Good. Finland has dozens of billions of trees. Having AI data centers on European soil is more important.
This isn’t about trees. This is about not following the environmental regulation.
To put in contrast this is something for which a private citizen could get into a lot of hot water.
So it’s about can a large corporation act as they like or do they need to follow the laws just like everyone else.
If they had followed the law, the trees would not be an issue.
This here is the exact sentiment which is making the entire country quite angry.
These are not pointless bureaucratic hoops.
The entire voting population is quite worried of large multinational companies starting extractive projects that damage the environment, like mines.
These are the same processes that are put into place to stop say mining companies wantonly ravaging the landscape.
It's a canary of a large company attempting to avoid the process, which was put in place to protect the environment.
So everyone is now quite concerned that are the environmental protections really functional or not.
Basically everyone considers nature to be a public good in Finland. There is "every mans right" which allows you to camp and collect berries almost everywhere, for instance. Majority of the population has vacation homes in the forests next to lakes. A large mine that ignores environmental effects can thus damage both the public goods and the value of private properties quite a lot. I mean - that is the feeling the people have.
So it's not about "company doing something in their own property, big deal". It's about respecting safety mechanism to protect public goods.
And, that the government should keep everyone equal under the law.
No one is thinking only about few trees. Everyone is quite angry that a company could not follow due process without any backlash and worried what happens with, say the next large mine if the systems intended to protect the nature are not really working.
Us data center stans need to accept the public's worries and make a more collaborative argument.
So, no thank you, these are not the data centres we need.
Protecting it could indeed be an issue, but destruction is not guaranteed. Finland has advanced air defense.
The question is, if there was a button that gave you ten million dollars but someone, somewhere, would die, would you press it? It's an abuse of the trolley problem but ask all your friends next time there's a lull in dinner conversation.
Still, I hope that we're r planting trees elsewhere to make up for the lost of trees in this instance.