Rising along the line where eastern and western Europe divide, a forested mountain range is home to shepherds, villages and plenty of bears.
4 min
The Carpathian Mountains are a horseshoe-shaped range that arcs from central to southeastern Europe. From their western edge in Austria and the Czech Republic, the Carpathians rise clockwise through Slovakia and southern Poland, curve around the Hungarian plains and through western Ukraine, run south into Romania, then turn back westward and finally protrude into northern Serbia. There are wild patches in Europe’s other major ranges, but the Carpathians have forests where the Alps have ski resorts and brown bears where the Pyrenees have the microstate of Andorra. The Carpathians are the last wild place in a crowded continent.
The Carpathians, Nick Thorpe writes in “Walking Europe’s Last Wilderness,” are the “geographical center of Europe.” Their peaks and ridges form the watershed between the Baltic Sea to the north and the Black Sea to the southeast. As geography shapes history and history shapes peoples, the mountains are a political “fault line between East and West.” Once contained within the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Carpathians now curve through six European Union states, one candidate state (Serbia) and Ukraine, whose future is uncertain.
The cover art of “Walking Europe’s Last Wilderness” evokes John Craxton’s designs for Patrick Leigh Fermor’s travelogues “A Time of Gifts” (1977) and “Between the Woods and the Water” (1986). Though Mr. Thorpe describes the enduring exoticism of hospitable huts, historical grudges, handmade goat cheese and homebrewed pálinka fruit spirits, this is not a romanticizing epic from a lost era. Mr. Thorpe is a hiker and camper, and always ready to go barefoot in the meadows, but he lives in Budapest, one of the cities of the plains that surround the Carpathians. A BBC reporter, he launched a series of episodic explorations between 2018 and 2024. He has compiled a richly textured report on an ancient terrain that is being remade into a new political and economic landscape.
The nation-states of the region were created in the 19th and early 20th centuries by “unraveling the complex web of religious, cultural and linguistic threads that characterized Europe.” The nation-builders suppressed “local dialects, vernaculars and identities” and then the Soviets suppressed the nations. The mountains still hide the remnants of the peoples who neither attained statehood nor succumbed: Liptos, Lemkos, Boykos, Hutsuls, Bukovinians, Szeklers, Ruthenians. The revival of the nation-states and their economies after the Cold War threatens to erase the last traces of local identity.
Samo Hríbik, a shepherd in Slovakia, finds his flock by starlight without the help of a dog and fashions traditional fujara flutes, whose “long, shuddering notes,” Mr. Thorpe writes, suggest “the wind buffeting a thatched roof.” In western Ukraine, the 86-year-old Vasyl Kischuk puts on his traditional white smock and brown hat and demonstrates the trembita , the traditional Hutsul wooden trumpet, and a “deep, mournful sound fills the meadow.”
As memories and traditional crafts are fading, incomers are reviving them. Mr. Thorpe meets brewers, cheesemakers, environmentalists and animal lovers mapping migration corridors for brown bears amid the refugee crisis caused by the Ukraine war. Oreste Del Sol, a Paris-born anarchist who shows Mr. Thorpe around his farm and the local slow-food cheese factory in the Ukrainian village of Nyzhnje Selyshche, tells him that being a shepherd in Ukraine is “illegal, or a-legal.” The production and sale of cheese is unregulated. The cheese, Mr. Thorpe finds, is “magnificent.”
For Slovaks, it is the mountains that matter; their national coat of arms carries three stylized ranges. Hungarians, however, speak of the “Carpathian basin” as their homeland and its ring of mountains as a lost shield against invaders. Romanians, whose country is bisected north-south by the Carpathians’ eastern flank, trace their origins to the Dacians, one of whose ancient tribes, the Carpi, gives the name of the mountains. For all their governments, forestry is big business. There are still “primeval forests” in the Carpathians, untouched by humans. There are many “old-growth” forests that were too remote or located on terrain too steep to be exploited in the past. There are also “buffer zones” such as national parks. But the forestry companies now have modern cutting technology and transport, and satellite imagery.
