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Hector and Victor Rabanal are obviously deep-green extremists, bent on destroying the jobs and economy of their local community.
There are 16 million other Chileans who aren’t complaining, so we also know the Rabanals are just part of a noisy minority.
Hopefully Timber Communities Chile will step in to set the record straight about these obvious Greenie trouble-makers.
Its either that, or the Chilean Government will need to legislate to remove the rights of all people living near the mill ... in interests of the “silent majority,” of course.
The Tasmanian Government has a long track record on legislating to remove the rights of their own citizens - if Chile is seeking “World’s Best Practice” in this area then they know where to come for advice.
regards,
Jason LovellPosted by Jason Lovell on 17/04/07 at 12:43 PMI know for a fact that Hector and Victor Rabanal are deep-green extremists, because Tomas and Herbert told me so. Barry Chipman says they were born that way and they cant be helped. Scott Mclean says of them “Anti-jobs, anti-everything”. Mr Kons described them as the usual suspects, friends of Bob Brown’s even.
Good enough for me.Posted by Pilko on 17/04/07 at 09:58 PMThe tourist…..
“Come over to Tassie”, said the brochure to me.
So I jumped on the boat as quick as could be.
There will be lots of things to see and fine food as well.
Love Tassie’s fresh air, the mainlands is hell.
So I took a deep breath, but it became a big toke.
For I coughed and gagged on Forestry’s smoke.
Now I am no smoker, but my head did spin.
This assault on my senses had wiped off my grin.
So I headed down south to see water and sky,
But there were just more fires here and close by.
So I feel for you in Tassie, for smokers and the like.
But I am out of this stink hole and back on my bike.
When your pulp mill is built and your treasures are gone
Always remember the fires will go on….and on…and on…Posted by Dave Groves on 18/04/07 at 07:07 AMFor what its worth, I have a vineyard in the vicinity of the proposoed Gunns Pulp Mill, and I take this sort of information very seriously. I am in the process of getting the original article re-interpreted, and getting its content verified by an independent source in Chile. So are other members of the Tamar Valley Wine Industry. Stay tuned, regards Peter
Posted by peter whish-wilson on 18/04/07 at 10:35 AMI had a fascinating chat with my local firewood bloke the other night. He actually works as a logging contractor, but the money isn’t good enough logging alone so he has to deliver firewood after work most nights; “if I was making a decent dollar logging, do you think I’d be dropping wood every night as well,” he asked. Obviously not.
We discused the pulp mill, the Greens, Peg Putt and Bob Brown, Labor and Liberal, Paul Lennon, Michael and Will Hodgman, Slimy Jackman’s new lawsuit against Gunns, Gunns themselves, logging contractors and the pulp mill assessment fiasco.
During the entire conversation he only swore once; “pack of f*cken arseholes ...” he said, just once, “... they’ve got Lennon in their pocket and the rest of us over a barrel. If anyone should contribute to an industry exit package for contractors, it’s them. They made $80 million last year, so that’s fair enough, isn’t it?”
Just who is getting all the benefits from Tasmania’s forest industry?
It sure isn’t the workers and we know the contractors are doing it tough.
So who actually benefits from forestry in Tasmania?
regards,
Jason LovellPosted by Jason Lovell on 18/04/07 at 12:01 PMThe visit of the brand new (2006) Pulp Mill
http://surfcore.co.uk/node/1336
A Visit to Nueva Aldea Pulp Mill: Part One
By Josh Berry at 2:54pm on 22nd Nov, 2006 Tuesday,November 21, 2006. The train ride out of Santiago is gorgeous but not very fast. As I sit in my seat I watch skyscraping Andes mountains as a vertical wall to my left; in the foreground are vineyards, small snowmelt rivers, giant monoculture agricultural fields dotted with roaming horses; the distant coastal mountains to my right contain the millions of acres of Oregon pine and Australian eucalyptus that feed Chile’s infamous forestry industry. At 7 AM the train is full of affluent agricultural engineers and winemakers talking on their cell phones as they travel to their fields from Santiago for the day. These guys are the scientists and managers behind the mass-produced wines, table grapes, oranges, tomatos, apples and asparagus that arrive jet-set fresh to your local supermarket during the northern hemisphere winter. Their prime export season is just now beginning.
But this is not a tourist brochure nor an article for Travel & Leisure; I’ve watched this gorgeous landscape pass by at 80 KPH a thousand times before; today I meet my nemesis, “Complejo Forestal e Industrial Nueva Aldea” (Nueva Aldea Forestry and Industrial Complex): a US$1.3 billion-dollar city of industry built to produce what we all want more of: bleached paper kraft pulp, cheap lumber and plywood. And your newspaper, office fax, surf magazine or bathroom remodel will soon contain some product from this very place. Chile’s trees grow three times faster than the same tree grown in North America. Who can argue that they don’t have the right to produce such a much-needed product?
