Crikey intern Olly Perkins writes:
News from around the planet today:
Gunns felled by own law suit. After four years pursuing a $3.5 million dollar claim against the Wildness Society, Tasmanian timber giant, Gunns Limited, yesterday agreed to settle and pay the former defendant $350,000 in legal costs, reports The ABC and The Age.
Under the terms of the settlement the Wilderness Society will only pay Gunns $25,000 in damages for a protest in Styx Valley in November of 2003 and are under no obligation to cease protesting Gunns’ operations. For the full details of the settlement see Wilderness Society website.
In a statement posted on the Wilderness Society’s Website, Executive Director, Alex Marr, called the settlement a great win for free speech saying the Wildness Society was still as determined as ever to continue protesting against Gunns’ “environmentally destructive” operations.
“If Gunns wants peace in the forests, it needs to stop destroying some of the most magnificent forests on Earth, and stop trying to ram a filthy, polluting pulp mill down the throats of the Tasmanian community,” he told The Age.
Also speaking to The Age, Gunns company secretary Wayne Chapman said his company will “continue to vigorously defend our right to carry out our lawful business.”
In 2004, Gunns brought 20 defendants, including the Wilderness Society, before the Victorian Supreme Court alleging they had trespassed on Gunns land and damaged forestry equipment. Today, lawsuits have been drop or settled on all but seven of the original defendants.
The ABC reported a ’spokesman for Gunns said they have no intention of dropping the remaining law suits’.
Sydney to lose its nigh time bling. In an effort to green up the resource thirsty Sydney Opera House, operators have said they be will switching of its external flood lights at 2am on weekend and 12am during the week.
By sleeping in the dark the Opera House will save around 10 megawatts house of electricity a year the equivalent of 15 tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions. Full story at the Sydney Morning Herald.
Plugging the roof of the world.The Himalayas are damned — or soon will be, according to a report by International Rivers, detailing blitz of new projects planned for the region over the next decade:
Massive plans are underway in Pakistan, India, Nepal, and Bhutan to build several hundred dams in the region, with over 150,000 megawatts of additional capacity proposed in the next 20 years in the four countries. If all the planned capacity expansion materializes, the Himalayan region could possibly have the highest concentration of dams in the world.
Activists including novelist and Booker Prize winner, Arundhati Roy, have been campaigning against similar projects for years; waring will have devastating consequences for local communities including mass displacement. Read more at Mother Jones.
One Comment
Heartfelt congratulations to the Wilderness Society. Gunns encapsulate the rape and destruction with which Oz was conquered by our ancestors. They they continue this pattern in the 21st century is nothing short of revolting. The previous premier of Tasmania, the one with the big belly ditto moustache, was totally bent, bought and paid for by Gunns. The bastards. It would be great to see all of them being boiled in oil.