Destruction of Saami homeland forests started again

The long lasting forestry conflict in Finnish Lappland is in an urgent state. The Finnish state owned company, Forest and Park Service, has started large scale logging operations in the home area of indigenious Saami people earlier this year. These loggings can't be accepted for the following reasons:

-there is no solution yet for the landownership conflict between Saami people and the Finnish state
-the Finnish state has not proven to be the actual owner of the forests it is logging right now.
-the clear-cutting style of logging ancient forests in the extreme north of Europe cannot be accepted from an ecological and micro-climatical point of view
-the loggings destroy the very basis of the culturally important Saami free browsing reindeer herding tradition
-the loggings waste the ancient forests and its wood and leave less possibilities for future truly sustainable continuous cover forestry without destructive clear cutting

By these arguments among others Union of Ecoforestry urged Finnish parliament to stop the logging immediately and gave for parliament groups the documentary movie "Last yoik in Saami forests" (link to online film below). The director of the movie, Hannu Hyvönen, expressed his feelings about the on-going loggings recently: "It is quite easy for us to update this sad turn-up in the documentary movie, but we cannot update these forests which are now again cutted down."

Finnish state own tv-company seems not to be able to broadcast the documentary which accuses Finnish state human rights violations, Union of Ecoforestry supports campaigning for Saami forests and invites all friends of Saami now for actions. In this situation Finns and foreigners are being asked to view the movie actions to understand what is really happening in Lappland, in Saami forests. The online documentary is worth a view and opened my eyes ro what is happening in the last natural forests of Europe.
The documentary movie can be loaded here: http://video.elonmerkki.net/last_yoik.mp4

If you want to order the dvd and/or join in friends of Saami: info@elonmerkki.net

More information:
www.elonmerkki.net/en/index
www.mehta.fi/en/index

Please take action:
http://weblog.greenpeace.org/forestrescue/
http://mehta.fi