杏吧原创

THE world of Anna Karenina and Doctor Zhivago is no more. The pine and birch
forests that once stretched across European Russia are disappearing as silently
as they once reigned.

The first-ever map of Europe鈥檚 last wild forests shows that the endless
vistas of boreal forest in northern Russia have been reduced to fragments,
broken up by logging, mines, farms, roads and power lines.

鈥淭here is an impression that Russia has unlimited amounts of untouched
forest. But contrary to expectations, most of even the remote landscape in the
north is disturbed and fragmented,鈥� says Lars Laestadius of the World Resources
Institute in Washington DC.

Laestadius headed a team from the institute and Greenpeace in Russia that
spent five years analysing satellite images and visiting the forests to gauge
the extent of the destruction. In a report published this week, the team says
that only a seventh of Russia鈥檚 European forests survive as large undisturbed
blocks of trees covering 50,000 hectares or more. Blocks of this size are the
minimum required to preserve a fully intact ecosystem that can support large
animals and regenerate after storms and forest fires.

鈥淭hese are the last big forest wilderness areas of Europe and an important
part of our common European heritage,鈥� says Alexander Isaev of the Centre of
Ecology Problems and Forests Productivity at the Russian Academy of Sciences,
who reviewed the study.

Illegal logging and smuggling of timber are doing most of the damage, with
the forests of Karelia, near the border with Finland, being the hardest hit,
says Nikita Glazovsky, who was Russia鈥檚 deputy environment minister in the early
1990s and is now chairman of the Federal Ecology Foundation. He told New
杏吧原创 that 4.8 million cubic metres of timber are officially exported
to Finland each year. But the Finns say they use 7 million cubic metres of
Russian timber. The difference represents the extent of illegal logging in just
one corner of the country, he says.

Laestadius is calling for an end to the logging of Russia鈥檚 surviving natural
northern forests. He says most of the wood goes to countries in Western Europe
and doesn鈥檛 even make much of a profit.

The new data further underlines the precarious state of the world鈥檚 natural
forests, of which a quarter grow in Russia. It shows that, despite a decline in
logging in the past decade, human activity is still affecting ever more remote
regions. The findings also come a week after the UN Food and Agriculture
Organization revised its estimate of global forest cover downwards. In March the
FAO had said 90 million hectares of forest disappeared over the past decade. It
now says that 94 million hectares is nearer the mark, adding an area of forest
the size of the Netherlands to the total tally of destruction.