The Veto in the Forest

You cannot walk into the strict reserve at Białowieża by yourself. You book a guide licensed by the national park, you meet at a gate, and you go in on one path with a group capped at a size the park sets. Inside, nothing has been cut, planted, cleared or tidied. Trees fall and stay where they land. Roughly a quarter of the standing volume is dead wood, which is what a forest looks like when nobody is managing it, and which is why more than a thousand species of fungi and several thousand of beetle live here, among them dead-wood specialists that have gone from most of the managed forest on the continent.

That reserve is about 57 square kilometres. The national park around it is about 105. The Polish half of the Białowieża Forest is around 625. The rest — some five sixths of it — is not a park at all. It is three forest districts managed by Lasy Państwowe, the State Forests, a self-financing enterprise that pays for itself by selling timber. Everything contentious about this place follows from that one arithmetic fact.

The beetle argument

In March 2016 the environment minister, Jan Szyszko, approved an annex to the Białowieża forest district's management plan raising its ten-year harvest limit from about 63,000 cubic metres to 188,000. The justification was Ips typographus, the European spruce bark beetle, which was then killing spruce in large numbers: left alone, the ministry argued, the outbreak would spread, dead trees would fall across paths and burn in summer, and the forest the world came to see would be lost. Most of the ecologists who work there disagreed, and not sentimentally. Bark beetle outbreaks are a normal feature of a spruce forest and have happened here repeatedly; the spruce dies, the dead wood feeds an extremely large number of other organisms, and broadleaf species come up underneath. Removing the dead spruce removes the only part of the cycle that makes Białowieża different from a plantation. Salvage logging, in this reading, is not a response to the damage. It is the damage.

Case C-441/17

The whole Polish side of the forest is a Natura 2000 site, which means the decision was not Poland's alone to take. The European Commission opened proceedings, harvesters went into the forest anyway during 2017, and the Court of Justice of the European Union ordered Poland to stop in July of that year. When the logging continued, the Court did something it had never done before in an interim order: in November 2017 it warned that it would impose a penalty of at least €100,000 a day for non-compliance. The Grand Chamber gave judgment on 17 April 2018 and found that Poland had breached both the Habitats Directive and the Birds Directive.

The Court did not rule that the forest was beautiful. It ruled that Poland had failed to establish that the logging would not damage a site it had itself nominated for protection, which is a much narrower and much more useful thing to have decided.

Why the park stops where it does

The obvious remedy is to extend the national park over the whole Polish forest. It has been proposed repeatedly since the 1990s and it has never happened, and the reason is procedural rather than ecological. A change made to Polish nature law in 2000 and carried into the Nature Conservation Act of 2004 requires that the creation or enlargement of a national park be agreed with the local self-government bodies whose land it would cover. In practice that is a veto, held by a handful of rural gminas around Hajnówka, and they have used it.

Their reasons are worth hearing before dismissing. A national park pays no forestry wages and buys no timber from local sawmills. It restricts firewood collection in a district where a great many houses still burn wood. Park status arrives as a decision taken in Warsaw about land that people in Podlasie live on, in a region that has spent thirty years watching its young people leave for Białystok and its bus services close. Being told by biologists in another city that your forest is too important for you to work in is not an argument that has ever gone well anywhere.

The wall

Then, in 2021, the border became the story. Poland built a steel barrier along its frontier with Belarus — 186 kilometres of it, five and a half metres high, the main section completed at the end of June 2022 at a cost of roughly 1.6 billion złoty. Tens of kilometres run straight through the Białowieża Forest, dividing the Polish side from the larger Belarusian side, which had been managed as one ecosystem and inscribed by UNESCO as a single transboundary site. Bison, lynx, wolf and elk had crossed that line for as long as anyone had been counting them. Gaps were later cut for animals to use, and researchers monitoring them report that very few animals do. This is not an argument about whether a state may control its border. It is a note that the most intact lowland forest in Europe now has a wall through the middle of it, and that no designation on the Polish side changes what that does to large mammals which need both halves.

Where it stands

In early 2024 a new Polish government suspended logging across large parts of the forest and reopened the question of the boundary. That is a ministerial decision, and ministerial decisions reverse — the whole of the 2016 episode was one. The clause in the 2004 Act has not moved, so the durable version of protection here still requires a handful of rural councils to vote for it, and nobody has yet made them an offer they want. What that leaves a visitor is small and specific: book the guided walk into the strict reserve, because it is the only way in and because three hours in there settles the argument better than any of the reading, then walk in the working forest outside the park, where the bison actually are, and notice how hard it is to tell the difference by eye. That is either reassuring or the entire problem, depending on which side of the case you have just read.