“True progress quietly and persistently moves along without notice”
I has been 4 months since my last post, but lot more than a couple meters of snowfall has befallen on Pietroasa. Over the next couple months, I hope to report on a series of successes that build an economic future for the citizens of Pietroasa. I think we are close. Thankfully, there are many Romanians that ignore the “Europe is falling” newspaper headlines and are finding honest, innovative ways to build businesses that leverage Romania’s extraordinary natural resources.
Thanks to the folks that emailed me to see what has been going on. As St Francis of Assisi said in the quote I borrowed for my title, true progress is often quiet. Shhhhhh ………………… Log-off the web, turn-off the TV, and come visit Pietroasa.
Encouraging News on Forest
Every time I think we are the first ones to tackle a challenge in Romania, I find that others have gone before us …. and succeeded. This week we have a team in Pietroasa working on a new ten year forestry plan. The team includes a consultant of Tasuleasa Social (http://tasuleasasocial.ro), an NGO sponsored by Coca Cola that has been successful in forest conservation since 2000.
The Financial Times ran an article this week that underscores the uniqueness and value of Romania’s forest. It is a fun read and reminder on why forestry planning, law, and enforcement is so important. Enjoy !
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/eca83348-0174-11e1-b177-00144feabdc0.html#axzz1cuL9SgaE
If this link does not work, google ‘Clive Aslet Lost in Transylvania’
A Small Town Romanian Success Story
Just returned from 17 days in Romania. Hope to have some positive news on logging issue in next couple weeks.
Attitude and expectations are self fulfilling prophecies. Last week, Nokia announced it was closing it’s factory in Cluj. To all my American partners, the reaction was “Of course, Nokia is getting clobbered in the marketplace by Apple, Adroid, and other smart phones”. On the contrary, the lead news story in Romanian papers was “Nokia leaving, Prime Minister calls emergency weekend Cabinet meeting, which foreign multinational is next?”.
It is time to start telling success stories…… so I’ll start in Pietroasa.
Ten years ago, Viorel, a Romanian living in Copenhagen, noticed that most wooden birdhouses were made in China. When he told the Danish retailer there were much higher quality products made in Romania, the retailer said he would be happy to find a European supplier. Viorel flew back to his home town of Constanta to find a Romanian supplier of wooden birdhouses. His friends in Constanta told him to visit the Padis area in Bihor County to find good craftsman. So Viorel drove to the Padis region and asked where he could find skilled wood craftsman. A number of people recommended the Ilas family in Pietroasa, as honest, skilled wood workers.
In 2001, Ilas’s shipped their first wooden birdhouse to Denmark. The quality of their products, reduced shipping times, and reliability gave them an advantage over the Chinese.
In 2006, Wildlife World, http://www.wildlifeworld.co.uk , an award winning UK-based supplier of environmentally friendly gardening products, contacted the Ilas’s about custom manufacturing a large variety of wooden products for the organic gardening market. At the same time, a young woman from the village, Estera, returned from the United States, where she spent her college summers in the “Work and Study” program. Estera’s english skills were the communication channel the Adi Ilas and Wildlife World needed.
In 2008, the Ilas’s renamed their family business, Nature’s Timber. They began to source there wood exclusively from Forestry Stewardship Council certified forests in Romania. Nature’s Timber did over $350,000 in business in 2010 and has 8 employees. Below, Adi Ilas, and Estera are standing next to some products
Recently, Nature’s Timber just received a $300,000 EU grant, to build an manufacturing facility in Pietroasa. This building will allow the business to reduce it wood drying time from 3 years to a couple months (you can see the wood drying outdoors in the picture above). Adi Ilas expects to add 12 new employees next year. Since the EU grant only covers the building, Nature’s Timber is using it’s own capital to build the roads and utility infrastructure for Pietroasa’s first industrial park. We hope that this industrial park will soon have other local businesses focused on “value-added” processing of local forestry products.
Nature’s Timber is the story of a very talented family of Romanian craftsman adapting their skills to compete in a global marketplace. It is also the story of a two Romanians, Viorel and Estera, using their experience abroad to leverage a uniquely Romanian trade. It’s demonstrates the success that teamwork brings.
A death threat, dozens of drunken loggers disrupt City Council, and a very angry Mayor – 1 September, 2011
Woke up this morning to a text that people plan to kill my partner, Adi, at today’s City Council Meeting. No need for coffee.
The signs of illegal logging are all over Pietroasa this summer. Floods, washed up roads, trucks filled with logs, no checkpoints on roads, and tractors with no license plates. The Pietroasa city budget tells the same story: no income from logging in the city forest, no taxes from local loggers and saw mills, and no permit fees from the businesses operated by many City Council Members. Perhaps most egregious of all is watching the E25 million EU funded Sudrigui-Padis road that brings so much tourism potential – being damaged by huge logging trucks and fallen trees while it is still being built !
