Old and new ways 2: "Silent is the country road" - or is it?

Here are pictures of a road built by a big private forestry operator between Lake Ounasjärvi and the national park for logging along the ski trail leading to the park.

Forest roads may look innocent compared to paved highways. But even those main roads have in the past been similar minor roads. And unlike highways, forest roads are made quickly and by the mile. They are built despite local opposition and with state financial support. They cut through the wilderness, bringing with them logging and lots of small and large motor vehicles.

Metsähallitus forestry department presents on its website: "There are approximately 36 000kilometres of forest roads in areas managed by Metsähallitus" and "Roads built for forestry use have proven to be an important infrastructure serving recreational use of state-owned land."

Have the authors confused the words "serving" and "spoiling"?

Whatever the roads may serve alongside the forestry giants, with them disappears - still, as in the days of Enontekiö nature author Yrjö Kokko's The Way of the Four Winds (1954) - ways of being in nature, with nature, the complex and delicate networks of humans and other organisms, the book of life. In the frenzy of speed and machination, whole forms of life are still dying. It's just that these current losses are harder to grasp than those of Kokko's time, which we can observe with the benefit of hindsight.