Five hours later after getting off the train I get in a car and drive another 50 km southwest to what was once a small rural village. Now the village has a rather large new neighbor that is constantly lit up with 300 giant floodlights and 200-foot-tall vapor-spewing smokestacks. Vineyards still border the edges of the pulp factory. One of them is an organic vineyard, and this year 80,000 bottles of its wine was rejected by Swedish authorities because of its proximity to the new pulp mill.
Nueva Aldea pulp mill from afarItata RiverI approach the heavily guarded gates (site of many citizen protests, including a Greenpeace stunt in late June of this year in which four climber activists, one of them a surfer, hung a giant banner reading, CELCO: ENOUGH POLLUTION ALREADY) and I announce my name to the rent-a-cop.
This time I am not holding a protest placard; this time I am an invited guest of the Plant Manager and the guard waves me through with subservient authority.
What rhetoric will I be showered me with today? How will the beast be painted by its human custodians?
I suspect the “local jobs and economy” argument will be heavily promoted. I merely have a few pointed questions to ask, and a strange desire to stare deeply into that chlorine- and sulfur-spewing cauldron of industrial ingenuity. Some people come to Chile to walk for days to stare into sulfur- and toxin-spewing volcanoes. Is my journey today that much different? Ultimately I seek self-knowledge and redemption, and getting to know my enemy helps tremendously in getting to know myself.
Today I am the lotus flower: growing in mud yet undefiled by it.Friday’s blog: the public relations slide show and a very stinky water treatment plant.
Posted by Frank on 19/04/07 at 04:57 PMhttp://surfcore.co.uk/node/1355
Nueva Aldea Pulp Mill Tour: Part Two
By Josh Berry at 8:28pm on 24th Nov, 2006Tom and I are at the Nueva Aldea pulp mill for a tour. Tom is a surfer from the United Kingdom who is an expert in large factories and their engineering.
He’s here on a round-the-world trip and offered his services to Save the Waves Coalition.We enter the executive offices of Nueva Aldea and are greeted by a public relations lady in a conference room dominated by a giant wooden table with fresh bottled water, coffee, tea and cookies.
The floor-to-ceiling windows look out on a neighboring vineyard and a perfectly manicured lawn. Ivan the plant’s public relations manager greets us with two engineers in tow: the engineer responsible for the mill’s effluent discharge into the Itata River, and the engineer who oversees for the construction of the mill’s 50-kilometer pipeline being built to the sea.
I immediately tell them that I am an environmental activist with Save the Waves and Proplaya and that we are totally against the construction of the pipeline to the sea.
I recount our street protests in Santiago in front of Celco’s offices, and of the protests in June in front of this very mill.
They laugh nervously yet are relaxed, with only a little political tension in the air!I see a digital projector, a laptop and lots of fancy paper folders with well-lit glossy photos of trees and happy kids and brand-new industrial equipment. Next I warn them that we must keep the office presentation to a minimum and what we really want to do is go out “en terreno” and see the mill operations firsthand.
After 20 minutes of slides and conversation we finally get our wish and they take us outside where we put on white hardhats, steel-toed boots and safety glasses. Ours and our hosts’ hardhats are white; Tom notes that the workers doing the physical labor are all wearing blue or green hardhats.
During the office presentation I learn some useful details that I did not know before: this mill produces plywood from pine trees and construction-grade lumber from pine trees (mostly 2x4 and 4x4 beams), in addition to Kraft paper pulp from eucalyptus. Part of the solid waste produced in the manufacturing process is burned as biomass and used as energy - the mill is entirely energy efficient and sometimes sells excess electricity back to the grid.
The rest of the solid waste is dumped at a nearby “certified” landfill. I’d like to analyse that waste for its ingredients, and see the conditions of the dump. The mill’s main client for all of these products is China. The United States and Europe are other major buyers, including the world’s largest manufacturer of wooden pallets for shipping and storage. In China, much of the lumber is used for manufacturing furniture which is then sold to the United States, Asia and Europe. The Kraft paper pulp is used to manufacture high-quality white paper products such as office paper, magazine paper, sanitary products and high-quality packaging.Our first stop “en terreno” is a water treatment facility. It is giant: at least four city blocks of holding tanks, treatment tanks, concrete, giant steel pipes and other equipment. Stinking dark-brown foamy water is sent from the production facilities to this place where it passes through a cooling tower (to be cooled down from 35 degrees Celcius) and enters three treatment processes including filtering, settling and bacterial digestion of certain solids and chemicals. This plant reeks of sulfur and other chemicals that are used in the cleaning process. After 15 minutes my stomach aches and my eyes are beginning to burn.
Our hosts tell us that the latest technology eliminates most of the odors associated with the production and waste treatment, but I’m definitely smelling some horrible smells.
As we follow the water treatment process the water gets cleaner and less stinky. At the end of the line, before the water goes into the 1.4-meter-diameter pipeline to the river, the water is clear and odorless.
They offer us a cupful but we decline. I’m not very thirsty.
