Comment by Aurornis
3 hours ago
Every time it gets posted most assume that the forest was supposed to be protected and they decided to cut it down anyway.
The details are much less dramatic: The company doing the work messed up on a part of the approval process that was supposed to be completed first. It’s technically possible that the environmental impact review would come back with some obscure exception that required them to revise their plans, but it’s unlikely that anything was going to stop those trees from being cut down.
The 250K trees headline appears dramatic if you don’t know that Finland is covered in trees and cutting down a lot of them is part of building anything.
In the US there's also a third category besides "permit approved" and "permit denied", "no permit needed": the thing you are doing is allowed and not covered by the permitting process. You just do it. This shows up in both building code (you typically don't need a permit for most repairs or cosmetic renovations) and environmental protections (you don't need an environmental study for logging in a non-protected forest).
The tricky part with "no permit needed" is that while you can just go and do whatever, if someone charged with enforcement suspects you're doing something that requires a permit, they can still demand you prove you don't (and stop work until you do), and if you guessed wrong and you did indeed need a permit, you're double-fucked.
That's why for many of these processes, there's also something like a certificate of no-permit needed, where you go through an abbreviated permitting process spending a lot of time and money while all of the clerks and officials stare at you like you're a moron before finally giving you a piece of paper saying you didn't need to do any of that in the first place.
And that's why a lot of people with a lot of experience and a good understanding of the law skip getting a "no permit needed" certificate.
I am assuming it's similar in other countries.
> a certificate of no-permit needed
Amusing. It sounds like it's a permit to not need a permit.
It also doesn't necessarily protect you from anything by obtaining it.
If you, say, go and get a certificate of no-permit needed when you're replacing all of your kitchen cabinets, and then you decide to move the sink while you're at it, you're back to still needing a permit for the plumbing change (and even if you aren't, if your neighbor calls the inspector and says they think you might be, the inspector might say, "no, we already know about that, it's just cabinets", or they might wonder if you are and then you're back in the situation you'd be in without the certificate).
A friend worked in the US tree cutting permit process. There were two main goals behind the permits (as I understand it):
1) To double check the harvest was not going to affect things outside their property (neighbors, land slides, erosion, etc), or special govt. interests on their property (endangered species)
2) To maintain their significant tax break. The break was for owning forest land, and you needed a plan to replant successfully.
Keep in mind that these are mostly 'working forests' that are more akin to wheat fields than wild forests.
It sounds like the issue was insufficient analysis of #1, resulting in excessive water run-off to neighboring privately owned property.
That being said, it could also be #2. The same friend worked on 'conversion' permits, wherein the owner asked to turn forest land into a residential or business property, and special considerations had to be addressed.