Life and death in an old Polish forest

BIALOWIEZA, Poland – The forest bed is a cemetery of spruces and fallen oaks.

But under broken branches and rotten leaves, thousands of species of insects feed on the Bialowieza forest. There are many species of mushrooms that grow here and throughout the year. Every year, they discover themselves even more.

More than two hundred species of birds, including rare species of woodpeckers and owls, fill the wind with their trills.

"There is more life in a dead spruce than in a living spruce," said Rafal Kowalczyk, director of the Mammal Research Institute of the Polish Academy of Sciences, when he said, a recent tour in the forest, one of the last virgin forests of Europe. It is part of an ecosystem largely intact since the removal of the last glaciers of the continent more than ten thousand years ago.

It has been more than a year since the Court of Justice of the European Union ordered the suspension of logging of the forest, after discovering that it posed an obvious threat to the forest. declared World Heritage site by the United Nations.

However, the scars are still visible: from the roads that opened the heavy machinery to go into the forest and cut thousands of old trees up to the large holes formed by the foliage in the canopy.

The law meant a great defeat for the ruling party of law and justice in Poland that supported logging. At first, Warsaw challenged the court order but gave up a fine of 100,000 euros (about $ 124,000) imposed for each day of violation of the law.

The battle for Bialowieza is one of many struggles against the right-wing government against the European Union, which has accused Poland of jeopardizing democratic values ​​and the rule of law by trying to seize the courts and restrict freedom. Press.

It is now feared that the Polish government will redefine its plans to increase logging in the area, bypbading the law by increasing the quota of timber in hundreds of square kilometers of forest, located just outside the boundaries . of the declared World Heritage Site.

As a rich and powerful people's playground, Bialowieza has been saved from the same fate as many other forests on the continent, most of which have been destroyed and others transformed into highly controlled versions of nature.

The order imposed on some of these European forests is remarkable. Ranger armies tirelessly remove dead wood and brush them to create almost perfect grbad mats under the pines. Forests look like nurseries rather than wild spaces.

But Bialowieza remained wild and uncontrollable.

Its remoteness and pristine nature contribute to making this forest the site of one of the greatest victories of ecological conservation on the continent: the reintroduction of bison after the hunt and the killing of the last ruminant in freedom in 1919.

Today, the forest is home to the largest herd of bison in Europe.

"When most people think of forests, think about nature controlled," said Kowalczyk, who arrived in Bialowieza for the first time in the 1980s. "This place is very different from any other forest I've seen. . "

Although the history of the buffalo is a success, a much smaller creature has triggered the struggle of logging: the little furry beetle.

The spruces, especially those that are weakened, form an ideal environment for mating the beetle. The male pierces the tree, creates a chamber in which he releases pheromones to attract females. It pairs with several of them, who in turn lay dozens of eggs in the room before flying off to look for other males.

The larvae left by the female in the room feed on the vascular tissue of the tree. When they become nymphs, the damage they have caused often takes the life of spruce.

The warmer winters caused by climate change have allowed the beetle population to soar. In addition, the preference of forest managers for spruce has led to the expansion of the territory on which the beetles can thrive.

In 2016, it was clear that the beetle – caused plague in Bialowieza had devastated large tracts of trees, including hundreds of years ago.

For many scientists, the best way to control the plague was to leave it alone, to let nature take its course.

"Scolitin has been part of the ecosystem for hundreds of years," said Adam Bohdan, a biologist at the Wild Poland Foundation. "This phenomenon is a natural adaptation to the new climatic situation."

However, the Polish government is not in agreement. He argued that the lack of human intervention in the forest could destroy it.

Then Jan Szyszko, who was then Minister of the Environment, ordered a large-scale slaughtering campaign, allowing heavy machinery to invade areas of the country. pristine trees.

"We are going to rebuild the precious habitats of the Bialowieza forest by removing as many dead trees as needed and restoring oaks and ash trees," Szyszko said in 2016.

The action was met with outrage and protesters went down into the forest to set up a camp, in addition to building human barricades to try to stop the heavy machinery.

An army of more than a thousand forest guards from all over the country was sent to a small town on the border with Belarus, ready to confront the militants.

Spirits have been exacerbated to become violence on certain occasions. There was fighting when militants were involved in coordinated acts of civil disobedience.

Logging only ended when the European Court threatened to impose economic sanctions.

A report published by Unesco in February revealed that "logging operations and other forest management activities have interrupted ecological and natural processes on the property".

However, according to the report, this is not irreversible. Now there is more tranquility in the forest. A new life replaces the old one, although beetles still represent a problem that has no simple solution.

"In the natural forest, the amount of dead wood is twice that of the living," said Bohdan, who was attending the protests a year ago. "It's a really unique lab."

"But we fear all the time that they will start again with logging," he concluded.

Joanna Berendt contributed to this report.

* Copyright: 2019 The New York Times News Service