There was a time when your predecessor at the Forest Department, Arvīds Ozols, figuratively speaking, had one foot in the Forest Department and the other in the State Forest Service (VMD). Combining two such significant posts is no simple matter. How long did you think about it – whether to accept or not – when you received the offer to become Director of the Forest Department?

As for the first part of your question, I would agree that one can only admire Arvīds Ozols for how he managed both, because, quite apart from the classic 100 days in the post (of Director of the Forest Department at the Ministry of Agriculture), I would suggest that even now, after almost six months, there are things I might still not know – and, in all likelihood, do not know. The good part, which I greatly appreciate, is that the view of the sector from a post at the State Forest Service and from the Forest Department is different. What is more, at the ministry everything moves very quickly and dynamically. Whereas at the VMD I was largely an implementer, that is, someone putting policy into effect, at the ministry I am also among those who shape policy. One of the positive things achieved back in my time at the VMD, which I can now appreciate from the other – the ministry's – side, is that the Director General of the VMD can issue an order on specific measures to limit mass outbreaks of forest pests and the spread of disease in the forest, for example in controlling bark beetles, by involving a group of experts rather than resolving the matter through the crisis management council.

Does it help in your work that you know the "other side" you mention so well – how the implementer, the person who carries out decisions, has to work? And how? There are all sorts of situations, all sorts of decisions and orders.

When I think about my own experience in the sector, in training, in study and at work, I have been through almost the full circle of what is possible (Ogre Technical School, the Faculty of Forestry at the Latvia University of Agriculture, now LBTU, Latvijas valsts meži, the State Forest Service); if I wanted to work anywhere else, I would have to think hard. In my view, what matters is the political course set out by Evika Siliņa in calling for a reduction in the administrative burden, because at times, looking at things within the ministry too, we conclude – and are glad – that less paperwork is needed, since we do after all have digitalisation, and one would like to see more work done rather than just talk – and that, in fact, is how it ought to be in almost every state or local government institution.

One would rather not remember the restrictions of the Covid-19 period, but that time, as many point out, also brought something positive, namely the opportunity to work remotely. Now it even seems odd that an outside impetus was needed to grasp something so very simple.

On this I too can say – thank you, Covid! The opportunities to work differently were right there beside us the whole time, but... many of us, put simply, were used to driving to Rīga – an hour or an hour and a half there, the same back – it was simply everyday life. The situation forced upon us by the pandemic and the related restrictions literally compelled us to think and to see that work can be done differently, that it is possible, and that it works well enough. Of course, as in many cases, the nuances have to be taken into account – if we look at working group meetings, work in person will undeniably be more effective, because there is nothing that can replace discussion "in the flesh", and if you are in the same room as the people you are talking to, there can be no "lost signal or poor internet connection". But, for example, to convene an inter-ministerial or even wider meeting quickly and promptly, the remote format is excellent for saving time.

What is more, in my view the possibility of remote work could motivate people to apply for jobs in public administration. In manufacturing you are hardly going to be able to work remotely, and at the State Forest Service you will not put out forest fires from a desk either, whereas in ministries and their units the possibility of remote work does exist. I have told my colleagues in the Forest Department that I do not need them to be physically present at the ministry from Monday to Friday, but (!!!) it is important that the tasks set are completed on time. Very simply – be at home, sit in the garden under an apple tree and work at your computer; what matters is the result. What is more, from an occupational safety point of view it is quite good if a person works at home, where they can get up, go out into the garden, do something else, move about, stretch – which is not always possible on ministry premises, where one meeting often follows another.

When we arranged the interview, you said that important meetings and sittings outside Latvia were coming up shortly.

In June, a three-day meeting of the directors of the forest departments of European Union countries took place in Brussels. What did we do? We assessed how forest areas are being regenerated so that they are closer to nature and more climate-resilient. Another very important topic, and a topical one for us in Latvia, is how to create opportunities for timber obtained locally to be processed locally too. Speaking of that word "locally", there are quite a few different ways of understanding and assessing it. For example, in Alūksne municipality there are several companies that process local timber obtained in that very municipality (though not only, of course); that is the municipality; the next level – we look at Vidzeme, then Latvia, the Baltic states... If we take the line of thought further still, we arrive at Europe. What to do and how, so that timber (the tree) is transported as little as possible from the place where it is harvested to the place where it is processed, or even to the end product. It is an interesting topic; one has to think about volume and about traditions.

I have also been working with colleagues on the declaration of the 9th Ministerial Conference on Forests. Its most important message is that we create climate-resilient forests ourselves. In the process of drafting the document, nature itself, one might say, intervened: some colleagues were delayed; there was flooding in southern Germany, because a month's worth of rain fell there – something similar to what, unfortunately, we experienced in Zemgale at the end of July. That makes one think about how well and in what way we are prepared for such situations – whether, for example, everything in Latvia is in order with the drainage systems, so that water can be carried away quickly enough, and so on. Continuing the topic, bark beetles and forest fires remain a serious problem in Europe, as do windthrow and windbreak. All of the above, taken together, calls for serious attention to the question and its possible solution: how to create and how to grow a climate-resilient forest. There are many and varied approaches, and the productivity of forest stands has to be looked at as well – the wish list is a long one. Timber is one of the renewable resources and it should be used even more. And that is not a story just about boards, plywood or veneer.

