Sparks: ‘Pure arrogance’: anger in Finland as Google illegally fells 250,000 trees for datacentre

If it be lawful to strip a forest for profit, then the law is merely the deed of the stronger, and the trees have no standing to object; but if the law exists to restrain what strength alone would do, then this act is not a mistake of the law but its refutation.

A regulatory body designed to constrain the industry it oversees, staffed by the industry's former executives and funded by the industry's fees, will reliably find that the industry's conduct falls within the permissible; the mechanism is the message, and the message is that nothing here was designed to stop this.

One observes that the puerperal fever of the modern age is a datacentre built without permission, and the physicians attending the birth of this new convenience have not yet washed their hands of the matter.

The men who signed the order to fell these trees are already dust, and so are the men who will replant them, and the forest that stood for a thousand years will be forgotten before the servers that replaced it are obsolete.

When you say the company acted illegally, do you mean the law forbade the act, or that the act was wrong regardless of the law - and if the latter, what is the wrongness that the law failed to capture?

Standing at the fence, I count the stumps - two hundred and fifty thousand - and I ask the company's spokesperson whether the trees were consulted, and he tells me the project will create jobs, and I write down that the jobs are in the datacentre and the trees are in the ground.

The datacentre could be built underground, cooled by the earth, powered by the wind that blows across the cleared land, and it would cost less to operate than the one that required the forest to be removed; we could have done this, we did not, and the distance between those facts is a choice.