In August the Mayor assured me that this logging activity is a wind down of contracts paid for before Pietroasa Prospera petition was signed. She said it would end in August. Last week, we obtained a map from Pietroasa’s Forestry Administrator, Oculul Silvic Soime, that showed over 5000 cubic meters of tress to be cut immediately adjacent to our land. This is on severely sloping land bordering the road and Valea Aleului River. This logging would devastate the river, destroy the road with erosion and rock slides, and cause even more flooding. As our forestry consultant said – “an environmental disaster”. When we told the Forestry Administrator (City’s must hire these Administrator’s so the City Council’s can be advised on Forestry law), about our legal obligation to protect the River and the destruction this logging would cause, his reply was shocking “I know it is against the law, but there is no other way to cut the wood, so we must sacrifice the river”. And this is in a National Nature Park !
Romanian leaders speak a lot about the importance of mountain tourism to national GDP growth. A couple have encouraged us to sue the City to hand it’s forest back to the National Forest Administration. Based on the imminent prospects of massive clear cutting adjacent to our property, our contractual obligation to Apele Romana, and the Mayor’s outright lie to me about logging ending in August, I advised the Mayor that she needed to stop all logging by September 2nd or we would sue the for it’s incompetence and corruption in administering the forest. I followed up with this letter which my partner, Adi, delivered to all 13 City Council Members on Wednesday.
My partner, Adi, attended the City Council meeting tonight – with an escort from the Bihor County police. The purpose of the meeting was to vote on point 7 and 8 in my letter. In a scene that reminded me of the coal miners marching on Bucharest twenty years ago, 100 loggers, most of whom had come from the bars, crowded the small City Council chambers. Big, drunk, and loud they were meant to intimidate ….. and it worked. The Mayor’s speech emphasized two points. Firstly, it is her, not the Americans that control her village. Secondly, that the all the logging activity is done according to the law. The City Council members opposed to the Mayor’s position could not speak given the raucous logging gallery. The vote on our request was postponed. What is noticeably shocking to an outsider is the absence of legal experts advising the dialogue. There were none. The Mayor, neither a lawyer or forestry expert, tells the City Council she is following the law. The City Council, which is legally responsible for all concessions, including the forests, has no legal counsel or money to hire a lawyer. City Council and public access to laws, logging maps, tax rolls, and many other things are deliberately denied by the Mayor. Democracy has not failed, it hasn’t been attempted because citizens are deliberately uninformed, denied access to rights, and intimidated by sideshows like today. IT WOULD BE GREAT TO SEE THE MEDIA INFORM ROMANIANS OF THE AUTHORITY GIVEN TO CITY COUNCILS.
In an earlier blog entry, I wrote about Saveta Osvat, The Mayor of Pietroasa. I like and respect her. We both come from very different worlds, speak separate languages, are separated by an huge ocean, and trying to dance in tandem through extraordinary changes. We will each look back at this week and recognized we could have handled things better. The only encouraging thing I heard from her today is that she is obeying the law. While disagree with her conclusion, it is good that we both agree that “the law” is our common foundation. Now we can apply it.
Summer 2011 in Pietroasa
The mountain bikers are discovering our village
The Pietroasa – Padis road is a game changer for our community (completed next summer)
Yes, Bears are here
A view from inside the Bears Cave
View from outside the Bear’s Cave
Our campground at 1200 meters
Our largest mountain is 1800 meters
Hiking to Cascada Bohodei
Water is our treasure
Back to the village at dusk
Words vs Action
We spend too much time listening to people talk and not enough time seeing what they really do. General George C. Marshall said it well: “best to speak through accomplishments, not words”. It was time for us to heed that advice.
Armed with our signed petition, I planned to spend the summer raising financial support for the Pietroasa Prospera Foundation. However, Romanians are very attuned to empty promises and we had created far too much energy and disruption to ‘sit still’. My Romanian partners said we did not have time to raise money, we needed to act now. In the court of public opinion, the loggers were acting in full force.
We knew the logging ‘money’ made it’s way into the pockets of some government officials. The loggers struck back through local government harassment. On June 21st, 5 government officials from the Labor Department (ITM) and Bihor County Immigration Office showed up at our property. Without a search warrant, and with intimidating, abusive language towards our female caretaker, spent hours rummaging through every room in our buildings looking for “illegal American immigrant workers.” Their ridiculous accusation frightened our employee. Another employee was told that loggers were preparing to burn down our buildings – with him inside.
Reporting these threats to local police often does not help, as they rarely confront the logging interests. On July 5th, I photographed loggers cutting down trees in a “highly protected National Reserve” surrounding the Cascada Bohodei. We contacted the local police as the unlicensed tractor sped down the mountain.
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An hour after my call, the police arrived with the loggers and Augustin Tomuta, the local Romsilva director. Mr Tomuta told us the loggers were legal, although they had no permit to show me. When I asked the local police officer if it was legal for a tractor to drive on city roads with no license plate, the policeman stood silent while the Romsilva director answered that it was okay. I had to shout at Mr Tomuta to “shut-up” and allow the policeman to speak for himself. The policeman reluctantly admitted it was illegal to drive without a license plate. He quietly told the logger he could not drive up the road, but I doubt he issued a ticket. Later, I spoke on the phone with Alin Mos, who confirmed the loggers were in a ‘highly restricted area’ where logging is punishable by jail time. More on this later …..