We also spoke about invasive species and forest fragmentation, but the topic of "local harvesting and processing" seemed very important to me – with colleagues we considered how to preserve the local: local sawmills, local producers, local master joiners and carpenters who still have these skills. The further and further we move away from the land and from practical things, the more certain skills are lost – they disappear. People still have a desire to flow from rural regions to the cities; there is a flow in the opposite direction too, but a smaller one. What is more, if we are talking about local-scale timber processing, it is important that there is not only the timber but also the person who will work with it.

In this connection I think a great deal about what has been done wrongly so far and what would have to change so that people do not leave the countryside but stay and live there.

If we are talking about parishes, a very good example is Lizums in Gulbene municipality, where four large companies operate (Avoti, Rairu, Dimdiņi, Farmeko) and there is work for people from quite a wide surrounding area. If we also talk about strong companies in the municipalities, there is Laflora, there is Stiga RM, there is Krauzers, and Latvijas Finieris has production facilities outside Rīga. And those are only companies in the sector…

You name precisely those entrepreneurs who do not stop at what they have achieved but look further ahead, so as to be a step, or a step and a half, ahead of the times.

When people who know their way around the sector read a popular science article about wood chemistry products, they understand well enough the work, the time, the resources and the volume of product that can be obtained; those who understand less, when speaking about wood and timber, tend to say that "surely one could produce this and that and earn a great deal".

At present the cascading principle is topical, whereby timber is processed to the maximum and the negligible remainder is burned; the other current topic is wood biorefining. The question is where and for what we will use the products obtained in the wood biorefining process. I would suggest that what is happening in many spheres at the moment is comparable to the transition from horses to motor cars. There are many things we can obtain, synthesise or produce from wood that we are not yet aware of.

What is your team like at the Forest Department?

I have a wonderful and self-reliant team, and both of those – the people and their self-reliance – are a pleasure to me. We are adding to the team step by step. This will already have been said on another occasion, but before I agreed to work at the ministry, I spoke to Normunds Strūve, who at the time was working at Latvijas valsts meži, and asked whether he would come and be my deputy at the Forest Department. I did not get an answer straight away, but in the end that is what happened.

In the department, understandably, people do change as well; recently one colleague went to work at Rīgas meži because she wanted to work in a tree nursery – I shall have to go and visit to see how she is getting on.

Returning to bureaucracy, it is odd that this problem tends to be highlighted by quite a number of lawyers, who for the most part are themselves the drafters of the legislation in question. If a conversation on this topic starts up on social media or at some event, colleagues in the sector and hunters usually stress: "Our sector is regulated in as much fine detail as hardly any other." Do you have a specific plan for how to simplify and free up, at least in part, the matters under your remit?

What endures is what changes! The sectors you mention and the issues important to them will have to be tackled, though we have already begun to do so. An assessment has been carried out of a whole series of regulatory acts, which we can broadly divide into two parts – technical amendments, for example the forest regeneration regulations in connection with the Constitutional Court judgment, and political decisions, which we are trying to include in the guidelines for forestry and related sectors.

Speaking of hunting, it is clear that we have to get to grips with assessing the state of game animal populations. If we look at the statistical curves and see how the number of animals keeps rising and rising, we have to work out how to proceed – whether to grow forest or to grow forest animals. A middle way has to be sought, and that may call for unpopular decisions.

One thing does have to be remembered, though: however much we dislike bureaucracy, at times it is important and necessary – it is just that one has to think about the degree of detail of each requirement or rule or piece of regulation. As in many spheres, in my view balance or a middle way is very important, so that a law or set of rules is not excessively fussy over detail and at the same time not excessively lax.

If a law or set of requirements is, as you put it, excessively permissive, is it really guaranteed that a great many people will rush to use that opportunity (or the so-called loopholes) selfishly or unreasonably? In Latvia something unprecedented happens fairly often and, on the basis of such cases, legal acts are created or added to without even considering that there may be no next case... Someone makes a mess of things, and the problems are everyone's, or many people's...

There is no need to look far for a bad example – as a result of the Zolitūde tragedy the Construction Law was changed, which has unmistakably and needlessly complicated the relevant processes.

Speaking of the weakness or strength of laws – the main thing is their substance. What is happening at the moment? Almost every line or word is traced along with a finger, and as a result the intended sense of the legal act is lost. A law expresses the substance; the rules express how to do it. Often the drafters of those rules want to write them into the law itself, and it loses that sense. It will not be possible to include every conceivable case in laws; one has to understand why something has to be exactly the way it is. Another important thing, if we are talking about laws, is that there should be less looking at the section on infringements, literally hunting for them. This issue, in my view, can be resolved by a good education – giving a young person, from kindergarten and the school desk onwards, breadth of thought and understanding – for example, there is forest, field, river, bog – and there is the interaction of all these places and factors. Speaking of education, the teacher asked my son's group at kindergarten: "Children, who can tell me where milk 'comes' from?" "From the shop," most of them answered almost in chorus. Mine objected: "No, milk comes from a cow!" It is a classic story that we have heard in various interpretations, but... in life it repeats itself far too often.

