...instead of raising the prestige of science by providing a correctly argued assessment of the situation, they publish a post that is illogical, which only serves to discredit a discipline that is already suffering from a crisis of authority.

Viesturs Ķerus, Chairman of the Board of the Latvian Ornithological Society, has been operating under a similar scheme for a long time. Capitalising on many people's natural desire to preserve as much pristine nature as possible, he regularly publishes ecologically correct, crowd-pleasing posts that nevertheless fail to stand up to scientific scrutiny. His texts are teeming with claims that forests are being clear-felled in massive quantities in Latvia, that forest cover is shrinking, and by deliberately dramatising the situation, he demonises forestry as a whole.

Anyone interested in this subject can easily find that forest areas in Latvia are increasing every year (currently exceeding 50% of Latvia's total territory), that the volume of growing stock in Latvian forests is also increasing (from 546 million m3 in 2001 to 670 million m3 in 2018), and that, in accordance with Latvia's strict industry legislation, new forests are planted in place of cleared areas, ensuring a full cycle of forestry regeneration. However, the ornithologist and scientist Ķerus is not interested in any of this. He just keeps repeating the same thing over and over, and many self-proclaimed "defenders of nature" see him as a kind of guru.