Two people standing on the roadside fix their eyes on the passing vehicle, a few others look up from the front of their homes, arms crossed. In Teghut, a village on the edge of Dilijan's vast forests, everyone knows who Hovo is and why he's here, but his presence rarely gets a warm welcome.
At the northern edge of Teghut, the road narrows into a rocky track that curves towards Dimats mountain. From here, Hovo Tonoyan, a ranger with a small environmental NGO, Eco-Patrol (Bnapahpani Toon), based in Dilijan, climbs out of the car. His work ahead will be on foot. Past the first scramble over loose stones, the climb steepens quickly. After a few minutes, he is already clawing his way through thick clumps of thorny bushes, each one scratching at his arms, his boots sinking into the earth heavy from a weeks' worth of rain, and the slope tilting almost vertical in places. For more than two hours, the route alternates between a steep rocky trail, with no shade from the sun, and dense bush where no path exists at all. Either on foot or on motorbike, this is how Hovo spends most of his week -- pushing into the forest to check whether another tree has been taken in the night.
"Here, here, here!" he calls. Just below the trail past another clump of thorns, he points to a massive stump nearly a meter across. "It's definitely an older, fully-grown tree," he says, guessing it was cut around three months ago with a chainsaw. The surface has been charred black, a trick to disguise fresh cuts by burning oil into the wood to artificially "age" the surface, but the shavings of sawdust still at the base of the stump give away the real story.
From a distance, the kilometers of dense trees surrounding Dilijan look untouched. But what you see from afar is like a curtain shielding the thousands of stumps where fully-grown beech, yew and oak trees used to stand. In just three decades, Armenia's forests have shrunk from roughly 14% of the country's total area to 11% today, though actual forest coverage is at 9.7% officially. In Dilijan alone, activists say that at least 2,000 trees are cut illegally in the region each year -- an area about the size of several football fields. When the tree coverage thins, the forest floor begins to lose humidity, becomes less stable, and even affects the water that reaches the villages below. Standing up to the crisis is a tiny environmental NGO, with no more than four or five volunteers working at any given time, who have transformed from citizen monitors to "forest defenders". With motorbikes, photo traps and drones, they track the logging and pass evidence to the authorities, trying to disrupt the business networks behind the tree thefts.
The story of our disappearing forests begins in the blackouts of the 1990s. When fuel imports stalled, households began to use trees as the only remaining source of energy. According to an FAO report about the crisis, the most serious threat to forests at the time was not fires or droughts, but "uncontrolled mass felling" that kept homes warm and stoves burning. The scale of the cutting was unprecedented. City parks were stripped for firewood, and forests were felled en masse. Before the start of the energy crisis, official statistics recorded only one to two thousand cubic meters of wood being illegally logged each year. But by the end of the decade, more than 700,000 cubic meters of wood were being cut each year. The vast majority was for household use, and the rest fed furniture makers and construction.
Now, despite the availability of gas, wood still remains the energy backbone for many in the regions. For poorer households, electricity and gas are prohibitively expensive, or sometimes wood is just more reliable. The evidence of the rural reliance on firewood is obvious: wood is piled at roadsides for sale, or stacked beside homes, in preparation for the colder months. But putting a number on that reliance is difficult, and estimates of the demand on wood as fuel vary widely.
In 2021 and 2022, official demand for fuelwood was estimated to be between 95,000 and 290,000 cubic meters by government and non-government agencies. Some earlier estimates put the demand between 2 million to more than 6 million cubic meters of consumption per year. But state forestry organizations, such as Hayantar SNCO, reported producing a combined total of just over 50,000 cubic meters of fuelwood in 2022. The gap between official production and actual demand (however unreliable the estimates) suggest vastly unreported harvesting. Much of this "shadow" wood is sourced informally, and in many cases is taken illegally from forests. By some estimates, illegal logging is up to 30 times more than the officially reported wood harvesting.
Illegal logging is a punishable offense, and people face fines up to 200 times the minimum salary for removing timber from forests, officials up to 400 times for the same offense. Since 2019, illegal logging has also become a criminal offense that can carry up to two years in prison -- a decision that was deeply unpopular among residents at the time, with many arrested in the violent protests against the efforts to stop illegal logging.
But in practice, the gaps in enforcement and a lack of boots on the ground have left forests vulnerable. Even officials tasked with protecting the forests have been drawn into the logging trade. Earlier this year, the Anti-Corruption Committee found a director of Hayantar, along with other foresters in the organization, had accepted a 1.5 million AMD bribe in exchange for loggers' free rein to cut trees in the forests of Lori. This is not the first instance of bribery, others at Hayantar have also been charged with negligence, and in the past, several National Park directors have been arrested for the illegal logging of several thousand trees.
