What is the point? They will pay a fine and move on to their next exploit. Maybe the punishment should be to force them to spend as much money/time/effort as needed to regrow the entire forest, all 250,000 trees, and then some. Even if it takes 20-30 years - pay for reforestation, hire crews, pay for inspections/watchdogs to monitor etc
The real punishment arguably already happened. This could have been a feel-good project with lots of positive PR: a datacenter built far from major population centers, in a place with lots of available water that isn't used for anything else, in a country with relatively cheap electricity that is overwhelmingly produced from nuclear, hydro and wind. Amid all the negative datacenter PR it could have been a project Google could point to where every single objection has been addressed. Instead it has become a PR disaster that has been dragged through the news cycle and social media's outrage cycle.
Google (through its local subsidiary) asked the regulators if they could skip doing an environmental impact assessment. The regulators told them that they could not skip doing it. They'd already started logging before asking for the exemption and continued to log for months after being told that there would not be an exemption.
They'd also applied for a landscaping permit for the site, but were denied one by the municipality because they'd still not performed the environmental impact assessment.
It's google trying to ask for forgiveness rather than permission, the news cycles making money on the cockup, and HN whiteknighting for Google because Google pays their wages directly and indirectly.
Every time it gets posted most assume that the forest was supposed to be protected and they decided to cut it down anyway.
The details are much less dramatic: The company doing the work messed up on a part of the approval process that was supposed to be completed first. It’s technically possible that the environmental impact review would come back with some obscure exception that required them to revise their plans, but it’s unlikely that anything was going to stop those trees from being cut down.
The 250K trees headline appears dramatic if you don’t know that Finland is covered in trees and cutting down a lot of them is part of building anything.
In the US there's also a third category besides "permit approved" and "permit denied", "no permit needed": the thing you are doing is allowed and not covered by the permitting process. You just do it. This shows up in both building code (you typically don't need a permit for most repairs or cosmetic renovations) and environmental protections (you don't need an environmental study for logging in a non-protected forest).
The tricky part with "no permit needed" is that while you can just go and do whatever, if someone charged with enforcement suspects you're doing something that requires a permit, they can still demand you prove you don't (and stop work until you do), and if you guessed wrong and you did indeed need a permit, you're double-fucked.
That's why for many of these processes, there's also something like a certificate of no-permit needed, where you go through an abbreviated permitting process spending a lot of time and money while all of the clerks and officials stare at you like you're a moron before finally giving you a piece of paper saying you didn't need to do any of that in the first place.
And that's why a lot of people with a lot of experience and a good understanding of the law skip getting a "no permit needed" certificate.
It also doesn't necessarily protect you from anything by obtaining it.
If you, say, go and get a certificate of no-permit needed when you're replacing all of your kitchen cabinets, and then you decide to move the sink while you're at it, you're back to still needing a permit for the plumbing change (and even if you aren't, if your neighbor calls the inspector and says they think you might be, the inspector might say, "no, we already know about that, it's just cabinets", or they might wonder if you are and then you're back in the situation you'd be in without the certificate).
A friend worked in the US tree cutting permit process. There were two main goals behind the permit process as I understand it:
1) To double check the harvest was not going to affect things outside their property (neighbors, land slides, erosion, etc), or special govt. interests on their property (endangered species)
2) To maintain their significant tax break. The break was for owning forest land, and you needed a plan to replant successfully.
Keep in mind that these are mostly 'working forests' that are more akin to wheat fields than wild forests.
It sounds like the issue was insufficient analysis of #1, resulting in excessive water run-off to neighboring privately owned property.
Yeah, and it's being done by a local contractor who presumably knows the process. It'll definitely be interesting if some moustache-twirling CEO at a foreign company is shown to have yelled "BURN THE FOREST DOWN, I WANT IT NOW!" at the contractor, but that feels unlikely in this case.
Funny thing is, if this "forest" is to be protected, why doesn't the govt buy/own the land? What an idiotic thing to say you plant trees in your land but you are not allowed to cut it. Don't approve of a data center in a land where you won't let them clear it. Bureaucracy must prevail!
• You wouldn't need this kind of permit for clear-cutting 3.3 sq-km of forest, if the forest stays as forest (i.e. you will plant with tree seedlings)
• You need this permit when the land use changes (from forest to build area)
• The subcontractor might not have known that they are clear-cutting without all permits, or at least they might have plausible deniability
• The decision makers of the town of Muhos want the data center, as it bring jobs and taxable income
• The town building inspector had given a green light for Google to proceed
• Finland is, still, a high-trust society. Punishment for this kind of wrong-doing is likely lenient (some relatively small fines), the shame of having been sentenced in court is supposed to be the main deterrent in itself
• Thus, it might make financial sense for Google to cut corners and proceed faster, even if it means they end up paying some fines
• Unless the bad publicity ends up costing more than the saved project time
The HN submission title is wrong and editorialised. Google is not being investigated for cutting trees. They're being investigated for environmental damage, including drainage and water management at the site. There's been reports of water running from the site out into the environment. The local residents have been worried over brown, muddy water streaming out from the clearance site into the surrounding nature (https://www.hs.fi/suomi/art-2000012327899.html).
