Every time it gets posted most assume that the forest was supposed to be protected and they decided to cut it down anyway.

The details are much less dramatic: The company doing the work messed up on a part of the approval process that was supposed to be completed first. It’s technically possible that the environmental impact review would come back with some obscure exception that required them to revise their plans, but it’s unlikely that anything was going to stop those trees from being cut down.

The 250K trees headline appears dramatic if you don’t know that Finland is covered in trees and cutting down a lot of them is part of building anything.

• You wouldn't need this kind of permit for clear-cutting 3.3 sq-km of forest, if the forest stays as forest (i.e. you will plant with tree seedlings)

• You need this permit when the land use changes (from forest to build area)

• The subcontractor might not have known that they are clear-cutting without all permits, or at least they might have plausible deniability

• The decision makers of the town of Muhos want the data center, as it bring jobs and taxable income

• The town building inspector had given a green light for Google to proceed

• Finland is, still, a high-trust society. Punishment for this kind of wrong-doing is likely lenient (some relatively small fines), the shame of having been sentenced in court is supposed to be the main deterrent in itself

• Thus, it might make financial sense for Google to cut corners and proceed faster, even if it means they end up paying some fines

• Unless the bad publicity ends up costing more than the saved project time

Yeah, and it's being done by a local contractor who presumably knows the process. It'll definitely be interesting if some moustache-twirling CEO at a foreign company is shown to have yelled "BURN THE FOREST DOWN, I WANT IT NOW!" at the contractor, but that feels unlikely in this case.

Google (through its local subsidiary) asked the regulators if they could skip doing an environmental impact assessment. The regulators told them that they could not skip doing it. They'd already started logging before asking for the exemption and continued to log for months after being told that there would not be an exemption.

They'd also applied for a landscaping permit for the site, but were denied one by the municipality because they'd still not performed the environmental impact assessment.

Funny thing is, if this "forest" is to be protected, why doesn't the govt buy/own the land? What an idiotic thing to say you plant trees in your land but you are not allowed to cut it. Don't approve of a data center in a land where you won't let them clear it. Bureaucracy must prevail!

That's the first thing that comes to mind here too. Very very very few contractors are going to do work without a permit. Maybe Finland needs to investigate their own government offices?