Recently, it was possible to read in the media about forest owners who feel they are employed by environmental activists who, by exploiting obvious inaccuracies in species protection, make their forestry, lifestyle and financial security more difficult.
It is, unfortunately, something that happens all over the country. It has never been the policy’s intention that activists should systematically be allowed to act more or less like an authority and have the tools to decide based on their own convictions how other people’s property is allowed to be handled.
Nonetheless is exactly what is happening. Over time, Swedish species protection has developed in a direction where various interest organizations have been given the conditions to more or less arbitrarily overturn people’s life’s work.
This happens strikingly often under the guise of wanting to protect biological diversity, but in a practical sense it is far from always that way. The statistics offered via SLU’s species portal strongly suggest that certain very commonly occurring species have become particularly popular to report.
A typical example is the knee-root orchid. It is a commonly occurring plant that is found on every other hectare of woodland in large parts of Sweden. It is by no means unusual, but is protected because it is part of the group of orchids that are protected at group level.
Since the peace declaration has proven to be an effective way to stop felling, the number of reported finds of just the knee root has grown almost explosively.
In 2015, around 1,000 sites with knee roots were reported, a number that has grown to over 13,000 in 2023. A slightly shocking increase of around 1,200 percent.
The number of reported “individuals” amounts to approx. 338,000 in 2023. This is based on a single year over areas that cannot possibly exceed a single per thousand of Sweden’s total forest land. Everything therefore points to the fact that there are millions of knee-roots in already set aside forests and many times more in the combined forest landscape.
Nevertheless, single finds on single hectares can be quite sufficient to prevent forestry in various ways.
The enormous amount in other words, reported findings of the knee rot are in no way about protecting an unusual species for biological diversity. It is simply an effective tool to stop forestry that Swedish activists have been assigned by negligent politicians and bureaucrats.
Unfortunately, it will not be enough to simply change the protection class at the root of the knee. There are plenty of other species that can be abused in a similar way. In principle, it is also questionable for the state to abdicate responsibility and allow activists free rein to demolish individual people’s ownership and user rights.
Therefore, it is required:
1. That Climate and Environment Minister Romina Pourmokhtari (L) review the Swedish species protection so that it becomes more appropriately adapted, better protects those who own the land and clearly takes responsibility back to the state and its authorities.
2. The government should consider whether the Swedish interpretation of what is considered “affected public” and who according to the Aarhus Convention has the right to appeal environmental decisions is reasonably balanced. Today, the affected public is considered to mean both individuals and interest associations. This in turn means that associations in Stockholm, sometimes with some funding from the public sector, can stick with a cadre of lawyers and pursue legal processes against individuals with limited resources, time and legal knowledge. Not infrequently, these cases concern land that said organization has no relationship with and can forget as soon as the processes are completed. For the small local communities that have their local economy shot down, however, the consequences will be highly tangible and long-lasting.
We have the greatest understanding that it is easy for the general public to be misled into equating concepts such as protected and unusual. However, it is not a legitimate reason for interest organizations to overuse a commonly occurring species such as the wallwort to attack the lives, heritage and property of individual people.
Above all, it is not a legitimate reason for the state to see through the fingers of a visible abuse of poorly designed legislation that is used to harm other citizens.
