Protest: Agent Green exposes the plunder of Bucegi’s centuries-old forests on the European Day of Parks

Protest: Agent Green exposes the plunder of Bucegi’s centuries-old forests on the European Day of Parks

Precious timber from Bucegi is turned into parquet flooring, doors, reels and drums

Bușteni, 24 May 2021 – Agent Green is protesting today in Valea Cerbului in Bucegi Natural Park to draw attention to the massive logging in this protected area.

Valea Cerbului is the main tourist access route to Omu Peak and has fourfold national and international protection: natural park, Natura 2000 site, Nature Reserve (Abruptul Prahovean), and virgin forests mapped in the 2004 PIN MATRA inventory, protected by Environment Ministry orders from 2012 and 2016. In 2018, the new Primofaro inventory included these forests as potentially primary and old-growth forests.

“On paper, Romania is doing well when it comes to protected areas. Such areas nominally cover 23% of the country. In reality, only 1% is strictly protected. Almost nothing, in other words, while paradise becomes a hideous place you have no reason to return to. In Bucegi, they have mainly strictly protected the alpine areas above the treeline and very little forest. Valea Cerbului and all valleys with tourist trails, which protect biodiversity, water sources, human settlements and infrastructure, should become strictly protected,” said Gabriel Păun, president of Agent Green.

Watch the VIDEO broadcast LIVE from the Bucegi protest:
https://fb.watch/5H9mWpSh-z/

For several months, the largest and most economically valuable trees, mainly fir but also beech, have been removed from Valea Cerbului. Logging takes place on waterlogged soil, along dirt tracks more than a metre deep and through streambeds, leaving behind other trees damaged by the felling and dragging of the targeted trees.

Loading area. GPS coordinates: 45°26’17.3″N 25°31’38.7″E

Logging roads in Bucegi Natural Park, Abruptul Prahovean Nature Reserve

Damaged tree

Aerial view of the heavy machinery used by the logging company

“We are protesting today because we cannot accept the bad policies that allowed this massacre in Bucegi, Romania’s best-loved and most-visited mountain. What we found here is shameful. A lunar landscape. The Environment Ministry must stop the plunder and cooperate with the ministry responsible for tourism so that tourist areas and access routes to tourist destinations no longer look as though they have been bombed,” said Veronica Tulpan, Agent Green campaigns coordinator.

“I love nature and the mountains, and at weekends I cannot wait to escape the city and run in the Bucegi Mountains, hike, relax and fully recharge, both physically and mentally. The mountains, forest and nature offer us so many health benefits. We will lose all this because too much is being cut, even in national parks, which should actually be protected. Nobody feels any shame any more; timber is cut and stolen in broad daylight. These people must understand that we do not live only in the present. The consequences of their actions will seriously affect future generations, to whom we are giving no chance. We wonder why flash floods come and why the land slides. We cannot live without oxygen! The air is increasingly polluted, unbreathable in cities, with lots of dust, and all of this ends up in our lungs. Life expectancy is shrinking considerably,” warns Dan Huteanu, a hiking enthusiast and mountain runner.

Agent Green traced the monumental trees logged in Valea Cerbului by Migab Forest. The timber is turned into parquet flooring, doors and MDF boards at the Turkish Yldiz Entegre factory near Pitești, and into drums and reels at the MarMob factory near Rădăuți, Suceava County.

Agent Green’s requests:

1. The Environment Ministry should change Bucegi’s status from Natural Park to National Park and strictly protect at least 90% of this protected area’s forests, including the whole of Valea Cerbului and all valleys with tourist trails, which protect not only biodiversity but also human settlements.
2. The Forest Guard should investigate compliance with the forestry rules in force at Migab Forest’s logging operations in Bucegi during 2020-2021.

Abruptul Prahovean Reserve, Bucegi Natural Park, May 2021

A monumental tree in Bucegi Natural Park’s centuries-old forests, targeted by the ongoing logging

Dan Huteanu, mountain runner

Press contact:

Catalina Radulescu, Agent Green lawyer, +40 745 138 165