Why I crashed an exclusive logging event on International Biodiversity Day
I’m a polite person. You know, all the basics; holding the door open for people, giving away my seat on the bus. I would usually never show up to someone else’s party uninvited. But these are unusual times.
We’ve all seen the news. Scientists are sounding the alarm that we are entering the sixth mass extinction. Species are being lost before we have time to understand them, and habitats are being decimated for humanity’s insatiable appetite for more resources.
In the Great Northern Forest, that great green crown of our planet that covers northern Sweden, Finland, Russia and reaches across to Canada, this crisis is now more real than ever.
So when I heard that SCA, a major Swedish logging company, was hosting a fancy exclusive event they called “Capital Markets Day” in the forest for investors and important stakeholders on exactly the same day as the UN’s International Day of Biodiversity, I could not sit idly by.
Early in the morning, while the guests were boarding their private jets, our team was making the final preparations to our plans. Merijn from Belgium was writing a story on how these forests end up in tissue products back in Brussels, and Irina from Russia, where huge tracts of intact forests are being fragmented by logging and raging forest fires, was finalizing communications to send back to her team in Moscow.
Were we nervous? A bit. Were we ready? As ready as ever.
And then it was time.
We met the investors on a field trip to the forest to be shown just how good SCA is at destroying these beautiful forests.
“Hi there folks, we’re from Greenpeace and we hope you’re having a fantastic International Day of Biodiversity. We know you might be thinking of investing in this company and I’m sure they are giving you some good reasons to do so, but we want to be absolutely sure you have heard the full story of how this company is threatening biodiversity, the climate, and violating Indigenous rights.”
This certainly wasn’t the field trip they expected, but it was the story they needed to hear.
In this part of the Great Northern Forest less than 5% of the forest is formally protected. The majority of forests are either logged by companies like SCA or turned into monoculture plantations, often with an invasive tree species called Lodgepole Pine that suppresses biodiversity and causes severe problems for reindeer herding, the traditional livelihood of the Sami, the Indigenous people of northern Scandinavia.
These plantations are the biological equivalent of walking into a library full of books by only one author.
The more scientists discover about the natural world the more they are finding how little we actually know and how much more there is to find out. Intact ecosystems are key for our collective survival and prosperity; for clean water, air, food, and medicine. A planet teeming with biodiversity is the only planet worth living on, and this planet is the only one we’ve got.
Join us in telling SCA to stop wiping away the Great Northern Forest.
Ethan Gilbert is a Forest Campaigner at Greenpeace Nordic
