Of a million hectares, there is taiga. Theft of the Arkhangelsk forest

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

In the Dvinsko-Pinezhsky interfluve of the Arkhangelsk region, the pristine forests are being destroyed rapidly and far from prying eyes, public control. This is a national disaster that exceeds all threats from the Shies landfill.

A terrible photo report was published on his blog by the popular photographer and blogger Igor Shpilenok. Such an outrage that is happening now was not even in the USSR:

“I returned home from the Arkhangelsk taiga. I visited two distant places: on the White Sea in the national park "Onega Pomorie" and in the interfluve of the Northern Dvina and Pinega in the eastern part of the region.

I also guessed that the remnants of the pristine taiga in the North-West of our country were being exterminated, but I did not think that so rapidly and on such a scale that was revealed to me during this expedition. Prior to this trip, I hoped that nature conservationists have a spare time, and Mother Nature has secluded off-road places where the remnants of the relict taiga can remain untouched for many, many years. Now I know that we have neither time reserve nor roadless "Berendeyev Thickets". An unprecedented extermination of the northern taiga is taking place, based on the most modern technologies.

In the interfluve of the Northern Dvina and Pinega, the largest in Europe massif of untouched reference taiga has survived to this day. More recently, its area was about a million hectares. Here originate or flow 18 salmon spawning rivers, the purity of which determines the state of the entire salmon population - Atlantic salmon. The interfluve forests are one of the last refuge for wild reindeer. whose population in the region is on the verge of extinction as a result of habitat destruction and poaching.

The entire territory of the Dvinsko-Pinezhsky forest massif is leased by large loggers, it is a resource for the forest sector enterprises in the region. Large forest tenants (this group of companies "Titan" and JSC "Arkhangelsk PPM" have considerable influence in the region. They declare their "environmental friendliness" and even voluntarily certified under the FSC system, which for Russian companies is a "green pass" to foreign environmentally sensitive markets Nevertheless, the development of forests goes along an extensive path. On the felled areas, high-quality reforestation is not carried out, birches and aspens grow in place of relict coniferous forests, and timber merchants continue their movement deep into the pristine northern taiga, as if it is endless. very soon, timber merchants will be forced to change their approaches to business, but we will no longer have the pristine taiga.

Off-road conditions have saved the northern taiga from intensive economic use for centuries. Freshly built roads do not lead to settlements, but to tracts of uncut forests.

On clayey areas, as well as on steep descents and ascents, concrete slabs were laid. The forest sector of the region spends colossal money not on high-quality reforestation in felled areas, but on the preservation and development of the old, extensive forest management system, on the construction of new and new roads in the last massifs of intact forests, on the expansion of felling volumes.

Since the transport distance from remote areas to processing sites is usually hundreds of kilometers, even powerful timber trucks, with good roads, cannot cope with the haulage. Along the roads, you can see stacks of timber in many tens of thousands of cubic meters. Here you clearly understand the scale of forest destruction.

This is how the Arkhangelsk taiga looks like from a bird's eye view. Felling rectangles. Each individual plot can be up to fifty hectares. Soon the loggers will "master" the surviving rectangles and for a long time will lose interest in the devastated places.

Trees in the north grow slowly and do not reach gigantic proportions. These spruce trees may be well over a hundred years old.

Logging camp. The organizers of the forestry business present themselves as benefactors of the local population. In reality, the colonial scheme is visible, when the main beneficiaries live in the capitals, or even in prosperous countries, and the local residents, after such forest use, are left with ruined taiga and poverty. New technologies of forest destruction require a minimum of people. The Siberian barber, on whom the crazy foreign inventor worked in the film of the same name by Mikhalkov, has existed for a long time and is destroying forests all over the world with frightening efficiency. Just one complex, consisting of two machines with the English names, a harvester and a forwarder, can replace more than fifty people working in logging using traditional technology. Freight "Mercedes" and "Volvos" are working on the haulage, carrying round logs along the wagon. Now Russia is firmly among the three leading countries in terms of the destruction of primeval forests, and the Arkhangelsk region is the leader in the destruction of such forests in Russia.

At the beginning of this century, when it became clear what kind of trouble was hanging over the northern taiga, nature conservation organizations, scientists, and the public began work to create a regional landscape reserve between the Northern Dvina and Pinega rivers, which would save at least a part of the relict taiga from massive logging. The reserve regime will allow the local population to continue their traditional nature management - hunting, fishing, picking mushrooms and berries, but clear felling will be prohibited. Several scientific expeditions were organized to survey the territory, difficult negotiations began with the timber merchants and the authorities. The creation of the reserve was postponed more than once, and its area decreased, information wars were waged against its creation. In 2013, the project of a nature reserve with an area of almost 500 thousand hectares received the approval of the state expertise. In 2017, the governor of the Arkhangelsk region confirmed that there will be a reserve. In 2018, an agreement was reached with tenants on the boundaries of the reserve and its area, according to this document it will amount to 300 thousand hectares. The tenants tried to push the territory of the reserve away from the zones of their interests, so the configuration of its borders turned out to be far from ideal. According to the plan approved by the Ministry of Natural Resources and Timber Industry of the Arkhangelsk Region, the reserve should be created in early 2019, but there is still no document on its creation. It worries …

The Arkhangelsk branch of WWF-Russia, having learned about the project to photograph the pristine forests of Russia, invited me to another expedition to survey the territory of the future reserve. The expedition began in the Pinega village of Kushkopala, which is located about three hundred kilometers from Arkhangelsk, then for a hundred kilometers we drove by car along new logging roads among endless clearings to the middle reaches of the Yula River. It was on these hundred kilometers that footage of the destruction of the Arkhangelsk taiga was filmed.

The endless expanses of wild untouched nature are turning into a myth before our very eyes. A soulless cash-based system robbing local residents of a sustainable future; takes home, habitat from our wild neighbors on the planet, impoverishes biological diversity. We are surprised by the climatic cataclysms of recent years.

The northern coniferous forests are of great importance for stabilizing the climate; they are a kind of "fur coat of the earth" that restrains the flow of cold arctic air masses into the interior of the mainland, retains and redistributes moisture. These are important arguments in favor of preserving at least a part of intact and pristine forest areas, including the creation of the Dvinsko-Pinezhsky landscape reserve …"