Raakut | Professor on concealing the location of the dead: “It’s not a flying squirrel”

Is it is it better to make the information about the location of the raw stream public, as in the case of Hukkajoki in Suomussalmi, or to keep it secret?

The question came up on Wednesday, when the forest company Stora Enso

announced

of a new suspicion that the raw stream had been crossed during forest work contrary to rules and instructions. However, the company did not announce the location, nor did the Kainuu ely center.

“In Finland, raw observations are information to be kept secret,” explained the director of the environment and natural resources responsibility area of ​​the ely center Sari Myllyoja alignment for HS.

“If we told the exact location, there could be many kinds of visitors there.”

For Salaam the fourteenth subsection of Section 24 of the Publicity Act gives the opportunity. According to it, documents can be classified if they “contain information about endangered animal or plant species or the protection of valuable natural areas” and “if providing information about them would endanger the protection of the animal or plant species or area in question”.

Mussel i.e. the river pearl mussel is an endangered, strictly protected species. That condition for encryption is therefore easily fulfilled. On the other hand, it is unclear whether public information about the place of occurrence would endanger the conservation of the mussel.

“Raakku is not a flying squirrel,” says the research professor of natural resources law Jukka Similä from the University of Lapland.

Exposure to the flying squirrel can be a real danger above all in situations where the forest owner notices the papans on his land before others and decides to clear the forest before it can be protected. In this case, the basis is economic: money in the account rather than a squirrel jumping from one tree to another.

The phenomenon has its own name, hunchbacks.

“Some species may be threatened by taking measures to prevent protection due to financial interests. I don’t know if the fact that the performance location would be known and someone would walk there would pose a threat to Raaku,” Similä reflects.

“But that should be asked of a biologist rather than a lawyer.”

Let’s ask. What does a university lecturer in nature conservation biology say about it Panu Halme From the University of Jyväskylä?

“Concealment is justified if there is something in the characteristics of the species that makes it vulnerable to harassment,” Halme concludes.

“An extreme example is the peregrine falcon, which is extremely valued as a hunting falcon in the Middle East. If a hawk’s nest could be found and the eggs could be transported alive to Saudi Arabia, that would be a jackpot,” he says.

Raakku is some kind of one-way animal.

“It’s a river pearl mussel”, Halme emphasizes the middle part of the compound word, the pearl.

“There is a significant risk that someone would get it into their heads to open the cracks to find a pearl. Thousands would have to be broken to find one. People have shown that they are sick in this sense, and therefore there are grounds for secrecy.”

Secondly Publicizing the location of the raw streams could create pressure to avoid driving over the streams during forestry work, and also to leave 50-meter-wide buffer strips along the streams, where trees would not be felled, Halme thinks.

If the people knew, then the people could also observe what is happening on the banks of the stream.

Environmental law professor Seita Vesa and academic rector Tapio Määtta from the University of Eastern Finland have also been interviewed for the article.