This lack of enforcement is where Eco-Patrol has stepped in, a small group of citizen monitors based in the mountains surrounding Dilijan. Gor Hovhannisyan, one of its founders, remembers how the project began in 2017 as an attempt at public oversight of the forests. "We weren't trying to be forest rangers ourselves," he says. But almost immediately it became clear to him that the situation was bad, and simply noting down each cut tree wasn't changing much. "You cannot go, see the tree, and write to yourself that there's a tree that's been cut," he says. "You need to try and make it so it's not allowed for that tree to be cut at all."
The volunteers changed from forest observers to forest defenders, he says. Comprised of only four or five people at any given time, the group patrols countless hectares of forest on foot, on motorbike, and by car, and often at night, because "just how the tree robbers go in the middle of the night, we need to do the same," Hovhannisyan says. Their role walks the line between playing detective and deterring would-be loggers from the forests. They install camera traps, track suspicious trucks, and look into newcomers in surrounding villages to see if they head into the woods. They submit evidence to the police, and occasionally post video clips online to raise awareness. But unfortunately, prosecutions rarely follow these efforts. Hovhannisyan estimates that only one in eleven cases ever leads to a conviction, even when culprits are caught on camera and are identifiable. "Unless you film the man while he is cutting the tree, that man is not guilty," he explains. "They'll go before a judge and get off, because our laws have gaps."
But compiling such evidence is far from safe. Hovhannisyan recalls confrontations with villagers and loggers that have sometimes turned violent. "They shot at us once, and hit one of the motorbikes with a car," he says. In 2018, he told Hetq that 30 villagers ganged up on two volunteer rangers patrolling the park.
Other local residents are more friendly, quietly sharing information about new loggers in town, or which trucks are moving through. "They like us because they've seen for themselves what's happened in the last ten years," Hovhannisyan says. One of the local villages had ten functioning wells, now it has three. "In the areas where they've cut trees, the humidity goes and the water dries up," he says. Tourism can also be affected, and many in the area run guesthouses.
And now that the organization has been around for some years, that "dangerous period" is over, Hovhannisyan says. "People understand who we are," he says. "But they're still trying to steal trees and we're trying to stop them."
When they first began their work in 2017, Hovannisyan remembers hearing the sound of chainsaws at work every night from his lodge. "You could sit here and hear the 'woooor'," he says from his porch overlooking the forests below Haghartsin. "From there, from there, from eight sides around you," he points. Now per his observation, tree stealing has halved since those days. "But that doesn't mean just because it's gone down, the remaining situation isn't a horrible amount," he says. Each year, he estimates a minimum of 2,000 trees are cut in the area that the organization patrols. Across the country, more than 5,400 trees have already been cut illegally in the first half of this year, according to official data per the Environmental Protection and Mining Inspection Body.
The people behind axes and chainsaws tend to fall into two categories. People who want to take trees for their homes, Hovhannisyan explains, so that in winter they don't freeze, and people who want to do business. "Our war is with those business people," he says. "We've seen old men take small trees, and we get mad but we say 'go'. But also if you don't say anything, in our experience, after a few years they will work for business too." Over the long run, the commercial side of the trade is far more destructive, and most of it is fueled by the demand for firewood, though some is for furniture making, too. There are trees easily worth up to $2,000, Hovhannisyan says, which is a large sum for a single nights' work. He's seen small crews of just two or three men head into the forest under the cover of night, as well as larger convoys of up to 15 people with a truck, all navigating the steep and difficult forest routes in search of profit.
Even though their efforts to "get under people's feet" have reduced the amount of felling in the area, the loggers are becoming craftier with their strategies. On his daily patrol through the forest, Hovo Tonoyan spots a stump that he suspects was poisoned. The loggers will dig a hole at the base of the tree and fill it with a substance that kills the tree from the inside, Tonoyan explains. Then they wait until a few months later, when it will appear to have toppled over naturally.
A few hundred meters below where Tonoyan is scrutinizing the tree stumps, a tourist 4×4 headed to Dimats mountain has pulled over for a lunch break. In this dense forest at the heart of touristic roads and hiking trails, it's not hard to find evidence of crime. Tonoyan walks a few meters further into the scrub and shouts out, "there's another one cut here." A second later, "another here, and another." One is a new tree, "they had covered this one in soil so that I wouldn't find it," he says, pulling out his phone to document the coordinates of the stump and share a picture with the organization's Telegram group. "However much we walk, we're bound to find more and more," he says.
Despite years of such patrols, the rates of illegal logging seem to be creeping up again. "We're seeing it little by little, that it's going up to what it was before," Hovhannisyan says. And the damage isn't hard to see. "I look at old maps, and where they show forest there is no forest," he says. The trees that stood there just a few decades ago might take several lifetimes to return.
But there's only so much a small team like his can do. Honhannisyan likens their work to keeping the forest alive with CPR, waiting for the government to bring the defibrillator. "I don't know when the defibrillator is coming, or if it's coming at all," he says.