How I came to realise that Sweden lost its forests
We have a small house up in the woods of northern Skåne. This is on the southern edge of the taiga, a forest that only 100 years ago was mostly wild, full of wolves and even forest reindeer. But today it is very different than that. It’s a forest that looks nothing like the old forests of pasts. When I was young I always liked the forest around our house. It’s very small but it is full of oak, ash, beech, birch and it was beautiful. Somehow I never enjoyed leaving our property since the forest was different somehow. I could never really put my finger on it but something was off.
As I started travelling around the world I discovered what a real forest should look like. I understood the difference between a plantation and a real forest. While visiting Romania I saw a small sample of pine forest that Ceaușescu, the dictator of Romania, had planted amongst the beautiful beach forest. It stood out as a scar in the beautiful beach forest. Luckily he gave up on his plans to do more plantations across the mountains. Sweden on the…