Our greatest enemy is the village rumor mill. History has given villagers every reason to be suspicious of businessmen. In the ‘zero sum world” of local business, the only economic model people know is to fight for what you can get. There is no frame of reference for making money by enlarging the overall economy. All kinds of crazy rumors were being spread to stop Pietroasa Prospera. The best way to discredit the loggers was to do more for the village than they did (which was nothing).
In 2009, New Vista built a soccer field for the village. A typical civic sponsorship in America – not so typical of businesses in Romanian villages.
During the April and May City Council meetings I suggested finishing the City Park (where a Memorial to Pietroasa War Veterans stood) and providing garbage collection for city residents (nothing destroys the tourism industry faster than piles of rubbish) as examples of how our Foundation might support local economic development. In the eyes of the City Council, MY SUGGESTIONS HAD BECOME EXPECTATIONS. So we hired a landscaper. Here was the park in May,
Here was the park under construction in June,
And here is the completed park in July,
We bought a 1000 garbage cans and paid for 3 months of trash collection for every residence
In July, 30 friends and families of the New Vista Investors came to serve in the community. Elderly local citizens joined us in picking up garbage off the streets. In fact they apologized for the garbage and explained “until you brought these cans, we had no where to put our garbage”. They had pride in their village.
We hosted a summer camp for children in the village. Many of our volunteers were American teenagers,
And we were welcomed into village homes,
Trained in food preparation,
And gifted with homemade wine.
At the end of the week, it was clear to many villagers that Pietroasa Prospera was more than words. For the American volunteers, something else was clear – they wanted to come back. They had received more from the villagers than they had given. That is why Romanian villages have so much potential.
May 15th 2011 – Decision Time for City Council
The City Council gathered to respond to the Petition drafted by New Vista for the formation of Pietroasa Prospera. For ten minutes the Mayor read the petition (English version attached) Petition to City Counsel and fellow citizens
I sat next to Mayor as she spoke. It was clear that the City Council members to her left were supportive of the petition. The City Council members to her right looked down as she spoke. Standing behind these Council members were a number of men with tanned, weather worn faces. As I looked at these loggers, I recognized that their work ethic was an asset to the community. One of our priorities must be to put these hard working men to work in building hiking trails, bridges, and logging in thoughtfully planned way.
After the Mayor spoke, I emphasized that we all were part of one of the most beautiful communities in Europe and have the tools to build a strong local economy. The ensuing dialogue began with a well-dressed man in the back of the room. This man looked like he lived in Milan, not Pietroasa. It was clear he had an interest in the logging business. As he rambled on with preposterous nonsense, I arranged a ride home for my 9 American partners. Sensing that the meeting was about to get interesting, they all declined.
The first burst of emotion came from the pro-logging City Council members claiming that the logging was legal and the American businessmen were scheming to steal the forest. Then a woman in the crowd accused the entire City Council of ignoring the illegal logging that was destroying Pietroasa’s biotic environment. Suddenly, the meeting broke into a shouting match. It was like watching four tennis matches at one time on a single court. City Council member vs City Council member. Citizen vs citizen. Remarkably, it was not necessary to understand Romanian to understand the points being argued.
After thirty minutes and some hand signals from my partners, I managed to interrupt the shouting with this message “We are going leave this petition on the table. If you want our help with economic development, please sign it. If you don’t want our help, that is also fine. And if you are confused about the petition, I can make it simple. If you want the law to be enforced in Pietroasa, then sign it. If you want to want to ignore the law, then don’t sign it.”
Then we walked into the street. To our surprise, the City Council and citizens followed us into the the street and the arguments seemed more inflamed by the oxygen rich mountain air. Literally, Council members were standing face to face, screaming and gesturing violently with their arms and legs. All of us were waiting for the first punch to be thrown.
As we collected our thoughts and drove up the mountain, each American was smiling with optimism. We began to recall similar scenes in our own communities. What we had just witnessed was Democracy ….. average citizens determining the future of their community. After we settled down for dinner, a caravan of City Council members arrived with the petition signed by 7 of 13 City Council members. They came to celebrate. They said they would have come earlier, but the Mayor was wrestling the petition away from two City Council members that had campaigned against Pietroasa Prospera …. and now wanted to be the 8th and 9th affirmative vote. We asked a couple of very muscular Council members if the meeting almost broke into a fight. They gently smiled and replied “No, in this village we fight with our words, not our fists.”
The evening reaffirmed that something very good is happening in Romania. I felt blessed to be a part of it. Over and over again people tell me, “Why do you waste your time in Romania …. Romanians will never change.” I have always believed that Romanians have the will change, they simply lacked the knowledge of what to change into. The Communist culture made it particularly hard for leaders to ask for help. Our economic plan was the first time the citizens had a unifying vision and experienced economic leadership. Democracy requires that citizens know what they want and fight for it. Democracy is earned, not given. The names on the petition are people committed to making Romania the place their children want to live..
Pietroasa in Pictures
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