soviet times and finished school in independent Latvia. How do you remember that change?
From the stagnation years I remember standing in queues in shops where the shop assistants spoke Russian, because Liepāja had a fairly Russian-speaking environment at the time. I went to a mixed school, and when it was split, Latvians had to go elsewhere while the Russians could stay.
What is our mentality, really? We ourselves never quite had that statehood foundation. The 12th and 13th centuries survive only at the level of legend, and certainly didn’t stay in the national psyche. In the 19th century we managed brilliantly to move from something close to serfdom into a different quality of life. The German nobility, who were essentially occupiers, though let’s call them colonisers instead, built the economic foundation and drew Latvians into shipbuilding and the timber industry. That’s how the Latvian national state identity took shape. We founded our first independent state, then came the Second World War, and we were badly broken.
We lost two diasporas – the Baltic Germans and the Jews – and a great many of our own people too: many emigrated, brave men fell in battle, legionnaires were tormented, families were deported. In their place came low-skilled labour with a very low level of culture and no respect whatsoever for this land. We’re still dealing with the consequences today, but I’m not saying the Russians alone are to blame. In 35 years we ourselves have let a great many things slip too.
The rebuilding of “1905 Park” in Kuldīga sparked a debate about what to actually do with a contradictory part of history – Soviet-era monuments.
Taking that kind of absurdism further, we’d have to tear down the Vanšu Bridge and other Soviet-era buildings too. Of course, monuments carry ideological weight. I went to 1905 Park and looked into it. The monument itself carries no red stars or other Soviet glorification, only the number 1905. We know this year for various historical events. It struck me that something still wasn’t entirely fair. Kuldīga wants to head towards a polished narrative, avoiding history because it’s complicated. It’s easier to take the monument out of sight, off to the cemetery, so nobody has to explain anything to anyone. I picked up the Latvian encyclopaedia and read everything about the 1905 revolution, starting with its causes. The story of 1905 should be told standing right by this monument. But what if it’s no longer there?
And what about respect for the sculptor? Perhaps I have a personal fondness for Līvija Rezevska, because she bought my grandfather a ticket back to Kuldīga, so that he, worn down by the camps and penniless, could return home after many years. I don’t believe someone who helped a person who’d been repressed would go around glorifying communism. Likewise, the 1919 memorial site is simply a piece of historical evidence – sweeping it off to the cemetery won’t make the truth any different, better or worse.
Latvians should understand just how complicated our history is, what the world is like, and that shaping the future isn’t so simple.
What was on your mind when you joined the National Guard?
My work involves cooperation with the defence sector, since its development mostly takes place on state land. When Russia’s aggression and the war in Ukraine began, I realised we weren’t ready and were doing too little. I won’t forgive myself if things get serious and I end up, at best, mobilised as a driver or a ditch-digger. What’s my motivation for giving up my free time and going off to National Guard training, living dirty in mud and cold? I’ve lived a happy and successful life up to the age of 45, thanks, of course, to the ancestors who pulled us out of the USSR.
Will I have done everything so that the next generation’s happy life isn’t cut short years from now? That’s why I decided to join the National Guard last year.
What draws you to take part in quiz games?
It’s a chance to test your knowledge of history and geography. There was a surge during the “Covid” period, when there was hardly anything else to do, there was no entertainment at all out in the countryside, but various online quizzes became popular instead, and new acquaintances formed. I’ve noticed how much it encourages broader thinking. I know real estate well, I’m interested in football, but there’s so much more besides. If you don’t know the answer, whether or not there are options given, you try to work out the most likely one. Games like that are a proper brain workout – entertaining and, at the same time, with a high energy-return coefficient.
You also took part in the TV game show “Veiksme, intuīcija, prāts” (Luck, Intuition, Mind). In what order of importance would you rank these three things in your own life?
Starting with luck. Because it comes from the verb “to accomplish”. If you’ve accomplished a lot, and done so often, things also go your way.
If you don’t sink your “threes”, as they say in basketball terms, it just means you haven’t taken enough long-range shots, haven’t scored enough. With the mind, I quickly worked out what’s possible and what isn’t.
We’re engaged in psycho-emotional cooperation with people – both those who think alike and those who think differently. Intuition mostly needs to be used in non-standard situations, but there shouldn’t be too many of those.
First published in the newspaper “Kurzemnieks”, issue of 30 June 2026