November 17 2018
“You’ve got to take care of the floors. You know the floors of the forest, very important,” Trump noted Saturday surrounded by the devastation of the burned town of Paradise in northern California.
“I was with the president of
Finland and he said, ‘We have a much different —we’re a forest nation.’ He called it a forest nation, and they spent a lot of time on raking and cleaning and doing things. And they don’t have any problem. And when they do, it’s a very small problem,” Trump said.
The trees aren’t the same.
Finnish forests are mainly filled with tall boreal trees — pine, spruce and birch — whereas much of Californian vegetation consists of lower-lying chaparral shrub land and small trees, which are more prone to catching fire.
“The whole comparison is a bit wild,” said Mr. Lindberg, who suggested that it would be better to study methods in Mediterranean Europe, where forests are more like those in California.
President Sauli Niinisto of Finland said, in an interview published Sunday in a Finnish newspaper, that in a brief conversation in Paris on Nov. 11, he had explained the virtues of Finnish forest management to Mr. Trump. But he didn’t recall mentioning raking.
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