By all appearances, Finland is resplendent in its verdant beauty.

   A flat country with expansive, marine-clay plains, low plateaus and small hills, 76 percent of Finland is covered by dense forest and woodland areas. About 188,000 sparkling lakes and nearly as many small islands dot the picturesque landscape.

   Nature, it has always seemed, has been high on the list of Finland's priorities.

   But the country's reputation as an environmentally responsible country and a bona fide pioneer in sustainable commercial timber production has been tarnished amid accusations by environmentalists that most of the Finland's old-growth forests have been chopped down in frenzied pursuit of logging dollars.

   The heavy toll that state-authorized, old-growth logging has taken on biodiversity within Finland's unique boreal and hemiboreal ecosystems — the predominantly coniferous Finnish forests are also referred to as Western taiga — has sparked public outcry and generated ongoing campaigns from several Finnish and Scandinavian environmental non-governmental organizations.

   "In Finland, many species have become extinct, and over 700 old-growth forest-dependent species have become endangered as a result of logging," says Mila Hulsi-Heathfield, a Finnish campaigner with Greenpeace Nordic in Stockholm. "Regardless, the logging of old-growth forests continues. Only roughly 5 percent of Finland's old-growth forests are left, and half of that is at risk of being logged right now."

   Much of the remaining old-growth forest is situated on land owned by the state-owned Metsähallitus, or Forest and Park Service, which has managed forests in Finland for the past century. The oldest protected areas were established more than 60 years ago.

   Responding to concern from academics, researchers and environmental groups, the Finnish Council of State designated a new old-growth forest protection program in 1996. This program covers a total land area of 344,000 hectares, according to the FPS.

   But half of the remaining old-growth forests were left out of the protection program, says Matti Liimatainen, forest campaigner for the Finnish Nature League.

   Not so, says Juha Mäkinen, director of communications for FPS. "All old-growth forests are protected, either by the official protection program or in landscape ecological planning," he says, referring to a forestry management approach that strives to take ecological, commercial and social aspects into account.

   The battle between FPS and environmental groups, insists Mäkinen, is over "second-class" forests that do not possess the ecological characteristics to classify them as old-growth.

   The FPS itself is split into various departments, including its forestry unit (which oversees forest management and logging) and a nature protection unit that has often worked in concert with environmental groups to try to halt clear-cutting of old-growth forests.

   "Every 15th of Finland's known species is threatened," the nature protection unit notes in its own materials. "Almost one-half of these species are threatened because of forestry practices. The large numbers of endangered forest species is a signal that it is now vital to protect the last surviving tracts of old-growth forest in order to safeguard the ecosystems and biodiversity."

   To curb the logging, environmentalists have responded with demonstrations, civil disobedience, letter-writing efforts and multilingual Internet campaigns. In the fall of 1999, an ad hoc group, Artists for the Old-Growth Forests, staged a high-profile rally in Helsinki. More than 150 prominent artists threw their support behind the campaign.

   "This is a question not only of biodiversity and extinction of hundreds of forest species ... (but also of) the people's environment," says Liimatainen of the Helsinki-based FNL.

   A sparsely populated, headstrong republic that won its independence from Russia in 1917 and suffered through its share of subsequent national struggles, modern-day Finland — a nation slightly smaller than the state of Montana — boasts a stable parliamentary democracy and many social welfare programs. The nation's highly literate, cell-phone-dependent, computer-savvy population numbers just over 5 million and is governed by its first female president, Tarja Halonen.

   Urban dwellers typically make annual treks to commune with nature during the warm, luminous summer months. Finns often spend weeks or even months in kesämökkeja, simple cottages that allow families the time and place to pick berries and mushrooms, enjoy saunas and indulge in boating trips and lakeside picnics.

   The strong connection that Finns appear to feel toward their environment is also evidenced by the country's long-standing traditions of recycling, low-impact hiking and camping, and a preponderance of natural, non-toxic household cleansers and unbleached paper products.

   But as the nation recovered from a deep recession in the early 1990s and experienced newfound affluence, some of these common-sense, environmentally-friendly patterns have been pushed aside.

   The government-subsidized forestry industry is credited with helping to build Finland's national economy. Today, that industry generates a significant portion of the nation's $43 billion export economy.

   Currently, more than 50 percent of FPS' annual timber yield is sold to two dominant Finnish-based forestry corporations, Stora Enso and UPM-Kymmene. Recent merger acquisitions suggest that these corporations are aiming for a greater global presence in the forestry industry.

   Many Finns are proud of their nation's thundering economic growth, evidenced by cell-phone technology leader Nokia, heavy machinery producer Ahlström and the nation's various paper, cellulose and pulp-manufacturing corporations. At the same time, a decreasing number of jobs in the timber and paper-producing industry in some towns has left many citizens blaming forest protection efforts rather than increased mechanization, cost-cutting corporate decisions and other factors.

   "The local people are very tired of the pressure forest activists have practiced," says FPS' Mäkinen, in reference to Kainuu, a fiercely contested Northern region of Finland where environmental groups have tried to expand protected forest areas.

   "I'd say that this questions divides Finns in two. Some are strongly against further protection," admits FNL's Liimatainen. "But we feel that there is enough support for us to keep the issue up."

   Liimatainen points out that the FNL continues to receive urgent letters and phone calls from all over Finland from those areas where old-growth or younger "natural state" forests, mires and bird-nesting areas are being threatened by logging. According to WWF Finland, threatened animal species include wolves, bears, lynx, otters, flying squirrels and forest reindeer.

   Environmental groups in Sweden and Norway face similar challenges to those faced by their Finnish counterparts in halting logging in unprotected old-growth forests.

   "The old-growth loggings in Finland we see today are part of the conversion of the last remaining fragments of old-growth forests. More than 90 percent of the forest land in Fennoscandia (Norway, Sweden and Finland) has been converted to intensely managed secondary forests," says Ola Larsson, information coordinator of the Taiga Rescue Network. The Swedish group represents an international network of non-governmental organizations and indigenous peoples working for the protection and sustainable use of boreal forests.

   Finnish and Russian environmental groups have also joined forces to bring particular attention to the dynamic, biologically diverse greenbelt that occupies the border between the two countries. The greenbelt crosses three boreal zones, stretching from the Gulf of Finland in the south to the Arctic Ocean in the north. Despite the unique ecological qualities of this area, logging in old-growth forests on both sides of the border is common, according to environmental groups.

   Environmentalists in Scandinavia stress that the devastation of old-growth forests in boreal regions feeds a non-stop demand for paper products in the developed world. A large proportion of the global trade flow of wood, pulp and paper goes directly from boreal forest regions (Canada, Scandinavia and Russia), to the three main consuming regions: western Europe, the United States and Japan. Put together, the inhabitants of these three regions constitute only 25 percent of the global population and yet consume roughly 75 percent of the world's paper supplies.

   This story first appeared in E/The Environmental Magazine.