For years, we were told to give up paper to save the trees. Electronic invoices, paperless statements, digital communication: the forest was finally going to breathe thanks to our screens.
Visibly, the message didn’t quite reach Finland.
According to an investigation published by The Guardian, Google reportedly had around 400,000 trees felled in Finland to prepare for the construction of two data centers. In Muhos, 330 hectares of forest were turned into a wasteland. Minor detail: operations began without waiting for the completion of mandatory environmental impact assessments, prompting Finnish authorities to suspend the work.
It must be said that tech giants have a new requirement: finding spaces large and cold enough to house their data centers, whose development is accelerating with artificial intelligence. Scandinavia happens to offer the ideal climate to keep cooling costs down. The only drawback: these regions are often covered in forests. A slight inconvenience to which bulldozers provide an effective response.
Google apologized and promised to replant trees. Yet this rather savory paradox remains: to allow us to consume ever more data, the digital industry ends up destroying the very forests it claimed to protect by replacing paper.
But rest assured: our email clients will certainly continue to remind us not to print our emails to save the trees. Some misconceptions clearly last longer than forests.
Jan Lemoux
Photo/Two Sides
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