Finns Are Seething After Google Illegally Toppled 250,000 Trees for a Data Center – Mother Jones– www.motherjones.com

This story was originally published by The Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Behind a wire fence lies a vast gaping wound of earth. Before Google’s arrival a few months ago, an estimated quarter-million trees occupied the 815 acres of forest near the town of Muhos in rural northern Finland. Now they are all gone.

After the tech company illegally stripped the entire area to build a data center— taking even the topsoil with it—all that remains is a vast expanse of mud indented with the trail marks of machinery; puddles; and mounds of earth, roots, and branches. Residents say that brown water flowing off the site is going into a stream that feeds the Oulujoki River. “It doesn’t end. It goes on and on,” says Mari Annala, an ecologist from the Finnish Association for Nature Conservation (SLL), looking at drone footage of the former forest from the perimeter