I ask the plant’s environmental manager if this water is similar to the water in a swimming pool. He smiles and says, yes, it is just like swimming pool water. I comment that one doesn’t see fish, river life or sea lions swimming and living in swimming pool water. He agrees with me with a “yes, that’s true…”, but stumbles to add that such creatures “often live in water much dirtier.” OK, Mr. Expert.cont.
Posted by Frank on 19/04/07 at 05:17 PMcont.
We then drive the length of the underground pipeline that’s now dumping this water into the river. Or at least that’s what they tell me, because I can’t exactly see it under 10 feet of dirt. At the river’s edge we encounter a giant hole in the ground with a grate over it and a ladder leading down into it, just like the grates you walk over on city sidewalks that ventilate the underground subway. At the bottom of this is a small river of water that then goes out into the middle of the river via another big pipe. The 50-km pipeline is being constructed from this point towards the ocean, on an old railroad right-of-way. 50-meter lengths of giant black HDPE pipe lie on the ground in perfect piles waiting for installation to lead to our ocean.Stay tuned for our educated analysis of this visit and of the private and government reports on the water treatment facility and the pipeline!
Here a link to the new blog with video:
http://greensurfing.blogspot.comTuesday, March 13, 2007
Pulp, Poo & Perfection: Surfer Activists in ChileAngel and I have just returned from 7 days in the heartland of Chile: we sought out and found the real human stories documenting pulp, poo and perfection with an HDV camera in hand and many hard questions at heart. Angel is a Chilean camera man/film director/ultra hyper Chilean-who-surfs and we are the ultimate documentary film team: he all noisy friendly extroversion seeking the perfect angle while he cracks up the interviewee; me all profoundly serious introversion seeking righteous rural redemption via the cleanest line, finding the bloody beating heart of the subject matter. On the road and in southern cornfields we met and broke bread - pan amasado - with coastal Mapuche indians, proud right winger cowboys, straight corporate talking heads and anti-system rednecks in the purest of the backwood Chilean rural style: huaso. This is the salt of the earth.
In the deepest south we stayed with Ruperto and his family in front of a tubing 3 foot wave - they hosted us with freshly boiled cow tongue, net-caught congrio, potatoes from the backyard, powdered tea and neighbors falling-down blind-drunk on one Cristal beer. Every day we surfed the dawn patrol - out of bed with moonset and a hot yerba mate, in the cold dark ocean by 7am - and after a hearty post-surf breakfast we set out on the dusty road to film interviews, follow rumours, chase changing landscapes and foggy light swallowing road dust.
In Pichilemu we had surf sessions and great interviews with Chile’s homegrown surf star Ramon Navarro, his neighbor Puño (named for his fast fists) and Ramon’s 14-year-old cousin Nacho, who’s already a big-wave hell man. They spoke about their leading role in the local opposition to a sewage pipeline proposed for downtown Pichilemu’s main surfing beach. Heroes! We also filmed the Laguna Petrel, a freshwater body near downtown Pichilemu that’s fluorescent green from sewage and chemicals. And its smell is even worse than the photo!
In Constitucion we met fishermen living in front of the town’s busy pulp mill located on the beach. The beach stank of chemicals. The fishermen spoke of ocean pollution and we watched as the forestry company’s heavy equipment “armored” the beach to protect its pipeline that dumps liquid cellulose waste into the ocean. This is the real state of South America’s industrial forestry complex. This is what supplies your office copy machine with cheap, bright white paper. Your favorite magazine exists so cheaply and so massively because of this industry.
Going south we drove through hundreds of thousands of acres of planted Oregon pine and eucalyptus forest on our way to the Nueva Aldea pulp mill. There we met eager public relations executives. They are eager to show us the modern industrial plant they have, and the efforts they’re making to work with the local community. But we also met angry local people who are breathing rotten-egg-smelling air everyday thanks to the new mill. Not to mention the hundreds of neighbors who have to put up with 24-hour truck traffic bringing wood, chemicals and construction materials to the mill. We also met Nato, the last man standing between the pulp mill and the ocean. He won’t sell his 5 acres of land to the company for its underground waste pipeline.
The wood company will eventually wear down this last humane holdout with their corporate “gifts”, or they will reroute their pipeline through other purchased acreage.Posted by Frank on 19/04/07 at 05:21 PMIn Constitucion we met fishermen living in front of the town’s busy pulp mill located on the beach. The beach stank of chemicals. The fishermen spoke of ocean pollution and we watched as the forestry company’s heavy equipment “armored” the beach to protect its pipeline that dumps liquid cellulose waste into the ocean. This is the real state of South America’s industrial forestry complex. This is what supplies your office copy machine with cheap, bright white paper. Your favorite magazine exists so cheaply and so massively because of this industry.
Posted by Berrytree on 06/03/08 at 10:37 PMhow does one translate to english (anyone ? )
d.d
Posted by don davey on 07/03/08 at 07:39 AM