The bouncy IKEA Pöang chair in Mr. Thorpe’s Budapest home is made from beechwood. Romania has two-thirds of Europe’s old-growth forests and IKEA is “the largest private forest owner in Romania.” On paper, IKEA is a “champion of sustainable forestry.” Environmentalists claim, however, that some of its beechwood is “illegally logged—or, at best, over-logged.” IKEA insists it practices “responsible forest management.” Mr. Thorpe goes to a hilltop near Romania’s border with Ukraine. Google Maps shows it “thickly forested.” Mr. Thorpe finds only stumps and scattered branches.
Romsilva, the state forestry company, manages about two-thirds of Romania’s forests. It is charged with both protecting national parks and exploiting a national asset. According to the Romanian Forestry Inventory, 18 million cubic meters (about 635 million cubic feet) of timber were legally felled annually between 2014 and 2017, but “a further 18 million cubic meters were cut illegally each year.” Between 2010 and 2020, 600 members of the Forestry Guard were assaulted after intervening to stop illegal logging. Six were killed.
When Mr. Thorpe leaves the Slovakian capital of Bratislava, he notices that a “gulf of sheer incomprehension has opened up between the village and the city.” The gulf never narrows. “The mountain people, those born and bred here, don’t do much walking in the mountains,” says Sergiu Frusinoiu, a Romanian working with a mountain rescue group. Romania’s “bear problem” is worsening as humans expand into the mountainous territory of its large carnivores: bears, wolves, lynx and jackals. New roads cut across bear migration routes. New towns increase human-carnivore contact. The bears are learning to see humans as a source of food. The Romanian government will allow “the hunting of nearly 500 bears by the end of 2025.” Foreigners, Germans especially, will pay up to 20,000 euros to kill a big male. But no one can agree how many bears there are in Romania, or whether there are really “too many.”
The mayor of Băile Tușnad has educated his townspeople, spent €10,000 on bear-proof trash cans, and cut down the fruiting apple and plum trees in his town. The bears no longer come into Băile Tușnad but, he says, neither do other Romanian mayors in search of advice. Many politicians and businessmen are deep in corrupt forestry deals. The U.S. and EU’s plans for postwar Ukraine include building a “circular road through the Carpathians” to open the mountains for further development. The oligarchs will build ski resorts “where the playboys and playgirls of the new Ukraine will glide effortlessly at high speed, while their brothers, or uncles, sit bitterly at home in wheelchairs.” Old-growth forests make new money, and slow food comes second to a quick buck.
Copyright 2020, Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved Worldwide. LEARN MORE
The Australian leather house has opened an immersive four-day pop-up in Manhattan, unveiling its Bloom Collection and redefining what a product launch can look like.
Following the successful launch of its Palais Collection, MAISON de SABRÉ has unveiled a new modular handbag system offering more than 720 styling combinations.
AI doesn’t rebel—people design, deploy and profit from it. The real danger lies in allowing tech companies to escape accountability while shaping regulations that protect their dominance.
4 min
A wave of corporate warnings and technical disclosures has flooded the media, with headlines worrying over “swarms” of rogue artificial-intelligence agents launching “unprecedented” cyberattacks, outsmarting their makers, and inching toward a terrifying autonomy. The most revealing part of this narrative isn’t what the software did. It’s who is telling the story—and why. When corporate leaders publicly insist that the systems they financed, engineered and deployed are suddenly beyond their power to contain, skepticism isn’t only healthy; it is essential.
For years, Silicon Valley has drawn scrutiny from civil society and global regulators over tangible harms such as youth mental health deterioration and systematic privacy violations. Today, industry figures seem to be trying to change that public image. Loudly blowing the whistle on their own systems—just as two of the leading companies were preparing for massive initial public offerings—lets AI executives position themselves as a new generation of leaders who have come to terms with their societal responsibilities. They seem to want us to believe that they no longer want to “move fast and break things” but will instead stand as vigilant guardians between humanity and a technological apocalypse.
