THE world of Anna Karenina and Doctor Zhivago is no more. The pine and birch
forests that once stretched across European Russia are disappearing as silently
as they once reigned.
The first-ever map of Europe’s last wild forests shows that the endless
vistas of boreal forest in northern Russia have been reduced to fragments,
broken up by logging, mines, farms, roads and power lines.
“There is an impression that Russia has unlimited amounts of untouched
forest. But contrary to expectations, most of even the remote landscape in the
north is disturbed and fragmented,” says Lars Laestadius of the World Resources…
