No one brings timber into the Carpathians, but many come here to take it away.I extended an old caliper, a tool used to measure the diameter of timber logs up to 70 cm, so that it can measure up to 111 cm (1, 10, 100 cm, meter, kilometer etc., signifying the expansion in space). I wrote Gruss aus den Karpaten on the extension, an inscription that is present on many postcards documenting the ‘golden age’ of logging in the region during the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, though ‘aus’ and ’von den’ are both grammatically incorrect. Here, the postcard is missing, but the message is there, a message from Vas county (Hungarian for ‘iron’), made of iron.
Nowadays, the issues of climate change and the exploitation of natural resources are gradually sidelined in the public discourse, even though they are at the heart of the current crises.
A couple of years ago, an Austrian company, the Holzindustrie Schweighofer, built five timber processing plants around the Carpathian bend, with a level of output unprecedented in the region. A sixth site is currently under construction. Not only do these plants make local timber processing irrelevant and downright impossible, but they also accept logs from questionable sources, such as from nature reserves. This is not a reasonable forestry operation, but sheer exploitation. Although the phenomenon is nothing new, it took the appearance of an ‘outsider’ company for the problem to surface, as previously no one had talked about similar practices of local and national actors, razing the forests at an astonishing rate in the period between 1989 and the appearance of the Austrian contractor. Political authority ebbs and flows, but the forest keeps on being consistently eradicated on both sides of the Carpathians.