by Adina Florea

Dan Turiga strides through a forest clearing now overtaken by weeds in Fetesti, a quiet village in northeastern Romania. It’s early October 2024, and the forest floor is blanketed in a quilt of orange and yellow leaves. A group of foreign journalists follows Dan Turiga, a forest engineer with Agent Green, an environmental NGO. They are here to understand how IKEA furniture contributes to the degradation of Europe’s best preserved forests  As he counts the struggling oak saplings planted by IKEA after clearing big strips, Turiga is interrupted by local mushroom pickers. With practiced ease, he chats with them, diverting their attention from the foreigners carrying cameras and a microphone boom pole. Wearing trekking boots, the 42-year-old forest enginner critiques the state of the replanted forest and inundades the group with insights into forest management —  diseases afflicting young trees, and the toll on biodiversity in the Ikea-owned forest.

Romania is home to Europe’s last untouched forests. But these ecosystems are vanishing at an alarmint rate, with 20 million cubic metres of timber illegally harvested annualy. Loggers and developers exploit loopholes and bribe officials to continue plundering the valuable resource unchecked. While some forest rangers are complicit, others risk their lives. Over the past decade, 180 people, mostly rangers, have been attacked, with six losing being killed while on the job. Locals, journalists, and activists have also been targeted in this dangerous fight to protect Romania’s forests.

Among those fighting on the frontlines is Turiga. Agent Green’s forest engineer ventures deep into forests armed with little more than a phone and bear spray. They’re not to ward off wildlife.

“Dan has a unique ability to defuse dangerous situations,” says Agent Green’s founder Gabriel Paun, who himself narrowly survived an attack in 2015 during an investigation into illegal logging.

The soft-spoken forest engineer would modestly call it ‘experience’. He didn’t have more than that when guarding state-owned forests from attackers on the outskirts of Bucharest.

For Turiga, who grew up surrounded by forests, protecting nature seemed an inevitable calling. His father and grandfather were rangers, but they discouraged him from following in their footsteps.

“My father didn’t want me to pursue this career,” Turiga explains, “for him, it was a personal tragedy to protect the forest from his own colleagues.” His career as a forest engineer began in 2016, in a forest management unit just outside the country’s capital. He initially studied accounting, and eventually joined Romsilva, Romania’s state-owned forest administrator, which oversees 65 percent  of the country’s forests. Yet the pull of the woods was too strong, and Turiga began studying forestry engineering while continuing to work full-time.

Turiga soon found himself at odds with the culture of corruption within Romsilva. “I had to keep an eye on my colleagues,” he says , reflecting on the irony of reliving his father’s struggles—defending the forest not from outsiders, but from those tasked with protecting it. He admits he wouldn’t have lasted much long under the pressure.

“You’re ridiculed and marginalised for trying to do things right,” he says “You’re the snitch.”

By the summer of 2018, Turiga was dismissed after he refused a reassignment to a hunting enclosure—outside his expertise, and of the forest he swore to protect. He says the reassignment was retaliation for his refusal to approve the dubious retrocession of two hectares of forest in a lucrative area coveted by Bucharest’s real estate developers.

“They tried to drag me with them into prison,” says Turiga.

In those final weeks at Romsilva, he fervently exposed irregularities to both his superiors, and to journalists. He filed a complaint with the environmental ministry about 11 illegal constructions in the forests surrounding Bucharest. There was even a criminal investigation, but it didn’t come to anything. Although he acknowledges being a whistleblower, the engineer doesn’t consider his actions to be extraordinary. “It’s normal to be a decent person. I couldn’t bear the community’s shame if I stayed silent.” he says.

Turiga believes his profession’s moral decline makes it easy for those without strong principles to succumb to corruption. “It’s different for me. The forest is part of me. My father instilled in me the importance of protecting it,” he says.

Since leaving Romsilva, Turiga has been embroiled in lawsuits. He is contesting his dismissal and the actions of the company’s disciplinary committe. The second case is under appeal, and Turiga notes that colleagues in similar situations have already won. He has no intention of returning to Romsilva, believing that systemic change is impossible under the current conditions: “It’s like being a miner—you go to work every day, but there’s no joy.”

He also faced personal attacks. His former boss filed a lawsuit against him for defamation, after the forest engineer exposed his misues of the company’s car. Turiga prevailed, with judges deciding in his favour in November last year. SLAPP lawsuits are common in Romania, explains Turiga, who had colleagues have been sued for defamation after repoting their bosses, proof of a systematic retaliation faced by whistleblowers in Romania

Romania’s whistleblower protections remain weak across sectors, despite recent legislative changes. A 2022 whistleblower bill that aimed at aligning national legislation with the EU’s Whistleblowing Directive has drawn criticism for discouraging disclosures rather than protecting those who make them. European Chief Prosecutor Laura Codruța Kövesi, who led Romania’s anticorruption agency, warned that the law could undermine cross-border fraud investigations across the EU. Ultimately, lawmakers re-voted a slightly modified whistleblower bill version in the spring of 2023 after the European Commission blocked a payment from the EU’s Recovery and Resilience Plan for six months.

Reprisals against whistleblowers persist. In December 2023, a state secretary was dismissed for responding to a freedom of information request, and legally disclosing information about Prime Minister Marcel Ciolacu’s alleged role in Romania’s 1989 revolution. “The pattern is clear: speak out, and your career ends,” says Turiga.

The forest engineer is content that, at least now, there is a whistleblower legislation in place. Though it won’t be of any help in his case, as it’s not a ex post facto law, Turiga doesn’t miss his former career at Romsilva. His goal was never to climb the hieracy but to meaningfully contribute to protecting the forest. He believes he can achieve more from outside the system. “From within, you simply can’t shift an inch the entrenched corruption,” says Turiga.