It is a spectacle of savage beauty: Splintered stumps and trunks lie like battlefield corpses between soaring oak and lime trees. Ochre-fringed fungus feasts on the dead wood, while the first green shoots pierce the leaf mould, amid the tracks of wolves and bison.
For ecologist Janusz Korbel, standing in the forest he loves and surrounded by decaying logs and branches, it is this life springing from death that is at the heart of this untouched place.
“It’s a kind of Eden,” he says. “It was not created by humans.”
The Bialowieza forest is a time capsule, protected for centuries by Polish kings and Russian tsars. To walk among the giant, slender trees — the tallest in Europe — is to glimpse the primeval forest that once blanketed all of the continent’s lowlands.
“It began about 8,000 years ago and has existed since then without any meaningful interference from people,” Korbel says.
However, Bialowieza is the last significant fragment of that vast forest, and while a 10km2 wood is fully protected, a mighty battle is being fought over the 84 percent of the forest that lies outside the national park.
It is a battle of philosophies, pitting those who believe nature has to be actively managed to prosper in the 21st century, and those who think nature can only be truly natural if left alone. Korbel is firmly in the latter camp.
Opposing him is the powerful state forestry service, which manages 30 percent of all of Poland’s land and exerts strong local influence.
“To keep the habitat in its proper state it needs to be managed and foresters try to manage natural forces,” regional director Marek Maslowski says.
The key question today is whether the successful protection the national park provides should be extended, to protect the ancient trees and myriad species that live outside its boundaries. For example, white-backed woodpeckers, whose resonant knocking booms over the spring chatter, have lost 30 percent of their population in the past 20 years in forestry-managed areas.
“This is the best moment in many years for change,” says Robert Cyglicki, director of Greenpeace Poland, surveying a felled copse.
There is a general election in October, the Polish presidency of the EU in January, as well as the drafting of a new forest management plan and a crucial change in legislation to ease the extension of national parks. The latter was prompted after Greenpeace collected 250,000 petition signatures in November and follows its three-day occupation of the environment ministry roof in August.
In coal-dependent Poland environmentalists are rare, with little national sympathy for action on climate change. Adam Wajrak, nature correspondent for the country’s biggest daily paper Gazeta Wyborcza and Bialowieza resident, says: “Polish don’t save energy, but they are very connected to nature. Most of us have grandparents in the countryside.”
That connection to the land cuts both ways. There is entrenched local opposition to enlarging the national park.
The neat woodpiles by the timber homes in the villages around Bialowieza, and the smell of woodsmoke, show the connection of the people to the forest. As well as heating their homes, many have worked as foresters for generations.
Near the village of Sorocza Nozka, foresters are felling a stand of trees planted 80 years before. Environmentalists do not oppose the cutting of earlier plantations, but these areas of low ecological value blend into more natural forest. Within earshot of the chainsaws there are mighty oaks and abundant evidence of the woodpeckers that, with owls, eagles and other birds, attract thousands of birdwatchers every year.
The forestry foreman, who asked not to be named, is blunt in his opposition to enlarging the national park and allowing its natural wonders to reclaim the entire 60,000 hectares of the Bialowiesza forest.
“Look, the ecologists and campaigners get their salaries for what they do, I get mine for what I do. I employ 20 men, 60 people with their families, and they can’t imagine any other job,” he says. “If you had been here two days ago, you would have seen the villagers fighting for the small amount of wood we can give.”
Most environmentalists agree that a small amount of timber could be taken sustainably from outside the current national park, but only if rules such as protecting trees more than 100 years old are observed. Adam Bohdan, of the campaign group Workshop for All Beings, spends hours in the forest using GPS to record rule breaches, such as felling trees with hollows used by birds to nest, or felling in the breeding season.
As we leave Sorocza Nozka, he finds a bronze beetle larva nestled in the bark of a log stacked by the track.
“That’s Cucujus cinnaberinus,” he says of the 15mm creature, which like many of the 8,000 insect species in Bialowieza specializes in eating dead wood. “It’s protected under the EU habitats directive and already extinct in some countries.”
The dead wood is vital to life in the most natural part of the forest, the strictly protected zone within the national park where the only entry is on foot and with a permit and a guide. Korbel says almost half of the wood in the forest is dead, 10 times more than in managed forests and that half of the 12,000 species depend on decaying logs. In managed forests, the dead wood is removed by foresters who see it as a sign of an ecosystem in danger or as a fire risk. Such forests are mere gardens, Korbel scoffs, no more natural than a manicured lawn. It is the balanced rhythm of life and death, Korbel says, which supports a full ecosystem, headed by the largest herd of European bison in the world, and featuring wolves, lynx and eagles that keep the numbers of deer, moose, boar and beavers in proportion.
Foresters, of course, disagree and nowhere more vehemently than over the bark beetle. This modest-looking insect strikes terror into the hearts of woodmen. The spruce, stripped of their bark, die quickly.
Zdzislaw Szkiruc, director of the Bialowieza National Park, gives an example from another national park he previously worked in.
“The bark beetles struck and huge areas were covered by dead spruce. If they were cut and replanted with the same species, in 50 years we will have proper forest, but if we left the dead trees in the forest, it will take 300 to 400 years for the same type of forest to come back,” he said.
Ecologists say cutting and replanting makes sense in conventional, managed forests, but not in the unique primeval forest of Bialowieza.
“In nature, all is connected and the beetles attack only the weakest trees,” Korbel says.
The person with the ultimate responsibility for the Bialowieza forest, Polish Environment Minister Andrzej Kraszewski, wants an extension of the existing protections.
“I will try to establish protection over the whole area,” he says. “There are two obstacles: the opinion of the local communities and the opinion of the forestry service. I have to convince both of them.”
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