This is what happens when you think you can skip the environmental assessment:
> “We had wolves coming into the village because all the wild animals moved out of the forest,” Anni Ranta, a resident of Otanmaki, told The Guardian. “They fled.”
I think this is a case of a misleading headline. Do the 250K trees even enter into this:
> Police said that, based on current information, there have been irregularities and shortcomings in drainage and water management at the data centre project's worksite
250K trees sounds like a lot, but Finland has like 20B trees, so it would take 3 hours for Finland to grow this back
Growing stock volume: ~2.66B m^3
Annual volume increment: 103M m^3
Approximate number of trees: 20B
Implied average tree volume: ~0.1275 m^3
Volume of 250K trees: 250k x 0.1275 ~ 32k m^3
Time for remaining trees to grow that volume back: 32k / 103M m^3/year ~ 0.00031 years ~ 2.7 to 4.3 hours
Google has a lot of subsidiaries all over the world that are very clearly NOT Google and never mind the fact that we only have one shareholder, whose name we unfortunately can not divulge.
Trees, and their roots, are an essential part of water management. They absorb rainwater, help water infiltrate into the ground, replenishing groundwater supplies. They slow down surface runoff, reducing the risk of flooding, and provide shade and release water vapour via controlled evaporation.
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[ 0.27 ms ] story [ 6.5 ms ] threadhttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50194283
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50048638
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49968324
They'd also applied for a landscaping permit for the site, but were denied one by the municipality because they'd still not performed the environmental impact assessment.
A viscous cycle all around!
The details are much less dramatic: The company doing the work messed up on a part of the approval process that was supposed to be completed first. It’s technically possible that the environmental impact review would come back with some obscure exception that required them to revise their plans, but it’s unlikely that anything was going to stop those trees from being cut down.
The 250K trees headline appears dramatic if you don’t know that Finland is covered in trees and cutting down a lot of them is part of building anything.
The tricky part with "no permit needed" is that while you can just go and do whatever, if someone charged with enforcement suspects you're doing something that requires a permit, they can still demand you prove you don't (and stop work until you do), and if you guessed wrong and you did indeed need a permit, you're double-fucked.
That's why for many of these processes, there's also something like a certificate of no-permit needed, where you go through an abbreviated permitting process spending a lot of time and money while all of the clerks and officials stare at you like you're a moron before finally giving you a piece of paper saying you didn't need to do any of that in the first place.
And that's why a lot of people with a lot of experience and a good understanding of the law skip getting a "no permit needed" certificate.
I am assuming it's similar in other countries.
Amusing. It sounds like it's a permit to not need a permit.
If you, say, go and get a certificate of no-permit needed when you're replacing all of your kitchen cabinets, and then you decide to move the sink while you're at it, you're back to still needing a permit for the plumbing change (and even if you aren't, if your neighbor calls the inspector and says they think you might be, the inspector might say, "no, we already know about that, it's just cabinets", or they might wonder if you are and then you're back in the situation you'd be in without the certificate).
1) To double check the harvest was not going to affect things outside their property (neighbors, land slides, erosion, etc), or special govt. interests on their property (endangered species)
2) To maintain their significant tax break. The break was for owning forest land, and you needed a plan to replant successfully.
Keep in mind that these are mostly 'working forests' that are more akin to wheat fields than wild forests.
It sounds like the issue was insufficient analysis of #1, resulting in excessive water run-off to neighboring privately owned property.
• You need this permit when the land use changes (from forest to build area)
• The subcontractor might not have known that they are clear-cutting without all permits, or at least they might have plausible deniability
• The decision makers of the town of Muhos want the data center, as it bring jobs and taxable income
• The town building inspector had given a green light for Google to proceed
• Finland is, still, a high-trust society. Punishment for this kind of wrong-doing is likely lenient (some relatively small fines), the shame of having been sentenced in court is supposed to be the main deterrent in itself
• Thus, it might make financial sense for Google to cut corners and proceed faster, even if it means they end up paying some fines
• Unless the bad publicity ends up costing more than the saved project time
> “We had wolves coming into the village because all the wild animals moved out of the forest,” Anni Ranta, a resident of Otanmaki, told The Guardian. “They fled.”
https://fortune.com/2026/10/26/wolves-finland-google-1300-ac...
> Police said that, based on current information, there have been irregularities and shortcomings in drainage and water management at the data centre project's worksite
250K trees sounds like a lot, but Finland has like 20B trees, so it would take 3 hours for Finland to grow this back
In this case, it's 3.3 sq-km (or 1.3 sq-miles) of forest.
That's how it looks like in the photos and videos and maps, yes.
https://www.hs.fi/politiikka/art-2000012304991.html
https://www.mtvuutiset.fi/artikkeli/miljardeja-euroja-ja-tuh...
https://www.tervareitti.fi/artikkelit/googlen-datakeskus-tul...
https://www.google.com/maps/@64.8361982,26.1427786,6855m/