Poland: Greenpeace opens campaign to protect more of Bialowieza, one of Europe's few remaining old-growth forests
In the opening chapter of his best-selling 2007 book “The World Without Us,” the journalist Alan Weisman ruminated on a trip to the Bialowieza forest, the last remaining stand of primeval forest in all of Europe, which straddles the border between Poland and Belarus:
“Think of the misty, brooding forest that loomed behind your eyelids when, as a child, someone read you the Grimm Brothers’ fairy tales. Here, ash and linden trees tower nearly 150 feet, their huge canopies shading a moist, tangled understory of hornbeams, ferns, swamp alders and crockery-sized fungi.
“Oaks, shrouded with half a millennium of moss, grow so immense here that great spotted woodpeckers store spruce cones in their three-inch-deep bark furrows. The air, thick and cool, is draped with silence that parts briefly for a nutcracker’s croak, a pygmy owl’s low whistle, or a wolf’s wail, then returns to stillness.”
The chapter describes a decades-long struggle to fully protect the 580-square-mile forest, divided about evenly between Belarus and Poland. On the Polish side, only 17 percent is national park, with the rest subject to selective logging.
Polish officials contend that the harvesting is for the good of the forest, and that only diseased or pest-infested trees are felled. Environmentalists say irreplaceable old-growth timber is being logged for commercial purposes.
The struggle over the forest continues, and on Wednesday, activists from Greenpeace staged an eye-catching stunt to draw attention to its fate, scaling the Polish Environment Ministry building and unfurling a massive banner reading “I Love Trees.”