There is one glaring problem: Software doesn’t rebel. A mathematical model possesses neither intent, malice nor the will to defy its creators, let alone extinguish our species. AI is a human artifact, engineered for profit.
When an agentic model in an evaluation sandbox connects to an unauthorized server or executes an exploit, it hasn’t staged a coup. It has tried to meet the human-defined objectives set out before it through a path its designers failed to constrain. It’s the digital equivalent of the King Midas myth, in which the king’s ill-defined wish turns even his food and drink into gold.
That powerful experimental models were able to discover novel vulnerabilities and breach external systems isn’t a sign of a dangerous superintelligence but of human error or negligence. There is no sentient actor lurking in the weights to be reasoned with, feared or pacified. There are only human software engineers, product managers and corporate boards deciding which guardrails are worth the latency cost and which permissions can be skipped in the race to market.
Policymakers and voters need to resist AI exceptionalism. In any other discipline—from civil engineering to pharmaceuticals—courts and regulators treat a system failure as evidence of bad product design and inadequate safety testing. If an aircraft crashes, we focus on finding the engineering defect, correcting it, and enforcing established liability standards for the damage created.
By leaning on an anthropomorphic narrative, Silicon Valley attempts to repackage its specific human choices that led to experimental, powerful models behaving unexpectedly during tests as an existential peril. Elevating the issue to a cosmic scale leaves the public paralyzed and takes ordinary product accountability off the table.
In the cutthroat race for venture capital and market dominance, building guardrails slows down deployment. Grandstanding about uncontrollable power costs nothing and generates billions of dollars in free publicity, justifying stock prices, all while cultivating an aura of technological capability not only to build the frontier but also ultimately to rein it in.
Governments need to recognize regulatory capture when it stares them in the face. Tech leaders’ strategy looks transparent: Alarm Washington and Brussels into creating a regime in which only trillion-dollar incumbents with fully staffed compliance and safety departments can legally operate. By sitting at the policymakers’ tables before anyone else, these companies can help draft rules digging an impassable moat protecting them from open-source developers and upstart competitors, domestic or international. The real danger is in further concentrating the tech industry into the hands of only a few companies with deep pockets.
Beijing and Washington have brushed off those tech leaders’ calls, albeit for very different reasons. Chinese state media dismissed them as part of the “Cold War playbook” and intended to preserve U.S. dominance. Xi Jinping argued for exactly the opposite at the Brics Summit on Sept. 12, calling on Brics countries to “strengthen cooperation in the field of AI, encourage open source, openness, collaboration and sharing, and break new grounds and scale new heights.” President Trump, steeped in a doctrine of unfettered capitalism and technological supremacy, called fears that AI could destroy humanity a “hoax.” Vice President JD Vance warned that AI companies “begging the government to regulate them” looked like a “Trojan Horse.”
Striving to pursue its “European way” on AI and assert regulatory leadership, Europe, by contrast, welcomed the call. European Union President Ursula von der Leyen made this clear at the State of the EU speech last Wednesday and announced that the EU will invite “the main frontier labs for a discussion on how we can support ongoing industry efforts to pace the frontier.”
Europe has been here before. In an effort to lead global regulation and react to fears borne from ChatGPT, Europe rushed its landmark AI Act into law in 2024. Already the world’s most restrictive rulebook, the framework quickly proved too broad and complex to enforce. Stalled by implementation delays and concerns about European competitiveness, the EU postponed the law’s full rollout, leaving regulations uncertain.
AI should be regulated—risks exist and should be taken seriously. But governments need to act based on available evidence and verified facts, not corporate PR panic, the views of industry insiders, or the desire for quick political wins. The greatest danger facing society isn’t that software will awaken and overthrow its human masters. It is that we will allow the creators of the software to abdicate human responsibility for the systems they choose to build and help them pull up the ladder to market access behind them.
