Press release 8th November 2007
Drained peatlands causing huge phosporus releases from bottom of the seas
Baltic Sea - sick from Finnish forestry?
The Finnish Association for Sustainable Forestry has called upon the Finnish government and the Baltic Marine Environment Protection Commission – HELCOM to study the impact of forestry on the state of the Baltic Sea and the inland waters of Finland. This request is based on an assessment that tiny particles of suspended humus in the effluent from drained peatland in Finland have caused oxygen depletion near the bottom of the sea and inland watercourses, triggering the phenomenon known as internal loading. This pollution phenomenon arises when the bottom sediment of these waters releases the phosphorus that causes eutrophication.
Read more here.
Press release and campaign letter 1.6..2007/
Union of Ecoforestry in Finland
The destruction of Saami homeland forests in Finnish Lappland started again
- this is a call for action to friends of the Saami !
The long lasting forestry conflict in Finnish Lappland is again in a very urgent state. The Finnish state owned company, Forest and Park Service, has started large scale logging operations in the home area of indigenious Saami people on the 14th of May, 2007.
These loggings can't be accepted for the following reasons:
-there is no solution yet for the landownership conflict between Saami people and the Finnish state.
-the Finnish state has not proven to be the actual owner of the forests it is logging right now.
-the clear-cutting style of logging ancient forests in the extreme north of Europe cannot be accepted from an ecological and micro-climatical point of view.
-the loggings destroy the very basis of the culturally important Saami free browsing reindeerherding tradition
-the loggings waste the ancient forests and its wood and leave less possibilities for future truly sustainable continuous cover forestry without destructive clear cutting.
By these arguments among others Union of Ecoforestry urged Finnish parliament to stop the logging immediately and gave for parliament groups the documentary movie Last yoik in Saami forests
The director of the movie, Hannu Hyvönen, expressed his feelings about the on-going loggings recently: "It is quite easy for us to update this sad turn-up in the documentary movie, but we cannot update these forests which are
now again cutted down."
Finnish state own tv-company cannot broadcast the documentary which accuses Finnish state human rights violations,
Union of Ecoforestry supports campaigning for Saami forests and invites all friends of Saami now for actions.
-In this situation we strongly encourage Finns as well as foreigners to arrange movie actions, public presentations, to get widely known and understood what is reall happening in Lappland, in Saami forests, the last natural forests of Europe. Union of Ecoforestry supports dvd distribution for public presentations.
The documentary movie can also be loaded here:
http://video.elonmerkki.net/last_yoik.mp4
If you want to order the dvd and/or join in friends of Saami -posting list please send a message to
More information:
http://weblog.greenpeace.org/forestrescue/