Tree Huggers Take to Sweden’s Forests to Fight Four-Nation Transportation Link

GOTHENBURG, Sweden —  If you want to annoy a Swedish road builder, hug a tree.

Militant environmentalists have taken to Sweden’s forests, chaining themselves to trees, halting and delaying bulldozers and forest-clearing machines extending the highway network.

Even the chilly Nordic winter has failed to budge the tree huggers, who have become a symbol for the radical fringe of a thriving green movement, already one of Europe’s strongest.

“It is a matter of saving the environment. It is our moral duty to protest,” said novelist Sara Lidman, interviewed recently while chained to a tree in western Sweden.

Favorite Target

The favorite target for the tree huggers is the multibillion-dollar dream of a European industrial lobby--the four-nation Scandinavian Link or Scanlink.

Scanlink is a railway, highway, bridge and tunnel network that would start in Oslo, cut down the west of Sweden, hop over the Danish islands of Zealand and Funen to the Danish mainland and then move to the Autobahns and rail systems of West Germany near Hamburg.

The $4-billion plan has been proposed by the Roundtable of European Industrialists, an industrial lobby that includes the chairman of Gothenburg-based car giant Volvo.

Although still a dream, parts of the network are already incorporated into road-building programs, with several stretches of highway under construction in western Sweden.

Great Belt Project

Denmark is also due to start work this year on one of Scanlink’s most adventurous components, a railway tunnel and bridge system across the 18-mile Great Belt waterway between Zealand and Funen.

“Sweden has not accepted Scanlink in its entirety, but there are inevitably parts of our national road-building program which go along with the Scanlink proposals,” said Transport Ministry spokeswoman Merike Palm.

The tree huggers, as the national media calls them, oppose completion of the full project, which they contend will pollute and destroy sensitive environments in western Sweden.

They argue that Scanlink would dramatically increase traffic into Scandinavia, raising exhaust and pollution levels.

Viability Study

The Scanlink proponents are convinced that the project would pose no serious environmental problems.

“Environmental aspects of the scheme will require further detailed study, but a joint Danish-Swedish government study into the viability of the project raised no major environmental problems,” the proponents group said in a policy statement.

The tree huggers operate by setting up camp overnight in forest areas earmarked for clearing and staying put when the bulldozers try to start rolling in the morning.

The road builders, sharing the customary Swedish aversion to confrontation, tend to go away, leaving the tree huggers to shiver and obstruct for up to a week at a time.

But sooner or later police are summoned by impatient councils, and dozens of tree huggers have been fined for obstructing the police.

One of the most active groups operates against a highway under construction in Bohuslan, a beautiful coastal province that stretches 90 miles from Gothenburg to the Norwegian border.

In Stenungsund, a main town in the province, the district court has seen a regular procession of tree hugging prosecutions.

The tree huggers hope to mobilize public opinion against Scanlink. Sweden’s ruling Social Democrats, citing environmental reasons, voted last autumn to shelve plans for a vital part of the link--a rail and road bridge between Sweden and Denmark across the Oresund straits.