Ruud Streefkerk

This spring the media reported that Poland blundered by felling trees in the Białowieża Forest, one of the last remaining primeval forests in Europe. The forest, partly in Poland and partly in Belarus, was placed upon the Unesco World Heritage list. The Court of Justice of the European Union judged that Poland has not fulfilled its obligations arising from European directives for special nature protection. In the past 2 years, at least 10,000 trees were cut down and the Government has always claimed that the logging was necessary to prevent the spreading of a beetle plague (the 'pine-weevil'). But the European Court argues that the extent of the beetle plague does not justify the scale of logging and moreover, that they didn’t  pay enough attention to the well-being of different inhabitant animal species. In our layman’s eyes the primeval forest didn’t look more spectacular than an ordinary forest, although young, old and fallen trees were mingled. I ran into this stump, decayed on the inside and covered with moss on the outside