Tiit Lepik’s mailing list

Hello

At one time I tried to create a shared information space among Estonian nature conservationists. I hoped it would help to protect nature. I set up a mailing list to which, at my own discretion, I invited people I considered important in the field. Not many, perhaps around 40. For various reasons the list faded away. In recent years I have felt the need to speak up there. I did not find the strength, the time or the words. Reading the news that my old acquaintance Peeter Raudsepp had become mayor of Tallinn, I could no longer keep quiet. I do not think my piece will change much. I realise it is one of more than a million opinions here in Estonia. But my heart is at peace.

As chance would have it, two letters ended up on this list one after the other. I hope you can bear it.

My health has been very poor lately and I have not expressed my opinions. I have still tried to keep up with life in Estonia. Since I have been steeped in nature conservation since childhood, these topics matter to me.

For a long time I have felt the need to share my opinion with you. Until now I have not found the strength and the time to put it into words.

I think Estonian society is doing very well at the moment, if you leave aside the clouds of worry arising from the general political situation in the world.

If you take the economic situation as a basis and allow for inflation indices and the like, we are in the clouds in a good sense. When freedom came, nobody could have dreamed of such wealth. Of course it is the 21st century — the world has changed. I have thought that it is above all the change in the values of Western society, and only then the development of technology, that has led to the fading of some professions and fields. At the same time new ones have appeared. I was once interested in the case of Milan. A huge city had lived and breathed for generations to the rhythm of producing printing machines. Suddenly, with the arrival of computers, all the knowledge, skills and factories turned out to be useless. They dealt with it there and life went on.

It is worth listening to Mihkel Nestor’s overview of the Estonian economy https://jupiter.err.ee/1609847590/esimene-stuudio This matters because, as I understand it, SEB bank in Estonia sets its policy according to his position. Decisions on loans and other ways of selling money to companies really depend on it. A large part of Estonian companies depend on his positions.

If anyone bothered to ask me whether this is the Estonia I wanted, the answer would be yes without thinking.

What has been unfamiliar and irritating for me is what comes with freedom of speech, one of the pillars of democracy. It is very hard to accept every person’s right to their own opinions and positions. It is especially hard when other people’s positions deviate from my idea of reality and the facts. Slowly, after several decades of living in the free world, my brain is beginning to understand that no law obliges a person to tie their thoughts to reality and keep them rational. Such freedom of thought and speech is one of the greatest engines of development of democracy.

I grew up in the family of a nature conservation inspector with a forestry education and a soil geographer. I earned some of my first pocket money in Lahemaa putting up posts along the road by Lake Viitna so that parked cars would not trample the ground under the trees. Times change. So do people’s values. All of today’s environmental protection is unfamiliar to me. I am not an expert or a practitioner in this field. But my first impression is that the whole activity has moved onto paper and has largely lost its connection with real nature. I have wondered why and how this came about here, but this is not the place to dissect it. The other side too, in my words the so-called cuteness-meter nature conservation, is incomprehensible to me. Years ago, with my late friend Gennadi Skromnov, who built Looduskalender, we argued for hours about the exceptional examples of cuteness-meter nature conservation of the time, Mikk Sarv and Kristel Vilbaste. The exception of that time has spread over the years and become dominant in our society. If you look for it, rational nature conservation in my sense still exists here, but unfortunately it is met very rarely and it escapes the attention of the media, and therefore of most people. I will not trouble my readers here with details and examples. I believe most of you are familiar with them. As a former history enthusiast I have tried to find an analogy to the present time in our history. Perhaps the time when the Baltic German manor lords received from the Russian state the monopoly on supplying the army with spirits. Back then a large part of the forests survived because with the technology of the time it was not possible to cut them down. Everything that could be cut was cut. Unfortunately, today’s technology allows the plunderers to operate practically everywhere.

In a democratic society such activity should be limited by mechanisms arising from people’s values. Here they do not tend to work, because environmental protection, the successor of state nature conservation, has moved onto paper and therefore does not work, and people’s attention is diverted from the subject by the so-called cuteness-meter nature conservation based on emotions. A vivid example of the latter is Eleri Lopp-Valdma and her activities in protecting predators. In reality her activities may lead to large predators practically being hunted out of nature. A simple mechanism — irrational decisions in society driven by emotions have already, for example, put wolf numbers out of balance. I think a single case in which, say, a wolf attacks a child would be enough for society, driven by emotion, to swing to the other extreme. The Ministry of Climate should keep things on track, but its decisions have long ceased to depend on real needs and instead depend on the relationship with public opinion and possible public approval. For example, the change in their attitude to the drainage of bogs.

I was brought up to respect life and to value nature. I still believe that people are part of nature. Somehow it is hard to adapt to the belief that nature is a coin in our wallet.