My profile:
An old house standing empty in a small Ivanovo region village that was hit hard by restrictions in the Forest Code.
But the law bars him and many other people without commercial interests from accessing firewood — even if it is gathered by thinning the forest and planting saplings, work that is direly needed in Ivanovo’s forests and others across the country.
“We typically have about 40 people here in the winter, and we have no idea where we will get firewood this year,” said Kudryashov, founder of the Choose Life rehabilitation center for drug users.
People come from all over the country to the small village of Antipino for free treatment, but since they are not locally registered residents they cannot legally obtain firewood for the wood-powered boiler in the two-story building where they live. In the past, the center has obtained permission from timber companies to clear wood scraps from their land, but this summer there are no companies operating legally in the area.
The required forest work, which Kudryashov offers to do for free, is hardly carried out at all in the region, said a forestry official in one of Ivanovo’s districts who asked to remain anonymous for fear of losing his job.
His district’s forestry department, which employed about 170 people a few years ago, now has just 20 staff members who mostly write reports, he said. Forestry equipment has been passed to a state unitary enterprise that is allowed to maintain forested areas unoccupied by companies with a lease agreement. The enterprise, which has no forestry specialists, is failing at its task for the second year in a row — and perhaps for good reason, the forestry official said.
The enterprise is supposed to take care of a sprawling 170,000-hectare forest that currently has no timber companies operating on a lease agreement, the official said. The enterprise, which has managed to work through only 4 hectares so far, has done no wildfire prevention and has planted seeds in July instead of May, he said.
“I am sure that none will germinate, but paper doesn’t blush,” he said, using a Russian expression to suggest that nobody would be held responsible for the failure as long as the right figures were reported.
In a meeting with Prime Minister Vladimir Putin on July 16, Federal Forestry Agency head Alexei Savinov blamed “poor reforestation work” on “weak seeds” and an inability to monitor the plantings “until their crowns touch together” at full growth.
Failure in completing forestry work eventually results in natural replacement of valuable pine trees by species like aspen, which “are commercially loss-making at the moment they are chopped down,” the Ivanovo forestry official said. Most of the region’s forest nurseries, where the district forestry department used to grow fir saplings, have been neglected for years and are worthless because effective forest management requires the planting process to be dictated by natural requirements, rather than six-month contracts for the works that are suggested by the law.
Kudryashov, the director of the rehabilitation center, said he has repeatedly asked the regional authorities for permission to thin the forest by removing dead or nonvaluable species of trees but without any luck.
His face grows grim as he contemplates the long, cold winter in his village, which has no gas. “We will have to steal to survive,” he said.
