A few years ago, people complained that hooligans had stripped the bark off living pine trees in the Gauja National Park between Auciems and Pielekši. Later, however, it turned out that they were not bandits at all, but professional environmentalists who had stripped the bark using European funding – as part of a project worth 823,243 euros.
They affectionately refer to this activity among themselves as "girdling". "It is done by cutting a strip of bark from the tree at a height of one metre from the ground so that it dies. (..) Sounds brutal? It is, because it is a slow death for trees, and that is why I will never do it again," is how Peter Wohlleben describes the process in his book "The Hidden Life of Trees". Yet our nature enthusiasts do it, and will continue to do so.
It turns out that, in the opinion of professional nature enthusiasts, there are simply too few dead trees in the park for invertebrates, birds and small rodents to inhabit, and for rare lichens, mosses and fungi to grow. After all, various beetles and other small invertebrates can live in standing dead trees.
It turns out that these activities are also part of restoring the natural environment. The environment that was gradually altered by our ancestors as they cultivated land for agriculture and began to purposefully manage and tend to forests. This alteration of the natural environment reached its peak during the Ulmanis era, when the area and proportion of agricultural land were at their highest.
Officials from the Nature Conservation Agency (DAP) also live in memories of a beautiful past when fields were uncultivated and more than ninety percent of the country's territory was covered by forests. At a seminar, one had to listen to a DAP official lamenting the “terrible situation in Latvia”, which caused “tears of blood to flow when seeing the devastated landscape of Sēlija” – naturally, without any specifics to justify these absurd claims. There are also DAP officials who praise the “excellent nature conservation system during the Soviet era”, and they are not troubled by, for instance, the devastation of the Daugava valley and the flooding of historical and cultural sites dear to the Latvian people.
Of course, to the ordinary Latvian, damaging wood has never seemed like a sensible thing to do. However, the most incomprehensible exploit of the professional nature enthusiasts was the planned fire ritual, which they themselves affectionately called "controlled burning". Specifically, in that same Gauja National Park, there were plans as early as 2014 to set fires over a 4-hectare area, so that everything would happen as it did in the old days, when forests burned and were not extinguished, and what grew back in the burnt areas was what nature intended. By 2050, the spiritual heirs of Herostratus intended to set the red cock to 251 hectares of overly green and healthy forest. As part of the implementation of the "Forest habitat restoration in Gauja National Park" project, naturally, invertebrates, birds, reptiles and small rodents would also be burnt.
Due to public outrage, the professional nature enthusiasts were forced to abandon the major burning project. The Nature Conservation Agency complained that "the public has expressed confusion and concern regarding this activity" and that "controlled surface burning could only take place after the public has been educated about such an activity and greater public support has been achieved for it". It is interesting to wonder how the nature conservation bureaucrats imagine achieving such inconceivable support?
Meanwhile, one of the ideologues of the burning, Uģis Rotbergs, in an interview in the 21-27 July 2017 issue of "Sestdiena", in which he is introduced as a "forest expert and politician", laments that "dozens of doctors wrote a letter" against the burning. But he is still ready to burn things immediately, because "controlled burning is a normal forestry method" and "this controlled burning actually reduces the threat of a more powerful wildfire – if you burn a little bit from time to time, forest litter does not accumulate". After all: "Look at a pine cone – it needs heat to open." And so on, and so forth. He speaks just like Zarathustra – equally alien and incomprehensible to a Latvian.
An ordinary person cannot understand why, even in the name of nature conservation, timber is not being utilised in forests but left to rot, even though its value is estimated by specialists to be 1.5 billion euros. Likewise, even professional nature enthusiasts will be unable to convince them why, in one place, bark should be stripped from thriving trees for the sake of insects, while in another place, trees should be burnt along with all the insects.