I am from the Alūksne area myself; since finishing my studies I have lived in Jelgava, and my children still managed to get to know hens, rabbits, cows and a farm – now we can drive out to the countryside, though the farm is no longer there. By that I mean to say that we need far more education and knowledge, and far broader, and then there will be considerably less worry about whether someone will break the rules or not. I think a person looks at themselves and at the environment they live in over the long term. If we are talking about forest owners, they are not people who think for a single day; when they think about the forest, they plan it for themselves, for their children and for their grandchildren too.

That is why, returning to education, one has to ask how knowledgeable and educated are those who voice opinions and to whom society often listens far too uncritically... If people's knowledge were broader, I think we would be spared the odd discussion about matters that someone who does not know does not understand.

You are not the first person I have asked, but – what is to be done about the conviction reinforced over the years that if you are a forest owner, or have the relevant education, all you see in the forest is banknotes? Once discussions about restricting economic activity begin, money is the first thing sector representatives are reproached with, while at the same time the reproaches come precisely from the people who are asking others (for the most part the government or the local authority) for that money.

The fact you mention would have to be looked at very specifically – who is saying this and who holds this view. Is it forest owners saying that instead of forest they see green, rustling scraps of paper, or is it people working in the forest saying it, or...

... it is said by people who call themselves green activists or green politicians...

Here it would be worth assessing how public opinion about forests and everything else connected with them forms and is formed. You will certainly have heard people discussing who is believed more and who is heard more. The forest owner will not always be the one with the loudest voice, running ahead of everyone else and energetically telling them something. A forester does his work very conscientiously; what matters to him is what has been done in his forest, not what someone will think about it or how he might show off his knowledge. Someone from outside comes along to such a colleague in the sector and says: "Listen, I think (think, not know!) that you are doing it all wrong!" There are things one can accept, there are things to introduce, but – if we want to protect something, the best way to do it is by managing it. For example, the pasqueflower in the forest very much needs sunlight; if a thinning felling has been carried out in a pine forest, the pasqueflower will like it there very much. If you do nothing, they will not be there.

The next step is compensation for restrictions on economic activity – how large and how adequate it might be. We can buy up a property, but – if it has been a family property for decades – why would anyone simply sell it?

When the sector was preparing for protests in the spring, in one conversation I asked colleagues for their assessment – how realistic it is, in a situation where the fine word "austerity" has returned to Latvia at least in the public sector, to find money for compensation. One of the counter-arguments will unquestionably be this – if people have property, they have plenty of everything, and so on. We have heard quite enough from official sources that if, when calculating benefits or support, you have one euro or five euros more in income, you are not entitled to anything – let alone with "a whole property".

I shall begin with an old truth – money does not grow on trees, and someone has to earn it and pay it into the state treasury. The age-old question is and will remain where to get this money. One can think about money from various European projects or funds, which is a short-term solution, because that money will run out. What then? In my view we should look more broadly and more wisely – not just look for money for compensation and write long, detailed rules and calculations, but think about how to manage these areas, and... then we will not have to think about compensation, or the compensation needed will be considerably smaller. That is a practical and sensible approach. Thought certainly also has to be given to nature protection as such – I understand that if a habitat is there, it should be preserved in that particular place (which also takes a certain amount of work), you cannot carry it away, but here too there have to be clear conditions. If we are talking, for example, about micro-reserves and their upkeep, the situation ought to be changed. Quite enough micro-reserves have been established, but what happens to them once they have been established? This has been discussed more than once. When the species protection plan for the lesser spotted eagle was drawn up, Uģis Bergmanis, an ornithologist and the best expert on the lesser spotted eagle in Latvia, had excellent proposals which for some reason were not taken into account. We cannot put nature in a box and say – now everything is sorted out for us, the micro-reserve is there, let us go away, do nothing and... when we come back everything will be just the same. Not a bit of it! It will not be the same. This is not about one particular bird, but... Maslow's pyramid still holds – feeding, shelter, breeding – the most elementary things a bird needs. If those are there, the bird will be fine; if something is lacking, it will go elsewhere.

Continuing on forestry and compensation, we have to understand what we are compensating and what has to be compensated. There are individual territories where privately owned land could be exchanged for equivalent land, and so on. Overall – and I shall repeat myself – nature protection has to be thought about through management; not by burdening the state budget, but by making a contribution to it. It has to be remembered that the more territories we have where forestry or economic activity cannot be carried out, the greater will be the share for which compensation has to be paid. If we know that the funding for compensation "arises" on the side of those who manage the land, then reducing that share disproportionately tips over the communicating vessels...