Sweden’s Green Veneer Hides Unsustainable Logging Practices

On a misty August morning in northern Sweden, a team of conservationists was combing an old spruce forest for rare species of lichen and fungi. The woodland was thick with trees towering over a mossy forest floor tracked up by moose, and it contained rare species of lichen, such as Platismatia norvegica, which is on Sweden’s Red List of Threatened Species. A GIS map carried by Mahlin Sahlin, a forest campaigner for the Swedish Society for Nature Conservation (SSNC), put the tract at 57 hectares (141 acres). The map also showed that this patch of forest was surrounded on all sides by recent clear-cuts. Read More